Good laptop for FS9

Well, my current laptop (Toshiba R835-P81) is now showing its age (5 years since I purchased it), and I'm thinking about purchasing a newer one. However, right now I can't find anything between $500 and $600 that can give me a significant upgrade against what I have right now: i5 2435M CPU capped at 1.8 GHz (instead of 2.4 GHz base/3.0GHz turbo), HD 3000 GPU capped at 667 MHz (instead of 1100 MHz), all for not allowing temperatures to reach over 75°C. Turbo Boost enabled and GPU cap removed will take my CPU over 100°C, and I'll get throttling...

 

The idea is to have the laptop purchased in the US and pick it up in a trip I expect to have later in the year. Since I expect to pay a hefty 50% import tax (stupid Argentinean government), my budget is very limited, so that I'm not considering FSX.

 

Any good suggestions for a $500-$600 laptop for FS9?

I would recommend the biggest bang for your buck. i have run fs9 on a 1.8 ghzs CPU and 8 gig of ram with a 1gig video card. The graphics are limited. Hope this helps.

I have an (old) DELL 17" Inspirion laptop with an Intel Pentium-M 2.0Ghz CPU, 2GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce Go 6800M grahics, Windows 7 32-bit OS. FS2004 + the 9.1 nocd update, and updated with UT-USA (all patches), REXFS2004+OD+HD textures, FSrealWX weather, and the beautifully created FS9 2015 Evolution Global Texture replacement package from Sascha, plus many addon sceneries, and many, many dozen aircraft models to chose from. The simulator runs perfectly on this old old machine. I also use the freeware nVidia nHancer software tool to increase the visual rendering ability of the graphics.

 

With an Intel I5 quad-core laptop you should be fine. You can also go into the windows Task Manager and assign different cores to the simulator needs. I personally assign all four cores to the sim, then cores 2,3, or 4 (if your CPU offers this) to other operations. My old laptop CPU is a single core, so this last tip does not apply on the old laptop. I do this on my desktop system. Hope this info helps. ~Glenn

I would recommend the biggest bang for your buck. i have run fs9 on a 1.8 ghzs CPU and 8 gig of ram with a 1gig video card. The graphics are limited. Hope this helps.

 

Remember, FS9 IS a 32bit program, so running it with a 64bit operating system, FS9 WILL ONLY see a max of 4GB, & that includes a combination of system RAM & graphics RAM.