I have been learning about the sim's and will probably go the G3 way and have a few questions. This is the computer I have; HP with a AMD Athlon XP (2.1 GHz), 512 MBSRAM, 160 GB hard drive. I fly primarily sport and want to get into IMAC and 3D, but would also try heli.

Questions;
What video card should I get and approximate cost?
Will this PC run the sim well?
Do I need to buy anything (adaptors, training cord, etc.) to use my Futaba 9CAP Tx?
Does the std. G3 come with the 41 planes mentioned in the advertisement?
Do I need any of the add on's?

Anything else I have missed?

Thanks.

Stay away from ATI cards.

I hgihly recomend going to knifeedgesoftware.com and reading up about g3 and the newest update. There is also a list of the supported cards on the site. Do not go by what the box says. You must use one of the cards listed on the knife edge site. Been there done that. read the box spent money on a card that fit the recomendations on the box, it did not work, went got another card and it did not work either. Finally found the list and got one of the cards that was listed and it worked.



Oh and the standard G3 does not come with many planes that fit your 3D type of flying. You will need to purchase most of the Add Ons along with the expansion packs to get the models you want. At 20 to 30 dollars each it will get expensive. There used to be some great 3D type models that were created for free download by some of the users but these users have taken their planes down due to some issues with the latest update from knifeedge.com (designers of Realflight G3). and it is not looking like Knifeedge is going to be fixing these problems either.

I run it on my only computer. It's getting pretty old now, 2.4GHZ pentium 4 with 2Gig of ram. 256MB ATI Radeon 9800. It runs pretty descent but if I load a custom airport with tons of 3D objects the frame rate gets a little low, seems to run all the stock airports pretty good.

Thanks for the info. I went to Best Buy to check out the cards and memory. Using the recommended cards/memory from the web site for G3, $150 for a card and $150 for 1GB of memory. This will put the G3 set up around $500. I know I can do better on the prices but was just looking.

Do you think that the 2.1 GHz Athlon I have will work ok? I noticed that Knife Edge recommends a Intel 3.0 Ghz on the high end.

2.1 Athlon is plenty. I can run it on full everything with good framerates on 3D fields with a 2.2 Athlon. Don't compare Intel CPU speeds to AMD. AMD are much faster than Intel. 2.0 Athlon is approx the same as a 3.0 Intel, if not faster.

I am running G3 on an old (close to 4 year old) Dell dimension 4300 with a old pentium 4 1.6 ghz processor with 384 mb of ram and a Nvidia GeForce FX5700 VE card. it runs pretty good on my setup with decent frame rate. I have to turn a few things off once and awhile or turn things down sometimes but that is usually if I am flying with a bunch of people on online multiplayer or if I am flying on a new field for the first time.

Great, thanks again.