Well, today I bought a 8600 GT SSC video card. I upgraded from a 6600 GT. Although it is mucho faster than my old card I am only seeing 2 or 3 more frames. The best part of all though is that I am now able to throw ANY weather I want at it and it eats it up like Grandmas cookies at Christmas! On my old card if I set heavy thunderstorms it would knock me down to 8 or 9 FPS (not much fun) but now I can stay at minimum 16 fps and up. So my weather performance has doubled from what it was. Here is a link to what I got:http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_...duct_id=0281135Having the ability to have real world weather of any kind makes the sim great especially when I'm soaring the skys in my Super80.Move this thread if needed as I wasnt sure where to put it as this is more about the weather than the card.Now I have a system I can live with untill I can finish my new system.:-)

Edit on my FPS increase. I has my fps locked when reading it. When I unlocked it to see the actual FPS it was at times hitting the high 40's with an occasional 50 FPS. Another thing I can do now is have my water set to low 2x. I saw too much of a hit to run water before my new card. Overall I am very pleased with my purchase.

FSX is CPU limited, so you won't see much improvement in frame rate with a new GPU. Perhaps you might be able to push resolution up a little...Cheers,Noel.

Hey Jwenham, what were the stats on your old 6600? because that sounds like a VERY good deal to me.

But if his old card was his bottneck, then a newer card could have fixed this.Jimhttp://www.hifisim.com/banners/hifi-community-sigbanner.jpghttp://www.hifisim.com/

NoobPilot,here is a link with my old specs. The old card was DDR2 and the new is DDR3 and the SSC version I got is overclocked to death (Factory). My FPS went up some but MAN OH MAN I love to fly with the weather! I get almost no performance hit no matter what weather I'm in. I also have the water at 2x Low which I could not do before. http://www.dealtime.com/xPF-PNY-VERTO-GEFO...00-PCIE-256-DDR

Thats exactly what it was in my case. My CPU is a Pentium D 805 which has turned out to be a diamond in the ruff. I was able to overclock it to 3.5 from 2.66! It has a low FSB and a high 20x multiplyer which made it easy to OC the @#$% out of it. I am actually in the process of building a new up to date system and was looking around at MicroCenter for what I want to get for it when I have all the money and just couldnt pass on the 8600 GT SSC for a whopping 89.00 (after rebate)