nickh From United States of America, joined Jun 2008, 98 posts, RR: 0 Reply 1, posted (3 months 4 weeks 12 hours ago) and read 2813 times:
You should be fine with those specs. Regardless of the application, never, ever skimp on RAM, it is not that expensive purchase and it makes a huge difference.
The video card that you are using should work, do make sure that your card drivers are updated to the newest versions.
A faster Hard Drive would be nice, but consider getting an external SSD (USB 3.0 SSD) or something like that to throw the scenery data and frequenly accessed data on, that will improve the performance a bit, especially when transitioning rapidly from scene to scene, esp., multi-player mode.
Get a decent flight controller - there are so many available, but one of my favorites (personal preference, of course, your mileage may vary) is the Microsoft Freestyle Pro w/Force Feedback and Motion Sensing - hard to find, they do not make it any more, but worth it if you can find it.
Another one is the Sidewinder Dual Strike, which has a nice array of programmable keys that you can assign to do the most commonly used functions.
Gee, I wish we had one of those on the real G.A. aircraft that I used to fly, so long ago... (SMILE).
CalebWilliams From United States of America, joined Dec 2008, 266 posts, RR: 0 Reply 2, posted (3 months 4 weeks 6 hours ago) and read 2800 times:
Nick's right on here.
You can never have too fast a processor and too much memory for FSX (well, if you have addons, anyway). SSD is great, but I wouldn;t want anything slower that 7200rpm. Not that I had a choice back in the day.
The flight controller, mine's 6-8 year old Saitek. works great.
Fabo From Slovakia, joined Aug 2005, 1111 posts, RR: 1 Reply 3, posted (3 months 3 weeks 6 days 9 hours ago) and read 2758 times:
I would go for nVidia and Intel though. The general consensus is, that these brands work FSX better than comparable AMD/ATi hardware.
Also on the notion of CPU, for FSX specifically you are better of with higher frequency dualcore than lower frequency quadcore, due to its old core architecture.
The light at the end of tunnel turn out to be a lighted sing saying NO EXIT
nickh From United States of America, joined Jun 2008, 98 posts, RR: 0 Reply 4, posted (3 months 3 weeks 4 days 21 hours ago) and read 2709 times:
Quoting Fabo (Reply 3): Also on the notion of CPU, for FSX specifically you are better of with higher frequency dualcore than lower frequency quadcore, due to its old core architecture.
There really are different schools of thought on this, and it depends on several factors, wether a higher frequency dual-core is better than a lower frequency multi-core. It depends on the generation of the Northbridge/Southbridge chipsets that you are using on your computer's motherboard, FSB speed, RAM clock speed, DMA clocking and else.
An important thing is wether the software/OS is aware of the multi-cores and can really make use of them.
For example, out of the several machines that I use on a daily basis for my work, two of them that I run FSX on, one is a genuine 8-CPU Intel XEON based 64-bit machine with 64GB of DDR3 RAM, and another is my personal laptop with a 4-core Intel i7 64-bit processor with dual threads per core and 16GB of DDR3 RAM.
FSX and the underlying OS (depending on which) can take advantage of either the true 8-CPU machine or the 4-core w/dual threaded architecture, in varying operating modes.
So in many cases, a well written multi-core-aware application can work better on a slower clocked CPU than just throwing more GHz at the problem.
But still, one cannot dismiss the value of a decent GPU and a decent amount of RAM. And a decently fast HDD/SSD.
Fabo From Slovakia, joined Aug 2005, 1111 posts, RR: 1 Reply 5, posted (3 months 3 weeks 1 day 2 hours ago) and read 2641 times:
Quoting nickh (Reply 4): So in many cases, a well written multi-core-aware application can work better on a slower clocked CPU than just throwing more GHz at the problem.
Yes, but FSX is not exactly one of those...
I agree with RAM, GPU and HDD points...
The light at the end of tunnel turn out to be a lighted sing saying NO EXIT
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