Opinions?

[Tomliner]

Hi gents. As Ben knows I'm looking at soon needing to replace my faithful old( at least 13 years!) XP pc on which I run Fs9.
There's a locally based company in Edinburgh who seem to have a good reputation and one of their products is this http://www.idealcomputing.co.uk/product ... gaming-pc/ I have a list of questions to email to them prior to calling in to see them again. Initially I'd want to get FS9 working again and I've received some advice from Benas a result of which I've been copying most of my fs folders to an external HDD although in many cases I still have the original discs. I'd already backed up downloaded zip files of add on aircraft etc. Any thoughts or suggestions would be gratefully received. Many thanks EricT
ps I would want an optical reader added not just for fs discs. This is about the maximum price I'm prepared to pay.

[TSR2]

Hi Eric,

That's quite expensive all in. A couple of points though. The 1060 card has been causing trouble for some users, and someone here pointed out its been plagued with issues, so I'd give that a miss. Other than P3Dv4, all the other sims so far are 32 bit. What this means is that 16gb of RAM will be wasted. You won't need any more than 8GB. 120GB SSD will be tight on the C drive. Id suggest a 240- 256GB boot drive. I'll dig some more info tonight.

[Dev One]

For what its worth, I've got my son's old ( 6 years old plus?) gaming computer with an ASUS Mother board & six core AMD Phenom II 1055T processor 2.8GHz, & running W 8.1. 4Mb RAM. Graphics is AMD Radion HD5700.
Original HDD gave up & now have a Samsung 120GB SSD as my C drive that only runs the main program & have 40 GB free. Changed to this method as believe SSD's have a finite life which gets used up quickly if they are written to continually as I understand Windows tends to do.
All my other programs, FS9, FSX, Autocad etc run on a 1 TB HDD of which I have 632 GB free. Have another SSD of 60GB ( originally used as sole drive until it froze possibly because of the read write problem, but now runs OK after reformatting) & another 500GB HDD, both used as backups, but I dont use them properly, although for my models & my personal data I do backup onto USB sticks.
Sophos Home (free) is anti-virus, & I find runs very nicely in the background.
Good luck
Keith

[spatialpro]

I think that is overpriced... esp. if your goal is simply to run FS9.

I've gotta say, if at possible, have a go and building one yourself... it is easy-peasy! If you built one just to run FS9 you could save yourself a ton of money.

I honestly can't recall the last time I actually bought a PC off the shelf.

[TSR2]

Couple of things further.

ASRock boards aren't necessarily the greatest and are relatively inexpensive. As is Kolink 600W PSU. The 1TB drive is unbranded, so again, that could be any old drive. The Samsung Polaris drive, I personally hadn't heard of. Everyone I know goes for the Samsung EVO range. I'm pretty sure it still comes with a 3 year warranty.

This is a ballpark indication, just lifted straight from Amazon Prime, and either averaged or rounded up to the nearest £5 but it gives you an idea:-

Samsung Evo 256 £85.00
Western Digital 1TB £60.00
ASUS Z270 £120.00
Corsair Carbide Case £75.00
Corsair 750w PSU £95.00
HyperX Fury DDR4 8GB £70.00
Intel i5 7500 3.4GHz £180.00
LG DVD rom drive £20.00
Windows 10 Home £100
£805.00

To be honest mate, its all a bit of a moot point if your happy with FS9, as Keith said, you will have a fantastic FS9 machine for a lot less than that, and will comfortably run FSX too. P3D is going to set you back £50 or so each year if you upgrade it every year (you don't have to though). And as most of the aircraft you enjoy wont run on it as yet, there's a strong argument to stick with what you enjoy, and perhaps have FSX for anything newer that isn't released for FS9.

[TSR2]

Eric, this is a much better option if you're looking for something that isn't "hand built" as it where.

http://amzn.eu/hVzMB2L

And you'd have enough left to get a great monitor.

[Tomliner]

Many thanks for all the helpful suggestions and especially to you Ben for doing that searching. I'll have a look later at the rig on Amazon that you found. Overall though maybe I ought to lower my sights a bit. EricT