System upgrade recommendations?

[Terry Ma 1116020]

Here's what I'm "packing" on my system :

CPU: Intel P4 3.00 GHz with HT

GFX: ATI Radeon X1300 Pro

RAM: 1014 MB

HDD: 160GB with 8MB cache and 320 GB with 16MB Cache.

PSU: Antec Earthwatts 430 Watt (poor PSU, I know...)

Sound: Onboard

 

If that is inadequate I'll provide more details if need be. I plan on running only FS9 on the computer because even I realize that it is no good. Now I'm not planning to put everything on ultra high, all I want is good framerates and be at least to see the signs for the taxiways when I play on VATSIM. So I'm looking for a "cost-efficient upgrade". I don't have much money to spend (100-), but any ideas are welcomed because I'll definitely look into it. If you can find better components for a cheap price, please please please do share!! I've heard that the bottleneck could possible be in my PSU, what do you guys think and any recommendations?

[Garry Morris 920567]

Start by turning off hyperthreading via the BIOS and see how that goes first.

[Terry Ma 1116020]

If you don't mind, can you please explain to me what that will accomplish?

 

Thanks,

Terry-

[Erhan Atesoglu 1050499]

HT is not approved for real time applications that use hardware I/O buffering, or any other situation where you need code to be completely executed as written. With windows you kind of know when it will switch over to the next thread, after the function call, with the original HT Intel messed that up quite good so it had to be disabled. Needless to say it's something I had turned off for the P4 3.06ghz... I don't bother now, vista manages all that for me on the i7, and in stead of 2 threads, they can be addressed as individual processors.

[Garry Morris 920567]

In more layman's terms, you're preventing FS from utilizing all of your processing, leaving half of it completely idle, and the other 1.5ghz struggling to run FS.

 

When I used to have a P4 with hyperthreading, I got a great boost from turning HT off, and ended up just leaving it off since I don't tend to do heavy duty multi-tasking.

[Luke Kolin]

In more layman's terms, you're preventing FS from utilizing all of your processing, leaving half of it completely idle, and the other 1.5ghz struggling to run FS.

 

This is not how HyperThreading worked in the P4. The P4 was designed for high clock speeds, using a very long pipeline. The effect was that if a stall in execution occurred (like a branch mis-prediction or waiting on cache or main memory) the execution units would be stalled for a long period of time, waiting to either decode an instruction or fetch some data. The problem is that there may be other instructions ready to execute that are waiting on the ALUs to become free.

 

HyperThreading in the P4 was essentially adding a second complete set of ALUs to execute other instructions while the first set of ALUs were stalled waiting on an external dependency. It is important to note that unlike a true dual-core CPU, which has two completely independent decode and fetch pipelines, most of the pipeline in a HyperThreaded P4 is shared, it just forks at the instruction execution level. This means that with HT on, you're not getting two 1.5Ghz CPUs. You're not getting two 3.0Ghz CPUs, either.

 

When I used to have a P4 with hyperthreading, I got a great boost from turning HT off, and ended up just leaving it off since I don't tend to do heavy duty multi-tasking.

 

HyperThreading in the P4 was highly dependent on the workload. If you had multiple threads that didn't have shared data and were both data-intensive, they might blow out the caches and reduce overall speed. If you had a highly data-intensive task and a smaller one that required CPU time and could keep its data sets in the L2 cache, HT might actually help you - while the first process was waiting on main memory, the second could go full steam ahead.

 

I found that HyperThreading, depending on the workload, could give me around a 10-25% boost, and I found it helpful when running ServInfo and FS9, because SI is notorious for hogging the CPU when downloading. It appears to be a tight idle loop, so it's the kind of thing that HT does well, since there are few data dependencies.

 

Your mileage will vary with HT on the P4. I don't think there's any hard and fast rule to keep it on or off.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[Terry Ma 1116020]

I turned off HT and then I discovered that it worsened the performance overall on the computer and also on the game. I get good framerates offline but sometimes on VATSIM, they just drop to single digits.

[Garry Morris 920567]

It was worth a try.

 

Thanks again for the clarification Luke. I seem to recall hearing something similar a while back, I should have remembered.

 

I run Servinfo and most other non-FS programs on a separate machine, so I was mainly running FS and the server client only on my sim machine.