Hey Guys,

Im trying to make my existing computer be able to run FSX with very high settings. If not FSX, FS2004 with maxed out settings. I was told that by getting the BFG - GeForce 8400 GS Graphics Card and 1G of RAM I would be able to run FSX with high settings. Do you guys have any suggestions or do you agree?
Here are my specs:

Hewlett-Packard Company
HP Pavillion
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor
3300+
1.81 GHz, 896 MB of RAM
Physicall Adress Extension

With a 8400gs, you will be able to enjoy a slide show. The cpu is also slow and will bottleneck whatever graphics card that is capable of running it at maxed out settings. Not to mention 896 mb of ram. I'm not sure how they could reach that uneven number.

Get an 8800GT 512

will that run FSX? If not what else would I need?

the athlon 64 3300+ doesn't run at 1.81GHz. Start there.

FSX is a CPU limited game. With an aging processor it hardly matters what video card you have.

I agree with the FSX being a CPU demanding game, I couldn't get good frame rates with it using a 4800+X2 and 2Gb of ram. But with my X2 6400+ and 4Gb of ram using Vista Platinum X64 my frame rates went up to a smooth 25fps, now with 8Gb of memory its gone up to 30fps with everything almost maxed out.

Will i be able to run fs2004 with maxed out setting with a BFG - GeForce 8400 GS Graphics Card and 1G more of RAM?

Simple answer: No

Shane6 greetings,

Flight Simulator is definitely CPU and memory/bus intensive. I have been simming since 2003 and seriously since 2004. I am about to upgrade my system to a E8400 dual core (core 2 duo) but my video card is just a 8600GT 256MB. This is more than enough if you look at Tom's ratings - the VGA charts. If you select the FSX option in the VGA charts - you will see that even the fastest video card does about 24fps, whereas the 8600GT does about 21.4fps. But my CPU and memory (in my new system) are very powerful and RAM is also important.

Your RAM is not enough - that's for sure. Even for FS2004, you need at least 1GB or RAM. But I think you CPU should be alright if you cannot upgrade anything and do not have much money for now. The biggest bottleneck is the amount of your RAM. My current PC, is a mere Athlon XP 3200+ with 1GB RAM, ATI X850 PRO video w/256MB ram and upgrading my video card to this one made hardly any difference in my FS2004 performance.

So for now, if you cannot upgrade CPU, memory and board, make sure you get a MATCHED PAIR (tested together for stability) of RAM - like Corsair TWINX. DO NOT get any ram and do not mix different brands of RAM if possible. This can cause major freezing or crashes in Flight Simulator 2004. I do not use FSX yet so I cannot say anything about its stability.