It's a good idea to understand at hardware before you buy - or you'll have regrets, trust me! My computers only a couple of months old and if I could do it again I would change the parts!
1. Drop the Aegia card.
2. Review this thread
http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb2 ... 1207153686 because it's possible that your DDR3 is SLOWER than cheap-o DDR2, particularly with a 1333mhz FSB processor.
3. If you don't know much about hardware pick the parts and get your local computer store to built it - that's what I did. Prebults like Dells usually are not very good.
4. If you have the budget I'd go for a faster Quad core like the Q9550 or Q9450, but the E8400 & E8500 are still fantastic. Do take note that applications need to be programmed to be multithreaded to take advantage of multiple cores. So it is very well possible that a higher clocked, cheaper, dual could be faster than a slower clocked quad.
FSX will keep Core #1 at 100% all the time, and the other three will be around 50% - 65%, but sometimes go upto 100%, loading scenery are you fly (In my experiance). It MAY be possible for a dual to be a better choice than a quad, so in my opinion, if you're going to get a quad get a Q9450 or above, or else you may as well stick with a cheap E8400.
5. There are a massive amount of fantastic videocards on the market right now. The best for MSFS is the 8800GTX, followed by the 3870x2, this is because MSFS is extremely hard on video memory and video memory bandwidth. More of memory / bandwidth = better. (There's a card called the ATi 2900XT which should be pretty good too, but it gulps power, is old, and is slow in games other than MSFS).
In other applications I would expect the 9800GX2 to be the quickest, followed by the 3870x2, then the 9800GTX, 8800GTX, 8800GTS 512, 8800GT 512, then 3870XT. To be honest I'd get a 3870x2 or an 8800GTS 512 - they're cheap, and fast.
I'm not sure what you would do, because there's a huge range of combinations availible depending on what you plan on doing with your PC.... what do you plan one doing with it? Other than MSFS.
If you plan on picking the parts and not configure a Dell (ARGH), then make sure you get a good motherboard which should help you upgrade in the future. At the moment there are three main chipset manufacturers, ATi, Nvidia, Intel, each have there respective advantages. In the future would you be interested in a dual videocard solution? It only has limited gains in MSFS but I can be worthwhile for games.
Last edited by Slotback on Fri May 16, 2008 1:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
by airdruid » Thu May 15, 2008 3:34 pm 
Mainboard: Asus P5K-Premium, CPU=Intel E6850 @ x8x450fsb 3.6ghz, RAM: 4gb PC8500 Team Dark, Video: NV8800GT, HDD: 2x1Tb Samsung F3 RAID-0 + 1Tb F3, PSU: Antec 550 Basiq, OS: Win7x64, Display: 24&
)
