80 hour student. Noob to Simulators. Recommendations.

[Eric Gleason]

For your PC, the graphics card is likely going to be a performance bottleneck. Most of the smaller PCs have integrated graphics that aren't up to this task, though you may be able to add one. Realistically, unless you're looking at building or speccing out your own machine, you're probably looking at a gaming PC.

X Plane has display settings you can use to turn down the realism to boost your framerate, and I'm sure the others have similar settings. I used X Plane for procedures practice when doing my instrument training, and still use it occasionally to keep skills sharp.

I'd say that you're realistically looking at roughly $2k all-in for a system that gets you to a relatively basic level of flight sim. Maybe you can keep those costs to $1500 if you are patient and buy used stuff from ebay. That's probably something like 10-15 hours of actual training with an instructor, right?

A better approach to finish your rating is to set up your schedule so you can fly at least twice a week for 6 weeks or so. A good CFI can likely get you finished off in that amount of time. If you're lucky, you have a flight school nearby with a Redbird simulator that you can use if the weather's not flyable.

[FlyingRon]

I've never seen a GA simulator that was worth a plug nickel for stick-and-rudder stuff. As Bill points out, it can be handy for learning navigation (pretty much the essentials of the insturment rating course). For that, X-Plane or most of them are reasonable (even the ancient Microsoft Flight Sim worked OK for this). If I were to buy now, I'd be looking hard at TouchTrainer. My neighbor has a PhD from Harvard in flight simulation. I'm waiting to see how her project is coming out (she's going after FAA approval).