I'm getting more serious in my deliberations on buying FS2K4. So I must confer with the more experienced here.My machine:Intel P4A Northwood @ 2.0GGeForce 3 Ti200, 64Mg RAM512 Mg RAMSoundblaster AudigyCan't remember the mobo's model, but it's an Intel mobo.FS2K2 runs nicely with frame rate drops to 10-12 while panning views at large concentration AI airports. I'm running it with 90% of sliders at 100%, including AI traffic at 100%.Thanks for any advice!!Rick

FS2K4 should run OK - the biggest bottleneck is almost always going to be your video card- if you're thinking of spending money ,spend it there.As an experiment I put FS2004 on an old PC with an AMD 700Mhz CPU/MS 663Ultra mobo,256mb SDRAM and (the best and newest bit) an ATI Radeon 9000/128mb Video card- it ran fine ,getting frame rates of 20-25 fps most of the time - dropping to about 10-12 in heavy situations.I'm sure most of the performance was due to having a fairly good Video card.My normal system- K7S5A/AMD Athlon XP2000/512MB DDRAM/Ti-4200-128mb -nothing overclocked,Dual boot WinME/WinXP-- run FS2004 no problem at all in either OS but XP is better by about 15-20% frame rates.Dave

Don't worry it will run fine. Even my older 1.2GHz Athlon with Radeon 7200 64MB will run FS2004 great. I had doubts before I even bought the game that my machine wouldn't handle it. But all that went away after I installed and ran the game for the first time. It actually ran BETTER than I expected, surpassing FS2002 in most cases at even with higher settings (except AI traffic at 0%, they are still Artifical Idiots in FS2004 :) ).

One suggestion which I do like vs. AI is choosing the "IFR only" option. There's something about being up there in the flight levels and seeing those contrails nearby, that makes you feel less lonely.One of my most memorable FS2004 experiences--I was sitting in KRNO and saw a contrail slowly moving overhead--gave me goosebumps it looked so real :)-John

I'm running it on a Celeron 1.2 with a GeForce2 Ti and it runs better than I thought it would. I have to keep AI and clouds turned down though if I want to keep it smooth...