I chose AFPD because i had one requirement it had to run in linux. the company has a linux binary that you can get on their website. to me it was serious enough where i turned down getting realflight and acouple of others. I like AFPD it runs great and there are model downloads i can get. my system is actually getting a bit old. i built it myself and have a sempron 3000+ with a 256 mb video card and older parallel hard drives. I dont have experience with Phoenix to say anything about it.