I've been into FSX now for about 10 months now. I first downloaded the DEMO on my laptop and was instantly hooked, even with the horrible processing power of a 4 year old system! So, witha LOW budget as my guide I decided to throw $500 (notice i said BUDGET) right down the drain on a system that I thought would run FSX, an AMD 640 quad core with a smokin radeon 9450 graphics card, oh the uniformed! I took me all of 2 minutes to figure out that , yes, FSX runs a lot better on this "NEW" system than on my out of date laptop, but was still no where near what I expected! So my first "Upgrade" was a HD Radeon 5750 GPU (again, budget!). Yes it did make a difference in FPS but still slowwwww! I next replaced my CPU with a Phenom 1090T, ok bumped my performance up a little. Next was a better MoBo to support more agressive overclocking. Then water cooling, new ram (corsair 7,7,7,8 1600) and Viola, now 4 ghz rock steady! Dissappointment! 12-15 fps on urban areas, Seattle, with Orbix addons PNW. Clouds are the worst! Kills my system wqith anything more than default "Fair Skies". Believe me I've read everything out there on how to get the best from my system, Bojote's Tweaks and cfg tweaker, turning off unwanted programs on startup and pretty much tweaking everything to squeeze every last drop of BLOOD out of this Turnip! I've decided to go to the DARK SIDE!!! INTEL>>>> meaning spending more money! I found this system for a reasonable price and would like some input on what I should expect in performance compared to what I already have. To me there is enough "Stuff" out there to make me swtch to Intel and Nvidia. This system seems to have a pretty good combo! "click on SUMMARIZE at the left of the screen to get the default specs... http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/system/Gamer_Xtreme_5200/ For $1300 dollars for a dedicated FSX machine, does this seem like a decent system? Intel i7 2600kGTX 570 "Superclocked"Water cooling8 gigs 1600 Corsair Dominatoretc. btw, I run a 32 visio monitor at a pretty low 1360X768 res. Thanks for the input!

Not a bad rig. You might consider going with the i7 2500K and save the $100+. It will give you all you need to OC for FSX. With that you could install the 300GB Velociraptor for your FSX drive and maybe opt for a 1 TB HDD for your system and data drive. You will still be at about $1300.You will need to pop for Win7 64B to use all that RAM. Good luck

Yes, i agree! there are a number of ways to go with this system. I'm just tired of thinking what components could/would be a good fit for my current system so that I can feed my new obsession! I had just picked it out mainly because the cpu and gpu are proven commodities when it comes to FSX. as a side note...I should have never started flight lessons because I'm now trying to replicate real world experiences as it is a lot less expensive to desktop fly than the real thing!

If you want to save some serious money, build the system yourself. You get to pick the parts so you don't have to worry about miss matched components, bad support, or high prices. http://www.newegg.com/ <- Best website in the world. Other then Avsim of course.... Oh, and welcome to the dark side.

That's a decent rig for a competitive prebuilt price, go for it! I highly suggest (urge) that you get two HDD. One for your OS and one for FSX. As far as what Joe said, SKIP the Velociraptor drive. Those things are noisy, expensive, and low capacity plus there will be no performance gains for FSX. Go with what's in my sig for an FSX HDD, the WD Caviar Black. The price is right with these WD hard drives and they're fast.

If you want to save some serious money, build the system yourself. You get to pick the parts so you don't have to worry about miss matched components, bad support, or high prices. http://www.newegg.com/ <- Best website in the world. Other then Avsim of course.... Oh, and welcome to the dark side.

That is sound advice! I did almost completely rebuild my system with components that I thought at the time would do the job, but what a hassle! A DOA MoBo, 1 stick of bad ram, Bios problems, etc., plus the fact that I know just enough about computers that I'm sure I'll screw something up! Nah, I think I'll just pay the extra few hundred to have someone do it for me. Plus, if i add up all the components that I'll have to buy through NewEgg, I really wouldn't save enough for the piece of mind that "hopefully" someone who knows what they are doing actually put this rig together.

That's a decent rig for a competitive prebuilt price, go for it! I highly suggest (urge) that you get two HDD. One for your OS and one for FSX. As far as what Joe said, SKIP the Velociraptor drive. Those things are noisy, expensive, and low capacity plus there will be no performance gains for FSX. Go with what's in my sig for an FSX HDD, the WD Caviar Black. The price is right with these WD hard drives and they're fast.

Yes, I forgot about the separate HDD for FSX, good point! I think I'm going to go ahead and get it...as soon as I figure out a way to tell the wife. Oh well, I wise man once said, "It's easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission!"

That's a decent rig for a competitive prebuilt price, go for it! I highly suggest (urge) that you get two HDD. One for your OS and one for FSX. As far as what Joe said, SKIP the Velociraptor drive. Those things are noisy, expensive, and low capacity plus there will be no performance gains for FSX. Go with what's in my sig for an FSX HDD, the WD Caviar Black. The price is right with these WD hard drives and they're fast.

Or for storage get a Z68 and use SRT. A small SSD would do the job. 20GB of cache over 64mb, must be good.

With a budget of $1300 he's never going to be able to afford an SSD. Please give RELEVANT advice to the OP. And I agree with all the above except the SSD. Get 2 1TB Cav Black. They're cheap, fast, large capacity. You can't lose with them. The I5-2500k overclocks just as well as the 2700k, so save yourself $100 there. 64bit windows 7. All the rest seems fine to me. If you're not confident building yourself, that's a pretty decent price for that system.

20GB SSD is only around $50. I was suggesting it as a alternative to a VRap.

And what can you fit on a 20GB SSD? OS? no. Fsx? No.

You don't get the picture. Have your even heard of SRT. It is caching for your mechanical HDD so you get 20GB of cache instead of 32mb or whatever it is. That results in faster boot times with windows over time as more gets added to the cache. You get all the storage advantages of a regular HDD with the speed that betters a RAID 0 of high performance HDDs

Okay so that's even more pointless to FSX. Which brings me back to the comment in our PMs. The 600GB Vrap will be faster than it hands down. A 20GB cache really is not going to do that much. It's still bottlenecked by the speed of the drive, 7200RPM. That would only be super useful matched with a SATAIII SSD.

It does the same as an SSD drive, over time your load times will become quicker and scenery will load better giving boost for FSX, do some research, you never know you may learn something.

The point is the budget. Let's keep on topic here. With a budget of only $1300, there are other components to think about which effect the actual performance and not just texture and loading times.