why bother until Athlon Tbred at 3GHz, or P4 at 3.5 GHz, via default or overclock, is possible. I am running a P3 at 1120 MHz and the thing is fine as long as I don't bother trying to run the Falcon or other complex aircraft. I do enjoy the 30-75m mesh and my sys can handle that fine. But honestly, I would have to say there is just no point on upgrading until I can get at least double or more the throughput. This AGP port issue seems crazy where this appears to be a bottleneck. Why the heck is this still an issue? To have a cpu and gpu that can handle the work, then have an AGP port limit that these is just plain defective design. I know it's more complicated than this but who needs this kind of incremental upgrade. I've always been bothered by the lack of linear scalability with FSx, as in you have a 500Hz machine that in situation x yields 15FPS. You upgrade the GPU and CPU to double their throughput in situation x, and you DO NOT get 30FPS. This smacks of a lack of correct engineering or something. If I were the czar of hardware, I would make sure in designing busses, ports, and what have you that whatever cpu, gpu or whatever you could put on the mainboard would never out do the subsystem underneath them. This doesn't seem like rocket science to me. Can you tell I'm frustrated? The AGP port can't handle this? Huh?! Put a dang 1" piece of copper between the system ram and the videa card dang it! Geesh!!!!!!!!!!!I was going to upgrade in a month or so, but I think not now after reading these posts. I'm sure a new machine would be noticiably better, but dang it I am not going to shell out $$$$$ to get 6 more FPS, and a slight reduction in stuttering in complex situations. It's wasted $$.And happily, this machine does work pretty dang well if I fly within the machine's capabilities.Cheers simmers,Noel

Rants are fun, huh? ;) BTW, although I disagree with some of your statements and their feasability, I won't post my thoughts and instead let you have your fun :)Max Cowgill

Max, buddy, you're feeling restraint???? :Druining all my forum surfing fun!michael

Yeah I love a good rant. I think we will be seeing some faster ramp up of capabilites what with the sagging interest in upgrading in the general computing public. I was a very very regular upgrader for the last 10 years. I put together this sys over 2 years ago, with a BX6r2 with 256 of PC100, and a Hercules TNT, and Celeron 300A oclocked to 504. I put a 1 GHz slot 1 P3 in 6 months ago, and another 256 of PC100. In past times I would have upgraded by now but not so. Just not enough bang for the buck--yet:o)Noel

Microprocessors are cheap. I just went from 1.4 gig to 1.9 gig with a noticeable improvement in smoothness. Frames went up too, but I limit them to 22. Cost, less than $250 including the tube of silicon goop. A very worthwhile investment - much cheaper than a new computer which I didn't need. The hard drives and memory work fine. This, by the way, is probably the best value upgrade for MSFS. Everything I read says the CPU is the bottleneck, not the video card. Also, I don't think that MSFS takes advantage of huge amounts of RAM. Good luck.