Upgrades.

Alright....time to put Intel's (and JLangevin 😀 ) money where their mouth is!!! I bought a Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 (codename Conroe) processor running stock at 1.86Ghz and a EVGA nForce 680i SLI (the Black Pearl) motherboard. Now, it was a pain in the ass to get this started; first the ram was wrong I had to ditch my 2Gb Corsair DDR400 for 1GB of some no-name brand sticks. I'll pick up a 2GB pack soon. Once I finally got it to go to the boot screen (took two days) it took two additional days to format and install Windows Vista. AFTER THAT, I had configure these IDE to SATA conveters to accept my additional 250 GB HDDs, since the 680i only came with one IDE slot and SIX SATA slots.

The motherboard isn't bad at all, considering that it is designed for 8800 series cards in SLI mode, WITH a THIRD PCI-E slot so that you can go SLI on one monitor and still run a second monitor. It has the normal jacks for your average 5.1 speaker setup, then it has a Digital Optical out jack to hook up to a Dolby Digital/DTS/THX reciever for a true 7.1 speaker system. I also can this onboard firewire port, whatever for, I don't know.

I haven't reinstalled FSX yet, do to the lack of memory (remember, I have only 1 Gb worth), so I am going to see what this processor can do when I ramp up the processor a bit. When I get more DDR (at least 3 GB), I'll start overclocking.

Hey..... I am still a AMD fanboy.