Jona33

X55 is definitely recommended, a lot of people round here own it and I've heard good things.

If you're looking for a cheap joystick I'd throw in a recommendation for a T flight HOTAS X. You have to get a bit imaginative with your control assignments but I've got pretty much everything you need even for the A-10 (which is probably the most switch heavy aircraft) mapped on mine. Not as precise as many others but an absolute bargain. Also, there's not demos of the modules themselves. You can have a look at the external models, and with DCS world you get two free aircraft (Su-25T and TF-51), meaning if you can download the game for free and check out performance, the mission editor etc. However there's no demo of the proper modules, but there are plenty of youtube videos available so you can get an idea of what it's like.

No, just the FC3 aircraft.

Alright, thanks for all the advice guys. I'll see if I can get the 760, if not then I'll carry on looking.

Here you go EDIT: I've found a cheap Radeon 5870 1GB on eBay that's apparently in pretty decent nick. A couple of people have posted on the forum that they're using that and it's working well for them. Though I've also found a GTX 760 2GB for decent money. Thoughts on either of those?

Windows 7 CPU: AMD Athlon II x4 (going by the sticker on the front at least) GPU: Nvidia Geforce 310 Did have the motherboard make the other night but i'll have to check that in a moment. 6GB RAM Don't really know anything else, if there's anything specific that it helps to know I'll try and find out.

Very nice, think I had a look at the 290X but saw some people had complained of reliability issues with it (though everything's got similar names, it's tricky to keep track. :)), thanks for the advice, appears my quest is not futile.

Hello all As I've long suspected would be the case, I'm not able to run DCS 1.5 due to my appalling graphics card, it's a nvidia Geforce 310. I'm seeing if I can do an upgrade on the cheap, I'm really not into spending much money on something which is essentially a hobby, and will stop when I go off to uni. Unfortunately I know absolutely sod all about the tech side of stuff. To be honest I'm not even sure what the names of the connectors for the current card are so it's likely I'll have to pull apart the current computer at some point, trying not to break anything. :D So the DCS website, lists the specs required as needing a DX11 compatible card, as well as two GB of RAM. What type of RAM is recommended? A lot of the stuff I'm looking at is DDR3, I see some have DDR5, how essential is that? Is it sensible to go for 4GB? What kind of clock speeds should be reasonable? One more question which I appreciate is difficult to answer at this stage. My computer only has 6GB RAM, while 8 is specified as the minimum. How likely is it that the game will flat out not work without the required RAM? I can live with some instability. It seems to be possible to buy the extra RAM quite cheaply but I wouldn't mind knowing. I'm not looking for great performance or high settings, cheapness is the priority here. :D Thanks for any help, I'm a complete novice when it comes to the internals of computers.

Yeah, I've got the same situation and I'm pretty certain it's the same cause (poor GPU). Kinda disappointing it won't even work on lowest settings but looks like I'll be sticking with 1.2 for a while.

For the canberra, half the actual altitude + 2000 ft, so at 44,000 ft the cabin altitude is 24,000.

Standard abbreviation for "Mission Editor"

Unlikely, it used to work like that but Steam stopped accepting DCS store keys a while ago. I doubt they'd switch back now.

Used one for ages, used 8 and 4 (think it was four, one on the top right of the stick) as modifiers which worked pretty well. The silver buttons on the base of the throttle work nicely for countermeasures.

Poor Oxford University, a whole mission dedicated to attacking their reserve rowing team. :D

Hey it's fun, and a hell of a lot more interesting than history essays!