MS Flight Simulator PC

For MS's Flight Simulator X, you need at least a quad core, and a relatively high end graphics card. It also depends on the resolution of your screen.

IMHO, $600 is a little too low for a system that's capable of running FSX smoothly. You should be looking at around $1000 rig  

Maybe a nice graphics card with a heavily Oc'ed CPU.

FSX is the most CPU bound gaming title available today. It demands as much CPU horsepower as you can afford to throw at it. FSX frame rate is ~ 85% dependent upon CPU Cores and overclocking, so an i7 @ 4.0 Ghz yields responsive frame rates.

Although FSX runs best on mainstream nVidia GPU's, it also runs best on a single GPU, rather than SLI / CF / X2 GPU's, since multiple GPU's divert valuable CPU interrupts, which has the effect of actually reducing frame rates.

See Tom's Gaming Graphics Charts Q3/2008 - http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-char...

I've been a Flight Sim enthusiast for 15 years, so I've built all my PC's over the years as dedicated FSX rigs.

Comp  

Intel Q9** CPU or Intel i7 takes care of the CPU load. Nvidia 2** GPU should be more than enough for video too.

RAM 4gb and 64bit OS


I used to get decent frame rates on my old E6850 / 4gb DDR2 / 8800 GTS

I know someone who built a 2x Opteron rig specifically for this game. It's that CPU intensive.

I tried 3 years ago to buy a PC capable of running FSX well, unfortunately I made the fatal mistake of buying a pre-packaged computer from Dell, as I had not yet discovered self-building. It performed OK on my system, but I am now in the process of completely overhauling my entire PC. So far I have only upgraded my video card; to an ATI Radeon HD4850 with 1gig dedicated memory. I would highly recommend this card, it is reasonably priced and performs beautifully. By itself it increased my FSX experience 10 fold. I run the game graphics on High (with obvious tweaks to individual sliders) and consistently see FPS over 50.

Specs:

32 bit OS
Processor: Pentium Core 2 Duo 2.13 g Hz
RAM: 2-gig DDR2
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD4850 1 gig dedicated
PSU: Corsair 750TX

Hehe, I only know how to play HAWX.