Thats a very valid point - the one I am looking at actually probably works out to more than yours - but thats mainly due to my laziness and wanted it pre-built for me as apposed to doing it myself...so I guess thats the price I pay,Im also not married and no kids and in between girlfriends so I thought I may as well dive in while the coast is clear! LOL!

True dat! (lol)... Wife, new baby (money pit), dog (money pit) lol... I love 'em all though! I'm just glad my wife didn't punish me after seeing the bill :(

Hi everyone,New here. Sorry for eventually bad english.

System Specification- Case: Antec 1200 V3 Case with White LED case fans.- Power Supply: OCZ ZX 850 Gold Rated PSU- CPU: Intel Core i7 2600K 3.40GHz Sandybridge overclocked to 4.60GHz- Motherboard: Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard- Cooler: Corsair H80 CPU Cooler- RAM: 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 Dual Channel Kit (16GB Upgrade Available)- Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB 6GB/s SATA-II 32MB Cache & SSD Options- Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 1536MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card- Sound: Realtek 7.1 Channel Sound (On-Board)- Optical Drive: Samsung SH-B123L/RSBP 12x BD-ROM / 16x DVD Writer Drive - Black

I would suggest the i5 2500k processor (oc to 4.7+ghz) and GTX 560Ti graphics card to save money.The DDR3 must be 1.600Mhz.Cheers,Fernando Santos (SBPA).

The OP is using a 32bit Windows, which can only address so much RAM. In other words, the OP's 1GB card is eating into some of the address space for system memory. My explanation is simplified so that I can understand it. :(

There's two different things: available physical RAM and Virtual address space. The GPU VRAM takes up some physical RAM but for the most part has no effect on the available VAS. With those 3GB of the OP I'm pretty sure all or almost all of that is available to the system independantly of what the GPU's VRAM size is. He may want to confirm what does Windows show as total usable RAM.Anyway, for FSX, better go with a Win 7 64 bit + 4GB RAM at least

On my meager system at least, the 747x is kind of a framerate hog. I can't really fly it from the VC without the sliders cranked pretty far down. The MD-11 runs WAY better.My system isn't much to marvel at... it's a Toshiba laptop with 64-bit Win 7, Core i3 @ 2.13 ghz, 4 GB RAM, and a nVidia GPU whose specs I can't really recall right now. That falls below the minimum requirements for most of the addons I own but I get by... Flying the MD-11 with sliders set right, I can hit my limit of 60 FPS in the 2D cockpit, and depending on the conditions 20-something in the VC... and that's with two monitors, usually FSX running on one and my assorted flight planning utilities on the other, or while I'm cruising, stuff like, I don't know, browsing forums... and it works for me I guess. I'm okay with pretty skinny graphics to maximize framerates. The ground looks about the same from FL350 anyway. I kind of wish I could downgrade to FS9 without rebuying all of my addons as I imagine I could fly with higher sliders, but I'll get over it.I'll build a decent system sooner or later but I'll probably wait until MS Flight comes out and starts getting addons, if that's how it goes, before I shell out money for a computer I'll be stuck with for a few years.

G'day Guys,Many thanks for all the input and suggestions. I take it everyone is using Windows7 X64 for FSX and that basically is what Ryan has indicated.Thanks Tony for those spec's.Do you have complex scenery and weather running with PMDG 747 on these high spec systems with frames at 40fps?Cheers,Delf(Heron 1B)

True dat! (lol)... Wife, new baby (money pit), dog (money pit) lol... I love 'em all though! :(

Hahaha, I almost fell out of my chair reading that. I agree, but my list is slightly different.Girlfriend (money pit), FSX (money pit), cat (not too bad), haha.. No kids that I am aware of though, at least not in this country :( Sean Campbell