What Hardware To Buy (aerosoft's Suggestion)

[KingofSkies 0]

Q9550, around $250 by now and around 260 Euro in Europe. The next one up (the 9650) is double as expensive so the 9550 or the 9450 are at the sweet spot by now.

I've already knew the prices, but thanks anyway. I probably will buy the Q9550, too, but only with the E0 Stepping...

[questy 1]

Hi Mathijs,

I Have just upgrade my rig again to a e8400 core 2 duo (3 ghz) and i can say wow it improve fsx a lot and all am wait for is the md-11 from pdmg.

colin

[Raedwulf 0]

When I set out to build another rig about 2 yrs ago, the word was out about what Vista would bring to gaming. Of course Dx10 was THE THING. No longer based on all Directx revision before it, it would need a GPU that fully supported it. Also too, there was the warning that not all hardware would be supported, older equipment might not work at all; hardly what one might call a Green solution, as it would put all sorts of electronics into the dumpster. Still, I had decided to build my machine around what the OS would require.

My motherboard is a Asus Commando, able to support different processors right up to Quad Core and Crossfire should I choose to have multiple GPUs.

My GPU, now is a HIS 4870, it was a ATI x1950, and then the HD2900 so I treat myself to Dx10 performance. Not for me anything to do with NVidia, call me a jaded 3dfx owner. I am very pleased with the 4870, the price was good, performance is great and it's not power hungry like the HD2900 is. Sure I would like the X2 version, but I'm happy with it the way it is. I'm not that much of an enthusiast, that tweak and overclock everything to the envelope.

For ram, it was mentioned that 4GB ram was the sweetspot between price and performance as far as Vista was concerned, I paid attention to the specifications of the RAM to the motherboard, I had been bit once where I had 2 sticks 1GB of OCZ ram that gave me no end of instability issues; I replaced them with ram that was proven to work with the motherboard I had at the time and no problems after that. btw Kingston

For hard drives, I have all Seagates, this includes one last 60G SCSI drive paired with a Adaptec 2940N controller. The SCSI controller worked well with a scanner I had, of course I could only make use of the scanner if I booted into Linux (Suse), Vista doesn't support the scanner. All other drives are SATA including my DVD Writer

The processor is a Q6600 2.4GHz Quad Core; I've not had a great need to overclock. If I did, I would have to pay attention to what aftermarket cooling solution I would need to use. The Northbridge heatsink might interfere.

The one hard to explain buy was getting a Cretive Labs X-Fi Platinum. EAX no longer works as it did even given the add-on driver. The Linux driver is tenuous. I somethimes think I should just put the Audigy 2 back in

All of these innerds are powered by an Enermax Galaxy 1000W Power Supply... just in case I did want to Crossfire (This was still when I had the HD2900s)

For Peripherals I have Logitech G7 mouse and G15 Keyboard.

Cyber Accoustics USB monarual head set, this is just my preference, it works well enough I can have the regular sound off the speakers and can do voice on the headset

For controllers I use Saitek X52 throttle joystick set and CH Pro-pedals

I'm tossing around the idea of getting the CH Throttle Quadrant to support multi-engine, like the Twin Otter, this would help with the steering with pontoons

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

When I set out to build another rig about 2 yrs ago, the word was out about what Vista would bring to gaming. Of course Dx10 was THE THING. No longer based on all Directx revision before it, it would need a GPU that fully supported it. Also too, there was the warning that not all hardware would be supported, older equipment might not work at all; hardly what one might call a Green solution, as it would put all sorts of electronics into the dumpster. Still, I had decided to build my machine around what the OS would require.

My motherboard is a Asus Commando, able to support different processors right up to Quad Core and Crossfire should I choose to have multiple GPUs.

