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I've ordered Core Duo and 8800GT, but after surfing the Nvidia forums it's plain that an awful lot of people are having dire problems with 8800 GT.

I've ordered Core Duo and 8800GT, but after surfing the Nvidia forums it's plain that an awful lot of people are having dire problems with 8800 GT.  At 84, coping with video card hassles is beyond me: I need reliability. So I'm wondering whether it would make more sense to step down a notch,  cancel the 8800 and go for the 7950, on the presumption that any problems would have been sorted by now.  Am I right? And hopefully it would still give me some improvement on my present rig? If so, which would be the best drivers? Any advice would be much appreiated.

AMD 4000+
Geforce 6800 GT
2 gig RAM

This will probably be moved. As for your question My son uses two 8800 GTS and is not having any issues at all. However he does not have FS installed but does play other games like Halo3. I also do not know if using just one by itself might have problems. As for the other problems others are having from what I have seen has to do with tweaking FS and might not have something set up correctly.
The 7900 is not a bad card but you would be losing the bandwidth and that alone will slow it down so the frame rates will be slower than the 8800. By how much depends upon other factors like cpu speed and the amount of system ram you have and how your config file is set up. Any time you change a video card you can expect having to make some changes in order to get the most from it. If it was my decision I would stick with the 8800. 8-)

i am not sure how well the 8800 runs but i run the 7950GT OC and have not had any problems with it. 8-)

In my opinion the 8000 series are a bunch of expensive paper weights. The 8800 was developed using the spec sheets of DX10, with no real API to test on so it isn't the best it can be. Also with the release of Acceleration and DX10 in FSX there have been a lot of driver issues which prevent FSX from running properly with the 8800. Under DX9 I believe the 8800 runs very well, but it is a lot of money to spend. I would go for the 7950. I'm running a 7600 and FSX still runs very well using it.

what?........i just ordered the 8800gt as recomended by some reputables on this forum...still haven't got it yet....now ya got me worried  :)

Fudamentally FSX is CPU-bound, so your cpu is critical to performance.  4 cores, and the fastest you can afford is becoming the measure of performance.  

Then a motherboard, mobo, chipset, call it what you like that allows the fastest possible Front Side Bus (FSB) speed.  

The newest CPUs are 1333 FSB, 3gigs and 4 cores, and up to 12mb L2 cache.  What that means is pretty quick and powerful and that's what FSX demands.

However lots of other goodies are built in to FSX that give really great visuals and that's where the video card comes into it. More knowledgeable people than me on this site (search for NickN) have written about shader technology and the like which are exploited by the newer cards,  I bought a 8800GTX and have never regretted it.  It seems to me in computers by and large you get what you pay for, and regardless of the lousy DX10 performance of Acceleration, the 8800 gives me a great picture - and that through a Matrox Triple Head2Go and a fourth screen off the other outlet of the video card where I park instruments clear of the view through the cockpit windows.

If you can afford it, buy an 8800 card, and if you can really afford it buy the top of the line. (which is the Ultra I understand).

I just got myself an EVGA 8800GTS look in my sig for a complete rundown of what I have, I havent been posting in ages. Anyways, The 8800 Series cards are fine, I dont see a single problem with em, to go with a 7 series card if you can afford an 8 series would be stupid if you ask me. Anyways thats my opinion, FSX on my old 939 2.4Ghz 3800 is fine, 1 gig ram kills me, But hey, I can run medium to med-high!

Gunny

<8800GT owner. At first i thought it was gonna be a let down because of DX10 deal but they are great. nothing bad to say about them yet.

<8800GT owner. At first i thought it was gonna be a let down because of DX10 deal but they are great. nothing bad to say about them yet.

Here, Here!!  Nothing bad to say about them either!!

Oh and BTW they overclock like a beast 8-)

Chances are the 8800 will have no problems. The 8800 is also faster.

Go for 8800.

When my 7950 GX2 died the store gave me a 8800 GTS to replace it. I have had some problems but it has been a combination of the current drivers and the motherboard BIOS. Also am not sure if my motherboard itself might be part of the problem.

As far as performance goes the 8800 runs circles around my 7950 GX2 in SLI mode.