Need video card advice

[Dougx]

Just got FSX, am a little dissapointed, Frame rate of course. I am not very familiar with video cards would appreciate comments on my GE Force FX5600 and reccomendations for a more capable card.
My comp -  3.2g P4, 1gb ram, FSX on 20gb partition, not sure of mother board. 500w ps, XP home. Thanks

[flymo]

ok well im guessing that as you are running a 5600 that your on an AGP mother bord
512Mb Sapphire Radeon X1600Pro AGP4x/8x 128Bit 800MHz GDDR2, GPU 500MHz D-Sub/DVI-I/TV-Out, Retail

its around 70quid which is not bad but a GeForce such as this geforce 7800 which would give you better perforamnce but its quite expensive

also if you can throw in another gig of ram and you should be alrite for med settings

just that that CPU u have will bottleneck any realy good card such as the ones listed abve so something likea 6800 would probably be better,

john

[Gixer]

I wouldnt put another 1gig of ram in that system it isnt worth it. It's only running Windows XP so 1gig will be just right for FSX and XP as long as you dont have silly amounts of processes running in the background.

Unfortunately the graphics card you have is well below average for todays standard, even at the time of its release it wasnt a very good card compared to the ATI alternative. Most of the 5000 series were pretty rubbish (and this is coming from an Nvidia user)  I now have a 6800Ultra AGP and that is just about holding its own still with todays current games.

In short you should see a good improvement if you get the best AGP (I am assuming this is what ur PC has) you can. Personally I wouldnt skimp on the graphics card as I think you will just end up dissapointed. It's worth saving a little more and getting the best AGP one out.

Also you have put FSX on a 20gig partition. This is not the best of things to do at all. If possible re-format and get rid of all partitions on your main OS drive. Partitions just slow things down. The bigger the hard drive and the more free space it has on it the faster it will be. Once a HDD starts getting more than 50-60% full its performance begins to degrade. You are over 50% on that partition as I believe FSX is 12gig isnt it?

In short FSX will work best if it is installed on an unpartitioned drive and on the same drive as your Operating System (Definately keep this drive un-partitioned)

Hope this helps.

[Dougx]

Thanks much Flymo and Gixer, I value your input. I am going to follow your advice. Doug