My GPU, now is a HIS 4870, it was a ATI x1950, and then the HD2900 so I treat myself to Dx10 performance. Not for me anything to do with NVidia, call me a jaded 3dfx owner. I am very pleased with the 4870, the price was good, performance is great and it's not power hungry like the HD2900 is. Sure I would like the X2 version, but I'm happy with it the way it is. I'm not that much of an enthusiast, that tweak and overclock everything to the envelope.

For ram, it was mentioned that 4GB ram was the sweetspot between price and performance as far as Vista was concerned, I paid attention to the specifications of the RAM to the motherboard, I had been bit once where I had 2 sticks 1GB of OCZ ram that gave me no end of instability issues; I replaced them with ram that was proven to work with the motherboard I had at the time and no problems after that. btw Kingston

For hard drives, I have all Seagates, this includes one last 60G SCSI drive paired with a Adaptec 2940N controller. The SCSI controller worked well with a scanner I had, of course I could only make use of the scanner if I booted into Linux (Suse), Vista doesn't support the scanner. All other drives are SATA including my DVD Writer

The processor is a Q6600 2.4GHz Quad Core; I've not had a great need to overclock. If I did, I would have to pay attention to what aftermarket cooling solution I would need to use. The Northbridge heatsink might interfere.

The one hard to explain buy was getting a Cretive Labs X-Fi Platinum. EAX no longer works as it did even given the add-on driver. The Linux driver is tenuous. I somethimes think I should just put the Audigy 2 back in

All of these innerds are powered by an Enermax Galaxy 1000W Power Supply... just in case I did want to Crossfire (This was still when I had the HD2900s)

For Peripherals I have Logitech G7 mouse and G15 Keyboard.

Cyber Accoustics USB monarual head set, this is just my preference, it works well enough I can have the regular sound off the speakers and can do voice on the headset

For controllers I use Saitek X52 throttle joystick set and CH Pro-pedals

I'm tossing around the idea of getting the CH Throttle Quadrant to support multi-engine, like the Twin Otter, this would help with the steering with pontoons

It's a shame that DX10 did not make the impact it could have done (mainly because of some mixup with versions halfway last year) because it could really make far better games/simulations.

[darem 106]

I am now done building a rig close to the specifications Mathijs gave here in this thread. I dismantled an old ATX Tower, put in an Enermax 525W, an Asus P5Q, a Q9550, 4GB RAM, a 10.000rpm disk for OS (Vista 64) and two more 320GB disks, one for the simulator and one for supporting programs/files. Furthermore, I have used my overclocked 8800GTX ultra, a Matrox dualhead digital edition (didn't go for triplehead because I wanted to reuse my 2 16:10 monitors), the Saitek 52 (not the pro) and a TrackIR4.

Generally speaking, I am quite happy with the performance. I am the eye candy type of guy, so for me it's important to have autogen on very dense, some AI traffic (MyTrafficX) and a lot of better textures (for exapmple 4096x4096 for clouds - FEX SHD edition), and together with a screen resolution of 3360x1050 I was quite aware of the fact that FSX wouldn't deliver screaming frame rates, but with the exception of busy airports I can keep them at 24fps locked (airports in the standard planes give me 18-10). The good news is that the big framerate drops I encountered with, for example, the Airbus series Vol. 1 are gone now, they are really playable, as is the 767. The only plane that still eats framerates like crazy is the Katana - don't know how she does it *g*.

Quadcore REALLY helps with FSX. Not so much regarding more fps, but in keeping it stable across different places.

[Waleed 29]

I have the quad q660 at 2.4ghz, 4gb ocz sli enabled ram, 320gn hardrive, and a 9800gtx.

I asked this before I think, but to be on the safe side, do I need to get a better fan to have the cores run faster? ( I read earlier that the cores can run at around 3.0 with a better fan.)

I will in time get a new power supply unit to play it safe (say 600mhz).

Also, should it be a 500gb hd, or a 300 gb velaciraptor that would have both fs9, and fsx, and leave the 320 for normal stuff? (Come christmass, the hd should be cheaper.)

