A great many have an emotional bias for, or against, one brand or another. So my suggestions will be on the generic side.
I've only bought one complete system, back in the '90s. For the most part I've replaced internal parts as I felt the need, or as a great sale would offer itself.
For that reason I've stayed away from the big brand names. I don't know if they still do this, but it used to be that the internal parts were made in such a way that you, pretty much, had to buy parts from the manufacture.
So it's not that they cant make great computers. I simply don't want to spend the extra money to buy upgrade parts from them.
There are a few things, though, that I think are important.Graphics. A good graphics card that will drive 3, or more, monitors. A minimum of 1GB DDR5, 2GB would be better.
AND DX-11! FSX doesn't use DX-11, but if you want to move over to the new Prepar3d V2, you'll need it.
The above will give you flexibility and won't cost you as much as you might think. But almost any video card that you buy today will be well beyond what the creators of FSX had at the time.
Memory. Start with 8GB. I know that FSX can't even use 4 BG, but with the supporting programs that I run along side of FSX I normally tie up 5.5 GB.
CPU. I have a i5 2400K 3.3MHz. It was bought with the intention of overclocking it. So far I haven't needed to do that. But the i7 has come down in price quite a bit, so you may want to get one.
If you stay with FSX, speed is more important.
Motherboard. Get one with lots of USB ports. I've maxed out mine. I have 13 in use at the moment, most are used for additional monitors and flight add-ons.
Side note - Although most flight simmers have preferred NVIDIA video cards in the past, I have a Radeon HD 6850 with 1GB of DDR5. This lowly card is driving
6 monitors and a little Saitek monitor.With most of the sliders pushed to the max, I get between 35 to 45 FPS.
Side Note 2 - A great place to look for hardware info it
Tom's Hardware. Good luck.
