please help quickly with computer purchase

[westcoastpilot]

Hello,
I love to play flight sim but am not looking to spend a ton of money and do not need the best quality. I have been running 2004 recently on an older dell desktop 700 mhz with 384 mb ram so you can imagine what that is like. I can get about 7 fps on a good day. I plan on buying a dell desktop tomorrow, preferably the demension 8400. I do not need to have the top of the line graphics card or anything as such. How well will a 3.0 p4 processor with 1 gig of ram and 80 gig hard drive work? This comes with a radeon x300 card. I can get this all for 1 grand which works for me. I know that this is an entry level card but won't this work pretty well? I do not see the need to spend 160 bucks for the x800. OR should I buy a dimension 4600 for cheaper, upgrade it and get a radeon 9800 pro card and spend about 150 more. Is the 4600 worth sacrificing for a better card? Will I notice that much of a difference? I just want to have fun with flight sim and am not looking for perfection. Thank you very much!

[eno]

I've just bought the Dimension 4700 (specs in sig).......... FPS 20-40+ with everything maxed .......  I wouldnt spend the extra money ......... all I'm going to do with this is add an extra 512k memory. The Graphics cards supplied on the higher end Dells are PCI express which is the way graphics seems to be heading.

Save the extra and just add memory.

cheers
eno

[congo]

I just filled a huge page with my thoughts on Dell PC's, but you are going to buy one anyway so......

The difference between the two systems is basically the chipset, the 8400 uses the Intel