Paul, I know you probably won't want to hear this but you should have asked before spending a crazy amount like $4000... you could have bought a system that will run it just as well for half that (prebuilt) or less (self-built). The 590 has no effect in FSX because it's a dual GPU card - a single 580 will be faster. The $220 i5 2500K CPU will perform just as well as the 990X in FSX too.

I am going to go the 2500k route for my upgrade, any particular model and brand of the 580 do you recommend for the video card

I am going to go the 2500k route for my upgrade, any particular model and brand of the 580 do you recommend for the video card

The 2600K is the same price almost here (where I live) ,and has 8meg cache whilst the 2500K has 4 meg cache. FSX will take advantage of the 8 meg cache so personally, I wouild go the whole hog and get the 2600K. If your spending 4K like I did, you might as well have the Rolls instaed of the Bently. FWIW I am using a Gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3, same as the P67 but with Sata fix and this board has excellent reviews. The last Giga I owned was rock solid, and this one has been really great so far. I am using a gigabyte 580. Zotek and Asus are good too. Cheers

I am going to go the 2500k route for my upgrade, any particular model and brand of the 580 do you recommend for the video card

EVGA is the usual consensus for best Nvidia card maker.

Better than MSI Ryan?GTX580 Lightning is the card everybody dreams of having, it's just much better engineered than the other 580. But it's made for overclocking, if you're not going for it, not worth the money from what I understand.I bought a MSI Twin Frozr II GTX570, the custom made cooler promises 20C lower temperatures. And it's about the same price of the regular GTX570 I think, maybe 10 dollars more, I don't know since I don't live in the US.

The 2600K is the same price almost here (where I live) ,and has 8meg cache whilst the 2500K has 4 meg cache. FSX will take advantage of the 8 meg cache so personally, I wouild go the whole hog and get the 2600K. If your spending 4K like I did, you might as well have the Rolls instaed of the Bently. FWIW I am using a Gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3, same as the P67 but with Sata fix and this board has excellent reviews. The last Giga I owned was rock solid, and this one has been really great so far. I am using a gigabyte 580. Zotek and Asus are good too. Cheers

the 2500K has 6MB of L3 cache, not 4. How are you so sure that FSX will take advantage of the extra cache and what kind of impact do you expect it to have? FSMark11 seems to prove you wrong

I have one Zotac and one Evga 580 and they both run at 872 without any voltage increase or glitch.