BoskoBD

I still have a lot installed, but I've stopped buying add-on aircraft from most developers. I was buying a lot because they looked great but I ended up flying them once or twice and getting bored with them. Now, I fly only A2A's Comanche, Boeing 377, P-51, RealAir's Turbine Duke, Milviz C310 and PMDG's offerings. I just don't have any fun with the less realistic addons anymore. -Brendan

Macrium looks really nice. I use Dropbox for all my FSX/P3D files, but this looks like a better solution. -Brendan

I use a 42" Samsung 1080p HDTV. Was only $350 and was a great purchase. The bigger screen really helps with immersion.

Thanks for the info. With airliners, I like both the older and newer cockpits. GA I prefer steam gauges. Sounds like it's worth a purchase. That CIVA is a nightmare though. It was on the old Concorde I believe(I think it's the same thing) and once upon a time I attempted to learn it with the Flight Sim Labs Concorde. Maybe now's a good time to try again. -Brendan

A little confusing here. First post says, "Before you ask, this is not a "study" sim (whatever that means)". When I go to the store page it says, "727 Series Study v2". Just wondering an honest opinion here, how would you compare this to the PMDG 737 or 777 as far as systems? I'll likely buy it if it's close to that level of fidelity.

IIRC, there's a voice pack option before you start your flight in the options menu. I think there's somthing like 4-5 different English voice packs and a few in other languages. Also, I found on their website, under More Downloads, that there are additional user created voice packs.

I have the Learjet 35A and it's my favorite of the small jets. I also prefer steam gauges. Really, there's nothing in this category that I'd call great(that I've seen so far). The Carenado Phenom 300 is pretty good and probably my 2nd favorite, but it's very modern. -Brendan

DIY ideally like Martin said. Or get a desk wide enough so you can have your racing gear set up in half and the flight gear set up on the other half. Then you could slide your monitor and keyboard/mouse to one side or the other. -Brendan

Why not try X-Plane? I recently bought it after many years of ignoring it. It has come a long way. It's 64-bit and runs great on modern PCs. It also has a good amount of quality add-ons now. Plus with PMDG starting to develop for it, it could be the sim of choice for the future.

I have a YOKO and PFC Beech Yoke. The YOKO is a lot better in my opinion. It has much more travel in the pitch and roll so it's more precise. They both feel great to use, but the PFC is pretty disappointing in its range of motion. I would have a very hard time recommending them for that reason, especially when the YOKO is in the same price range.

I'm not a fan of any of the FSX/P3D 757 offerings, but the QW 757 is probably the best of them. The best 757 overall I've used has to be the 757 Professional for X-Plane. It's not quite up to PMDG standards, but it's very well done.

I'm new to X-Plane as well. I've found the Challenger 300 and the CRJ-200 to be quite good with the CRJ a little better in my opinion. If you're OK with a regional turboprop instead of a jet, the Saab 340 is extremely well done and very fun to fly.

I have the Milviz F-4E and the VRS F-18 Superbug and both are excellent. I've also heard very good things about the Lotus Simulations L-39 Albatross but not sure if that works in P3D.

The GPU is definitely your problem. I looked up the AMD Radeon 8570D and it doesn't even have dedicated memory. Unfortunately, you'll never get good 3D performance with something like that. You may be able to get passable performance though by tweaking the settings.

If it's crashing with other games, it could be that your video card is going bad. I've seen this before where errors and crashing start to happen slowly, then get worse. It was a bad video card. If you think it might be that, you may want to try taking out the card and using the motherboard's built in video card(if you have one). It would be terrible with P3D but you may be able to see if it still crashes.