Hello,
I love to play flight sim but am not looking to spend a ton of money and do not need the best quality. I have been running 2004 recently on an older dell desktop 700 mhz with 384 mb ram so you can imagine what that is like. I can get about 7 fps on a good day. I plan on buying a dell desktop tomorrow, preferably the demension 8400. I do not need to have the top of the line graphics card or anything as such. How well will a 3.0 p4 processor with 1 gig of ram and 80 gig hard drive work? This comes with a radeon x300 card. I can get this all for 1 grand which works for me. I know that this is an entry level card but won't this work pretty well? I do not see the need to spend 160 bucks for the x800. OR should I buy a dimension 4600 for cheaper, upgrade it and get a radeon 9800 pro card and spend about 150 more. Is the 4600 worth sacrificing for a better card? Will I notice that much of a difference? I just want to have fun with flight sim and am not looking for perfection. Thank you very much!

I just filled a huge page with my thoughts on Dell PC's, but you are going to buy one anyway so......

The difference between the two systems is basically the chipset, the 8400 uses the Intel® 925X Express one which supports PCIe 1x and PCIe x16 for graphics cards.

The PCIe x1 slot gets blocked off by the fan on a decent graphics card installed into the PCIe x16 slot, and if you use a lame graphics card in the x16 slot, it's fan will be blocked by any PCIe x1 device installed into it's respective slot......... Bad motherboard design.

The 4600 uses the I865G chipset which is Onboard Graphics (a definite no no) with an AGP slot to add a Graphics card.

I'm sorry..... I was trying to make some positive points here, but I've already wasted too much of my time trying to explain away Dell PC's, and that violent mood swing is starting to kick in.......  


Good Luck with your new PC.