Well, I spent days tweaking FSX.

The initial setup is horrible. You have to go in and tweak everything.  Initially I got like 15 fps and was going to throw FSX in the circular file. Also, make sure ALL of your drivers are up to date (both Nvidia and DirectX relesed new software this month). Also, make sure you do a good defrag after installation.

System Specs
AMD 64 X2 4800 overclocked to 5184
2 GB matched DDR400 overclocked to 433
PCIE bus overclocked 8%
7950GX2 520M 1GB video
XFi sound
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI motherboard

Anyway, I get between 27-80 FPS with usually mid30's to high 40's in the KMIA area  flying on Vatsim with all tabs at ultrahigh, AI traffic off, Water effects off(like it better this way anyway), Light bloom off, Global texture all the way up..makes for nice paintjobs), Autogen off, Scenery complexity Extremely dense.
I fly using real world weather.  The B206 and CRJ both get great frame rates. I think the newer "stock" planes do better than the others.


The water effects just don't look that real to me. I like the default ocean better. AI traffic is off because I like to fly with human controlled planes.  Autogen Off is a personal thing for me. With Autogen on, the FPS hit is not too bad for Normal setting. I 'm still tweaking.

Once you get in some good flights with descent FPS on FSX, you won't go back to 2004.

BTW I consider my 1 year old system (except for the video card) to be minumum. And it's NOT a $6,000 system. More like $1700 to $2000 if you build it yourself.