Home built rig advice - looking for wisdom

[Covert53]

I fly FS9 and thinking about building a new gaming rig (a first time for me) primarily out of a desire to save expense. I'm looking for recommendations for mid-to-upper mid range non-SLI motherboards, CPUs, and graphics cards set ups. Also looking for good vendors. I see TigerDirect sells "barebones" kits which I find intriguing. Vista is a non-factor. Anyone wanna share some wisdom and success stories (or horror stories)?

Thanks!

[rossspargo]

So-far Success Story

Gigabyte GA-VM900M Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 @ 3.60 GHz (You can get those faster Quad-Core processors now which are quite expensive tho)
Kingston 2GB PC2-5300 RAM
Sapphire Radeon X1650 Pro 512MB PCI-Ex16 Graphics Card
Maxtor 7200rpm SATA 250GB HDD

Im running FS9 smoothly with all Graphics on Ultra High with an average of 19FPS whilst on the ground and 37FPS whilst in the air (and this is around add-on scenery!) But, you get get way better spec computers than mine Im also running Windows XP Pro w/SP2 without any probs. at all (Not into Vista at all)

Ross S

[mvm]

Hey Rick
i build most of mine myself also that way i can get the system and components i want rather than what someone else has bundled...my next is going to be either an Asus p5e or Msi platinum or diamond board,Core2 quad core q6600 cpu,Corsair ram,not sure how much yet,still researching the GPU but it will be a NVidia card as right now they lead the graphics world,but that can change in a heartbeat!!

now i just gotta find a way to get at the visa without the old girl divorcing me!!!

[Covert53]

fellas, thanks for sharing your thoughts...

Gigabyte GA-VM900M Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 @ 3.60 GHz (You can get those faster Quad-Core processors now which are quite expensive tho)
Kingston 2GB PC2-5300 RAM
Sapphire Radeon X1650 Pro 512MB PCI-Ex16 Graphics Card
Maxtor 7200rpm SATA 250GB HDD

my next is going to be either an Asus p5e or Msi platinum or diamond board,Core2 quad core q6600 cpu

Boy, I have a lot to learn about the language of PC hardware. And it changes every six months to boot!

now i just gotta find a way to get at the visa without the old girl divorcing me!!!

Yeah, at 17.99% (if you're lucky) she's not the only thing to worry about. You have to pay the ridiculous interest too!

[CaptVirtual]

Mike,

Sounds similar to my current rig I purchased in Aug last year, although for the first time in years I didn't build myself, I actually purchased a system configured by Dell (XPS710). It is a hyper threaded quad core with 4GB of fast RAM, 256 FSB, 512MB nVidia Card and all the other bells and whistles - cost me about as much as a small car!
It absolutely launches applications & mutli-tasks like crazy, but believe it or not FSX still runs slow & crappy on it - thus I have reverted back to my beloved FS9 (which I have years of work invested into anyhow). Only thing is I am now eying the 64-bit developments and my system is will be a step behind again pretty soon.

[mvm]

Mike,

believe it or not FSX still runs slow & crappy on it -

No kidding well don't that just tick ya off...ok i'm wondering if FSX will run on one of them Cray supercomputer thingies...although i may need a second or third mortgage for that venture..

[PetriSuni]

I'm by no means an expert, but somehow I would suspect your graphics card if FSX runs slow on such a rig. Certainly it's not the processor or RAM! Do you have a decent enough graphics adapter?

Petri