while i have given advice from time to time i feel a need to recieve some of the collective wisdom. system: custom builtmobo asus a7v8xathalon xp1800<1.53ghz>windows xp homecreative pci512 gainward geforce 4 mx440i use lots of ai and scenery and have most sliders 3/4 or more aa on etc. i fly vc all the time . i'm getting 18-22 fps which is fine by me. i do plan to get 2004 and think an upgrade may be in order. what would be the better plan, buy an xp2400 ataalon or a gainward TI 450 TV 128MB Golden Samplett

At the very least get a GF4Ti card. MX cards simply don't work properly!Then get a faster CPU, a lot more RAM (probably, you don't mention it, get at least 512MB but better 1GB of RAM).Best bet would be to change from AMD to Intel too for best performance and stability.

i didn't mention but its a 1.25 g RAM i'm happy with the AMD,it's rock solid. i'm trying to decide as to where the best bang for the bucks will be. a xp2400 is aprox 85 and a gf3ti500128 ddr is about 90. i realise fs is processor hungry, but with the gf 4 mx i'm not sure that a "bigger" [1 year old technology] card might relieve the processor of lots more rendering. thanks for the input, tt

ASUS mobo's are great you should check with them at http://www.asus.com.tw/support/cpusupport/cpusupport.aspx to see if you could go for an even faster processor after a BIOS update. Those AMD's also give a lot more bang for your bucks (they might get a little hotter than the P4's but with an AMD's boxed set that has a matched proc cooler there are no worries).I personally switched from the Gforce to the Radeon 9700 camp. You might want to hold out to see how long it takes ATI to fix the reported driver problems with FS2004 though. I would suggest the RAdeon 9600, 9700 or 9800 if you want to use AA a lot.Check the memory like Jeroen suggest and disregard the stability rant. You have a good configured PC's that are stable and then you have bad configured PC's that run like... well they don't run that well. Looking at your choice of class A components I'm not worried about stability