HyperionXL

High end CPU is good. Low end GPU is no good. Go for an Nvidia. AMD suck for FSX. Nvidia 970 is what you want to look at.

500 watts is plenty for an R9 270X.

Any USB powered external harddrive will work for your PC. Western Digital and Seagate are two trusted HD manufacturers to look at. http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Portable-External-STBX1000101/dp/B008R7FC74/ref=sr_du_3_map?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1383410985&sr=1-3 This should work fine

Love AirHauler! Looking forward to AH2 so I can finally get rid of FSPax. Do you plan on any sort of in-flight breakdowns or emergencies? Loved that part of FSPax and its one of the only reasons I keep it today. Nothing like your landing gear failing to lower on your way to approach to wake you up!

FSX won't even load past the rebuilding scenery libraries for me. No crash report, no error logs. It just stops loading with 0 errors with this fix installed.

There is a fix in the avsim files. Search for lights or runway lights.

Well he owns the domain for 7 more years according to who.is, so he still has control of the domain. Best guess is that its just a hosting error.

Haha that's my excuse, too. Def. get the Orbx stuff. It's fantastic and covers a such a large area that you won't run out of places to discover. You might also like Air Hauler and FSPassengers as they add some sense of having a goal and progression to get through. Air Hauler especially. Used the Mooney myself as a starter plane until I could afford the Duke.

Anyone tried this out yet? I'm more or less interested in the planes included and their models, as they were developed by A2A. If they're any good, it'd probably be worth the $50 to get the 3 trainer craft you get. Any opinions on the overall gameplay as well? Been out for a while but haven't read anything on Avsim about it.

The 680 would be faster most likely, but probably not by much. Not sure if it implements the use of SLi or going without it would be better. Going to do a couple flights. Not going to test it, but I use the 690 for other games where it really shines. Not going to run FSXMark11 because it would take days just to set it up. It has provided no significant boost over my previous 580 except one more bump in AA which is hardly noticeable anyways, really.

Eww... Windows Media Player for audio is awful. Poorly written, slow and very heavy in resource use. Up there with iTunes, which can't even play .FLAC files - fail. Use Winamp, or even better Foobar2000 - an extremely light program written specifically for audio.

It's a hobby, and some people like myself like to get invested in their hobby. In comparison to other hobbies many people enjoy, like fixing up old cars and hotrodding, real aviation, etc - dropping a couple thousand a year on FSX isn't that much when you compare them. On top of that, this top of the line hardware allows me to play any other game at its highest fidelity with no problems. So if you really love FSX and want the best out of it, you invest to get the best that you can get. It's all very relative on what you can afford in the end. Thankfully, because I work from my PC, write websites, create videos, and advertise, all my FSX gear is a tax write off. Whoop whoop! lol.

probably a 690 issue then as beta and whql drivers don't keep the clock maxed.

Bahg. I wrote a long reply but for some reason it has disappeared. What this hack does is allow you to lock in your overclock. Meaning it won't use boost and it won't downclock. It stay consistent at what you tell it to. With the beta drivers, I was watching my clocks bounce up and down all over the place while flying, and I could tell when it needed to initiate boost for that extra bit of autogen or clouds popping in is when I would notice stutters and lag. While the call to grab that extra boost from the GPU is only fractions of a second, it translates to stuttering or lag on my end - whatever you want to call it. With my overclock locked with this hack, I have noticed much smoother flights, more consistent FPS, less crashing, and I've been able to bump my AA up a notch with what looks like 0 negative impact so far. Maybe its just a placebo effect, but from my testing I think it is actually working. I've also tested on maxed settings on BF3 and Grand Theft Auto 4 and the effect is much more significant there. No boost lagging, as I'll call it, and extremely smooth gameplay on 64 person matches in BF3.

Sounds nice. I'll just have to figure out how to get it all to Thailand without getting raped by import taxes and shipping probably doubling the cost of it all.