As far as the card is concerned, do I need to think of dual (SLI), or gx280, or am I blessed with the one I have?

I will run fsx more often by January, and will have quite a number of mega airports, and a few other producers airports, along with traffic, fs global, asx, gex,utx,vfr paris, london,manhattan, innsbruck,and a bunch of payware aircraft.

Thanks.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

I have the quad q660 at 2.4ghz, 4gb ocz sli enabled ram, 320gn hardrive, and a 9800gtx.

I asked this before I think, but to be on the safe side, do I need to get a better fan to have the cores run faster? ( I read earlier that the cores can run at around 3.0 with a better fan.)

I will in time get a new power supply unit to play it safe (say 600mhz).

Also, should it be a 500gb hd, or a 300 gb velaciraptor that would have both fs9, and fsx, and leave the 320 for normal stuff? (Come christmass, the hd should be cheaper.)

As far as the card is concerned, do I need to think of dual (SLI), or gx280, or am I blessed with the one I have?

I will run fsx more often by January, and will have quite a number of mega airports, and a few other producers airports, along with traffic, fs global, asx, gex,utx,vfr paris, london,manhattan, innsbruck,and a bunch of payware aircraft.

Thanks.

I think you are safe with the stock cooler as long as you don't overclock over 3 GHz.

For harddisks it's simple, the faster the better, but keep in mind it only helps for loading, FPS will stay the same.

Getting a different graphics card might help a little bit but personally I would not invest in that, what you got works fine (and you can overclock that one a bit as well).

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

With some reluctance I am going to post a warning about the 9800GTX. The last few weeks we saw a number of problems in FSX with that card with late drivers. It's all a bit sketchy at the moment but I know two simmers who are removing that card this weekend and will replace it with something else.

[expor 0]

Hello,

I have been looking on this forum alot last few months (mainly drooling at the f16 release topic ;>) and upgraded my pc not long ago.

With this new pc I had hoped to be able to run FSX easily on highest settings but I seem to have trouble doing so if I max the settings.

I'm currently running the following setup:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66 GHz (with Scythe Infinity CPU Cooler)

Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C4DHX 4 GB

Samsung SpinPoint F1 1 TB (32mb, SATA II)

Asus ENGTX280 /HTDP/1GB

Windows Vista Business 64bit

Samsung TFT SyncMaster 2232BW 22 Inch

At the moment I'm writing this on my laptop so I can't list out my exact settings but I'm quite sure I'm running everything maxed out, except AI traffic, and I'm getting around 12FPS on EHBK (NL) so it's not even scenery heavy compared to flying over the US. I was wondering if this is normal performance with this setup, and if so what settings should be changed to get easy frame improvements. All drivers and updates up to date, and I'm running FSX Accelerator (which to my knowledge has up to SP2 included, so multicore should work?). I hope someone knows the answer, since I expected a bit more coming out of this machine myself.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

Hello,

I have been looking on this forum alot last few months (mainly drooling at the f16 release topic ;>) and upgraded my pc not long ago.

With this new pc I had hoped to be able to run FSX easily on highest settings but I seem to have trouble doing so if I max the settings.

I'm currently running the following setup:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66 GHz (with Scythe Infinity CPU Cooler)

Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C4DHX 4 GB

Samsung SpinPoint F1 1 TB (32mb, SATA II)

Asus ENGTX280 /HTDP/1GB

Windows Vista Business 64bit

Samsung TFT SyncMaster 2232BW 22 Inch

At the moment I'm writing this on my laptop so I can't list out my exact settings but I'm quite sure I'm running everything maxed out, except AI traffic, and I'm getting around 12FPS on EHBK (NL) so it's not even scenery heavy compared to flying over the US. I was wondering if this is normal performance with this setup, and if so what settings should be changed to get easy frame improvements. All drivers and updates up to date, and I'm running FSX Accelerator (which to my knowledge has up to SP2 included, so multicore should work?). I hope someone knows the answer, since I expected a bit more coming out of this machine myself.

