Hi Jake,

That PC for 450 smackers is, in my mind, a great deal. It'll handle FS9 well and with a 64 bit processor you can't go wrong.

BTW,

Intel P4 - AMD Athlon 64
Intel Pentium D - AMD Athlon X2
Intel Celero - AMD Sempron

Cheers,
Mehdi.

Quote:

If your running at a budget, building your own PC is your best option to get the best possible "Bang for Buck" if you see what I mean.....

Agreed,
E-Machines are not the worlds best pre-assembled PC !  , however, double the price? thats Roughly, £495 UK, yes that would certainly get a better spec PC, but if double the price isn't an option, then he needs to consider his PC's spec a little better.

For FS9, you need to seriously consider Graphics capability, an X200 is not upto FS2002, never mind FS2004 !

Quote:

Roughly, $450 US I believe,but, you still won't get great performance from FS9, it'll be 100% better than that E-Machine ,though, I promise you.

Be warned however, the card, despite being a 256MB one will not perform that well, especially with FS9 imo.

The rough US cost of that card is $75, you REALLY need to add at least $100 to that price, for which, you will get an ATI 9800 Pro 128MB,  that'll certainly give very good FS( performance, I'm sure plenty of 9800 owners would confirm this don't be fooled as its only 128MB, its still MUCH faster than the 256MB 9550.

I fully appreciate cost is a major factor, but when your spending such a sum already and, your main factor is FS9 performance, then frankly, skimping on the most crucial component for FS, i.e. the Graphics card, is madness.

Seriously consider budgeting more for the card, you won't regret the extra investment , I promise you.

I hope this is of help, I used www.overclockers.co.uk , my local PC store for prices, and converted them to USD $, via http://www.xe.com/ucc/ , Universal Currency Converter, so apologies if my £ - USD conversions are out.

Note also, you'd still need to purchase a copy of XP, for the time being, I'd use your existing Operating system which I assume is Windows '98, whilst saving for XP.

The end result will be a better spec PC that you've spread the cost of. Well, its what I'd do anyway.


Paul.

What ever happened to socket style and chipset?

AMD 64 has too many variations to simply state it as a spec.

Socket 754 or 939? Because 754 is inferior in many ways. Hence a very cheap price tag.

Chipset choice is paramount, and most chipsets that provide onboard graphic "solutions" are an utter pain in the posterior, and never perform as well even if an addon graphics card is implemented.

For the most part, the XP number of AMD cpu's is roughly equivalent to the P4 eqivalent.

So a XP3000+ is like a 3.0ghz P4.

Semprons are roughly the same cpu as XP's, sharing a common core but with reduced L2 cache. The cache deficit has very little impact on performance, making the Sempron good value on some platforms.

Semprons are not made for the high end socket 939 based AMD 64bit systems, which you should be aiming at, based on a nForce4 SLI or ultra chipset.

I dare say that PC is worth every cent, and not a penny more.