I wanted to thank my fellow members here at AVSIM for sharing their knowledge regarding hardware upgrade information.  After spending some time reviewing several of the threads here in this section of AVSIM, I went ahead and took the plunge by ordering the following via New Egg:

 

- CPU:  i7-6700K 8M Skylake Quad-Core 4.0 GHz CPU

 

- MB:  ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Ranger

 

- Memory:  G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3000

 

- Video Card:  EVGA GeForce GTX 970

 

I also purchased a hard-drive, Blu-ray drive, case, power supply, etc. to round off the new rig.

 

The funds were not limitless so I did have to cut back on some things, like the graphics card and amount of memory, for example.  But I'm hoping that the above will provide a very good FSX experience for quite some time. 

I would appreciate any input as well.

Thanks again! 

Looks great to me! Down the road id get a SSD for Windows and or FSX

Thank you, Ryan!

 

That was definitely my plan as well.   The initial financial hit was brutal so I was trying to pick up the essentials first and then get the SSD and possibly a dedicated sound card later on. 

Nice looking system there indeed.

 

I've just purchased one very similar, except I have a m.2 SSD for Win10 and a seperate SSD for P3D.

 

I imagine it will run FSX well, but P3d even better.

Thank you, Ryan!

 

That was definitely my plan as well. The initial financial hit was brutal so I was trying to pick up the essentials first and then get the SSD and possibly a dedicated sound card later on.

If you're an audiophile , yes go for it. If not the onboard sound is quite good these days on most recent motherboards - save some money

That's good to know.   Thanks again!