Apart from the Vista 64 that will not help your framerate (you could expect about 10% better fps on XP) your rig is about as strong as it could be and your result are certainly not abnormal. But running all at max makes very little sense and will only slow you down. For example if you fly over a scenery that has 4 meter pixels and you got it set at 60 cm you are not doing yourself a favor. It's a common mistake, tune the sim to what you got loaded and you get much better fps. I also way suggest trying to get it to 22 fps and then set the framerate lock at 18 or 19 fps. That will make the sim fast enough and a lot smoother.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

Gents, about the end of the month and I need to upgrade the hardware topic. But as last month I can only see a drop in price of about 3% but no new hardware that is interesting enough to be added to my list. But could I be missing something?

[RemarkH 80]

Hi,

what do you think about WinXP 64 - instead of Vista 64 - and RAM more than 4 GB?

Would that make sense for FSX?

Regards,

Remark

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

Hi,

what do you think about WinXP 64 - instead of Vista 64 - and RAM more than 4 GB?

Would that make sense for FSX?

Regards,

Remark

Simple answer... no. I have yet to see FSX use anything over 1,6 GB and the overhead of a 64 bit os will hurt you in performance.

Now if you are a developer with large images open in photoshop while FSX runs things are very different, you certainly can use the memory.

Interesting thing. Last week I downgraded a Vista system to XP for several reasons. Same hardware, nothing changed. But after a few days I am so ######ed off about the multitasking of XP that I will reformat next week and go back to Vista. The whole system, the same applications simply are far less responsive when the CPU is pushed. In XP things start to become sluggish when one cpu core gets busy, in Vista I don't even notice it. Simple tasks like background backup I did not even notice in Vista now cause me to get coffee. FSX might be 5% faster, but that does not mean a thing when the OS irritates me.

[palm 0]

I am running a Q9450 overclocked to 3.4GHz with an aftermarket cooler. It eats FSX pretty good. As for GPU I have 2x EVGA 9800GX2 powered by Corsair HX1000W.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

I am running a Q9450 overclocked to 3.4GHz with an aftermarket cooler. It eats FSX pretty good. As for GPU I have 2x EVGA 9800GX2 powered by Corsair HX1000W.

Yes that's about as fast as you could use for FSX right now.

[RemarkH 80]

Simple answer... no. I have yet to see FSX use anything over 1,6 GB and the overhead of a 64 bit os will hurt you in performance.

Now if you are a developer with large images open in photoshop while FSX runs things are very different, you certainly can use the memory.

Interesting thing. Last week I downgraded a Vista system to XP for several reasons. Same hardware, nothing changed. But after a few days I am so ######ed off about the multitasking of XP that I will reformat next week and go back to Vista. The whole system, the same applications simply are far less responsive when the CPU is pushed. In XP things start to become sluggish when one cpu core gets busy, in Vista I don't even notice it. Simple tasks like background backup I did not even notice in Vista now cause me to get coffee. FSX might be 5% faster, but that does not mean a thing when the OS irritates me.

So for a"FSX-only-sytem" WIN-XP 32 and 4 GB of RAM (XP snatches some MB ...) is the fastest arrangement?

i.e.anything more of OS or RAM would be a waste of money?

with regards

Remark

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

So for a"FSX-only-sytem" WIN-XP 32 and 4 GB of RAM (XP snatches some MB ...) is the fastest arrangement?

i.e.anything more of OS or RAM would be a waste of money?

with regards

Remark

100% yes. Nothing will beat that at this moment for FS2004 or FSX.

But keep in mind is is all at best something between 5% and 7% more fps.

