SWFan

I'm shocked that no one has addressed the air capital of the world; Wichita, KS.

Looks like a good system for FSX. The only thing I would change is to add a second hard drive. You should have FSX on a separate drive from the operating system. Ideally you'd get an SSD for the primary drive to house Windows, and either a second SSD or regular HDD to house FSX. In terms of the video card, if you're sticking with FSX the 660 would be plenty fine. If you have plans of going with Prepar3D when their v2 comes out, with the DX11 goodies you'll really want a 780.

How much of an overclock do you plan on doing? Not sure you need a liquid CPU cooler unless you plan on cranking it up to say close to 5Ghz or faster. You don't mention if there will be any other games played, other than you want to use it as a media center computer as well. If the only game to be played is FSX, you could save quite a bit of cash and get a quad core i5 processor over the i7. It has pretty much been proven that the i7 doesn't get you any noticeable performance out of FSX over the i5 processor.

I do still believe the i5 3570K is the best bang for FSX. If you play any other games it may not be, but for gaming, if the computer is ONLY going to be used for FSX, I don't see any reason to splurge on anything bigger than an i5-3570K at this time. Haswell might change that, but until that product is released everything is speculation based on early test runs.

http://www.jetlinesystems.com/ http://www.alienware.com/ http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/ http://www.falcon-nw.com/ The above offer systems already overclocked. Just make sure what you get has either already been overclocked or comes with an overclockable processor and motherboard.

For airports anything from the following developers won't disappoint you. FSDreamteam Flytampa Flightbeam For overall world texture replacement, I'd wait for Orbx's FTX Global. For highly detailed regions which include buildings and autogen, look at the few regions offered by Orbx.

There already is one, it's X-Plane. While not new, its been around for quite some time, it's still actively developed and improved by the developer and every year more developers jump to XP to make scenery and aircraft. Everyone knows FSX is a dead-end and lets be honest, the FS community is small compared to other gaming genres making it a risky bet for a new developer. Instead of adding yet another developer into the mix, further segmenting our small market, I'd rather see the community start to get behind one of the existing alternates that is currently alive and well. And in my opinion X-Plane is the best alternative.

I agree, that is a good, solid build for FSX if you're overclocking. One thing though, tally up the add-ons you plan on getting. I have FSX on a 250GB SSD and I'm already using 60% of its space. 120GB is fine for Win7, and for FSX with a modest set of add-ons its fine there too. But if you plan on investing in a lot of scenery, 120GB is likely going to be too little.

If you don't overlock then you won't see much difference in FSX between your current machine and the new machine. However, if you do overlock the new machine to say 4.5Ghz you'll notice a significant bump in FPS compared to the Acer.

If I were picking a regional turboprop, I'd get the Majestic Dash 8 before the QW. After the Dash 8, then I'd probably look at PMDG's J41.

For something bigger than the 737 that you can buy today, you really only have three choices. 1. PMDG 747 2. PMDG MD-11 3. Level-D 767 I own all three of the above. In terms of features and FPS, the MD-11 is a great plane. The 747 is PMDG's oldest FSX aircraft and was not all that optimized for FSX. They do have a v2 in the works, but you won't see it until after the 777 is released. The Level-D 767 was really the cream of the crop of jets back in 2006/2007, but now its long in the tooth. The cockpit visuals are nowhere in the league with PMDG's latest aircraft. But the systems are well modeled and if going from PMDG's cockpit visuals to the Level-D's doesn't bother you, I can highly recommend it. If it were me and I only had money for one plane and wanted to buy that plane now, I'd buy the PMDG MD-11. Don't get me wrong, the 747 and 767 are great models, but with PMDG working on a v2 of the 747, unless you gotta have it now, I'd wait for v2. If however, you're in a position to wait, and don't have interest in the MD-11, then I'd just wait for the 777 to get released. For Airbus, there are no good planes larger than the 737 (A330 or A340). BBS has a work in progress 319/320 and recently a 330. Keep in mind, they are unfinished products that you can buy. They seem to be rolling out updates and if you don't mind using planes that are somewhat incomplete these could be an option. They are the only developer with a decent Airbus out that is bigger than the A319/320 right now. The other players basically just have the base A319/320/321 models which doesn't get you something larger than the 737 pack from PMDG.

The problem with that is you still have the OS and FSX trying to read-write the same physical drive. The point of putting the OS on one physical drive and FSX on another is so that neither are fighting for control of the read/write head. Creating partitions doesn't resolve that problem. If you go with SSD's, many argue they don't have that same problem since there is not needle floating around looking for data and there it might make sense to just get one larger drive and partition it.

No, it is not possible. If you have XP Professional you're capped at 4GB. If you have XP Home edition then you're actually capped at 2GB. If you have the Home edition then I strongly recommend just buying Windows 7 64-bit and upgrading because 2GB is just not realistic with today's add-ons. For XP Professional, if I remember correctly, allocates 2GB of RAM to applications and 2GB to the OS, so FSX likely has only 2GB of real RAM to work with. If you're using a lot of add-ons you're probably going to run into more CTD's and OOM's than is typical of people using Windows 7 whether 32-bit or 64-bit.

I'd ditch the 670 and go with a 660 card. I don't think FSX will utilize any performance gains a 670 might get you over the 660 with today's current CPU's. Using two hard drives is the best approach and I see in a follow up reply you were switching to SSD which is also great. However, with a 128GB SSD for FSX you might find yourself wanting more space quickly. I have a 128GB SSD for Windows which is plenty fine and a 250GB SSD for FSX and my FSX SSD is about 60% full. Your space requirements will depend on the amount of add-ons you plan on installing, especially scenery.

Keep in mind, the FSX code base goes back to FS98. Much of the code base was built around Pentium processors being the prevalent processor with the expectation by the mid-2000's you'd have Pentiums running as fast as 10Ghz. During the Pentium years this was Intel's plan, but they found they just couldn't keep those processors cool enough much over 4Ghz. So they scrapped the Pentium line and introduced the Core line which moved from pure Ghz to multiple cores running at slower clock speeds. Until SP2 was released, nothing in FSX recognized anything more than one core and FSX ran horribly. And SP2 was only a small bandaid fix to get FSX to see more than one core, not a re-write of the code base, which is the only thing that could fix FSX today. The sad fact is, FSX was designed to run best on single core Pentiums expected to be running well over 5Ghz by this time.