Ouch! Thankfully I've never had any PC components spit the dummy... yet.
Running all this on a Q6600 2.4Ghz Quad, 4Gb RAM and a 8600GT 512mb card - The main bottleneck for me now is the CPU - realistically to run X at near it's potential 3.0Ghz is a starting point
Within the next 12 months, I have a very tech-savvy friend who is going to put together a ballbreaker of a rig for me... I don't have the time, patience or the brains to work out the "how to" in getting the components to talk nicely.
Watercooled, big clock speeds, as much DDR3 RAM as we can stuff into it (going 64bit this time round...) GPU to be confirmed closer to the final assembly
Funny you mention the FPS going up as you add autogen, I read somewhere a while ago that by having it turned down, it sucks up more juice as FSX actively loads it into the cache and then has to "hide" it. Same goes for the water/wave effects in my case - the jump from 1x to 2x was minimal, and the step up to 4x was barely noticeable but with far more eyecandy