[Andy B. 40]

I disagree with this comment Mathijs in my experience of a dual boot setup of XP and Vista 64 with 4GB of RAM, Q6700@3.2Ghz, HD4870 512Mb sharing the exact same install of FSX, XP is always at least 30-50% better frame rates and as much as 200% better in places.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

I disagree with this comment Mathijs in my experience of a dual boot setup of XP and Vista 64 with 4GB of RAM, Q6700@3.2Ghz, HD4870 512Mb sharing the exact same install of FSX, XP is always at least 30-50% better frame rates and as much as 200% better in places.

Well then we agree, lol. Sorry if I was not clear enough, XP is best, Vista 64 worst.

[Andy B. 40]

No I meant I disagreed with your 5 to 7% comment, I see a minimum of 30-50% increase in XP, I thought your difference was only quite small an not really worth worrying about.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

"In a recent document sent to partners, Intel pointed out that when comparing Core i7-965 with QX9770, we can get 52% more 3D gaming performance, 38% more rendering performance and 41% more movie editing and conversion performance. (Core i7-965 platform: X58, DDR3 3G, Discrete VGA card, QX9770 platform unknown.)"

[Waleed 29]

Mathjis, I just purchased vfr London, and also have mega heathrow for fsx, and am waiting for the releasr of UG Europe.

I had severe oom issues every time I used the embraer 170, and even the a320.

It seems my system was not up to the challenge. The hawker hunter stutters.

2.66quad with 4gb ocz ram and a 9800gtx card.

I do not mind bringing the sliders down to somewhere around the middle, but considering the fact that Kai Tak and the surrounding area show no problems with frame rates, and Mega Frankfurt was running smooth, I must admit I was a bit shocked with this.

Could it be that I am not running my graphics card at its optimal?

What is a decent setting for fsx, keeping in mind that I have not decided yet on wether I should pay for the ($$$) upgrade for traffic, or get MY Traffic instead.

I do not necessarily need my settings at the extreme right, but I feel that 70% or more on almost all settings(traffic 35%) should suffice.

Any advice on the fsx settings, and the graphics card would be appreciated, as I am thinking twice now about Manhattan, and VFR Paris, and Insbruck when they comeout.

Thanks.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

Mathjis, I just purchased vfr London, and also have mega heathrow for fsx, and am waiting for the releasr of UG Europe.

I had severe oom issues every time I used the embraer 170, and even the a320.

It seems my system was not up to the challenge. The hawker hunter stutters.

2.66quad with 4gb ocz ram and a 9800gtx card.

I do not mind bringing the sliders down to somewhere around the middle, but considering the fact that Kai Tak and the surrounding area show no problems with frame rates, and Mega Frankfurt was running smooth, I must admit I was a bit shocked with this.

Could it be that I am not running my graphics card at its optimal?

What is a decent setting for fsx, keeping in mind that I have not decided yet on wether I should pay for the ($$) upgrade for traffic, or get MY Traffic instead.

I do not necessarily need my settings at the extreme right, but I feel that 70% or more on almost all settings(traffic 35%) should suffice.

Any advice on the fsx settings, and the graphics card would be appreciated, as I am thinking twice now about Manhattan, and VFR Paris, and Insbruck when they comeout.

Thanks.

I assume you use Vista. And Vista had memory leaks and they cause your problems. It's a bit complex, but check this for an explanation: http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007...ress-space.aspx

And if you google for "FSX out of memory" you will find much more hits and tips.

[Waleed 29]

Vista sadly it is Mathjis.

I hate it, but that is what came on the system.

To mee it is simply a shame, as it is a hundred steps back.

Thanks for the link.

I will get on it as soon as I get a chance tonight.

It is for the record fantastic.

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

Vista sadly it is Mathjis.

I hate it, but that is what came on the system.

To mee it is simply a shame, as it is a hundred steps back.

Thanks for the link.

I will get on it as soon as I get a chance tonight.

It is for the record fantastic.

Personally I really like Vista, it looks better, multi tasks better, is overall much smoother in use. But it has bugs and more then I expected for a new OS. It's also slower in most games, sort of expected but still bummer.