Seeking recommendations for new PC build for FSX

[Erhan Atesoglu 1050499]

Luke: the fact is the Asus motherboard can already do that, and apply it to all processors not just one. So it's really not something that's a function of the processor but a function of the BIOS. The only real difference is that it has Intels "blessings" whatever that's worth.

[Luke Kolin]

Luke: the fact is the Asus motherboard can already do that, and apply it to all processors not just one. So it's really not something that's a function of the processor but a function of the BIOS. The only real difference is that it has Intels "blessings" whatever that's worth.

 

So what LGA775 boards support this feature?

 

Luke

[Erhan Atesoglu 1050499]

Any Asus motherboard with A.I. Boost. including and not limited to Nvidia chipsets which provide it as standard for their LGA775 models, just go into the BIOS and turn it on for instant 15%. In fact the Rampage board for the i7 which is a Socket 1366, not LGA775 has similar functionality in the BIOS.

 

But overclocking capabilities are quite common these days, even when Intel says their chips don't support it. If we were to listen to Intel only the Extreme chips would support overclocking which is simply not the case.

[Luke Kolin]

Any Asus motherboard with A.I. Boost. including and not limited to Nvidia chipsets which provide it as standard for their LGA775 models, just go into the BIOS and turn it on for instant 15%. In fact the Rampage board for the i7 which is a Socket 1366, not LGA775 has similar functionality in the BIOS.

 

If I understand AI Boost correctly, it operates by increasing the external clock frequency?

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[Aggrey Ellis 964561]

Drop the Zalman CNPS 9900LED Cooler. It performs terribly compared to other 1366 coolers.If you want the best Get a Prolimatech Megashadow. Get an HD 5870, I would have gotten it but my PC shipped days before it came out.

 

Drop the expensive Asus board and get a Gigabyte UD-5 or an equivalent eVGA board

 

Also Arent you going to want DDR3 RAM in a multiple of 3?

 

I'm running for a month now.

i7 920 @ 3.00 Ghz D0 Stepping (Bad Cooler) Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2

XFX HD 4890 XXX Edition

6 GB Corsair XMS3 1600 Cas 9

Gigabyte EX58-UD5 Motherboard

640 WD Caviar Blue

1 TB WD Caviar Green

Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit

all powered by a Corsair HX650W

Monitor at 1920x 1080

 

It runs FSX with everything maxed except car traffic. DX10 Mode

My last flight was into FSDT KJFK on VATSIM with Mytraffic Models,Aerosoft Manhattan and Imaginesim LaGuardia, UTX,REX, GEX and the CaptainSim 757 (The most FPS intensive bird in my hangar). That's the hardest test I've put this machine through and it p[Mod - Happy Thoughts]ed. I handflew smoothly from 10000 right down in VC mode. You say you don't want FPS below 20 but in FSX to be honest 15 is really smooth enough. It's not like FS9 stuttering.

 

One final note. Whoever keeps repeating the myth that ATI is bad for FS was wrong. ATI drivers are usually stable. In 1 month of owning this system I haven't had a bad experience. I slice through clouds like butter with no hit. It handles just about anything you can throw at it.I can post screenshots for you if you'd like.

 

The Lynnfields are good if you're willing to sacrifice a few options. If you have alot of money you may want to go to the 6 core Gulftown processor when it comes out. This is only supported by the X58 motherboards as they have socket 1366. Triple channel RAM isnt an option on the P55 boards. But Lynnfields offer better performance at stock speed.

 

Read this for an interesting take.

http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=647

[Nicholas Taylor 1104922]

DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON A GTX 295. It is basically two cards you are buying, and FS can't take advantage of those two cards. If you want Nvidia, get the 2GB GTX 285 or the ATI HD4870.

[Ross Carlson]

Thanks again for all the input, folks. Nicholas, I've been thinking about ditching the 295 and getting a 285 instead ... I think that's probably good advice since the real difference in FPS in FSX probably isn't going to be enough to justify the additional cost, if there even is a noticeable difference.

 

So here's my current list:

 

Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz LGA 1366

EVGA 141-BL-E757-TR LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX X58 mobo

CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600

EVGA 02G-P3-1185-AR GeForce GTX 285 2GB

Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 300GB 10000 RPM SATA

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit 1-Pack for System Builders

[Wycliffe Barrett]

Ross

 

That will be a sweet system, I know you will enjoy it.

 

Wycliffe

[Aggrey Ellis 964561]

Skip the fast hard drive and get an SSD to install FSX on. I urge you to get the HD 5870

[Ross Carlson]

Skip the fast hard drive and get an SSD to install FSX on. I urge you to get the HD 5870

 

I'm thinking seriously about the SSD ... been reading a lot of reviews. I might do both the fast drive and the SSD. I need a new drive for this system anyway since I'm going to turn my existing system into a development server for my home office.

 

I think I might get a 64 gig SSD for FSX, and put the OS and everything else on the raptor. But then it would be nice to have a larger SSD for the OS and FSX.

[Luke Kolin]

Do you know of anyone with an SSD? It might be interesting to install FSX on it and see what difference it makes.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[Ross Carlson]

Do you know of anyone with an SSD? It might be interesting to install FSX on it and see what difference it makes.

 

Unfortunately not. I've read a number of reviews and everyone says the load time is cut in half (sometimes more) and some say it eliminates some minor stuttering issues they had previously with a mech drive. A couple said that scenery loads (such as when nearing a complex airport) are instantaneous. Another said that livery texture loads when switching to external views are instant.

 

I guess the question is, which of these benefits would also be realized with a 10k drive? I'm probably just going to jump straight to the SSD and not be left wondering how much faster the SSD might make things "feel" as compared with a 10K drive. Call me obsessive ... I won't argue.

[Gary Morris 1090995]

In comparative tests, a half decent SSD will out-perform a 10k drive in every area. I cannot remember where I saw the test results but they were staggering

[Aggrey Ellis 964561]

Just search for FSX SSD.

[Ross Carlson]

Just search for FSX SSD.

 

I did ... as I said above, I read quite a few reviews on running FSX from an SSD.

[Aggrey Ellis 964561]

Just search for FSX SSD.

 

I did ... as I said above, I read quite a few reviews on running FSX from an SSD.

 

 

Sorry. Didn't read, but I'm sure you won't regret.

[Ross Carlson]

Just search for FSX SSD.

 

I did ... as I said above, I read quite a few reviews on running FSX from an SSD.

 

 

Sorry. Didn't read, but I'm sure you won't regret.

 

Yeah, I think I'm just gonna go for it.

 

Thanks for all the input everyone, I appreciate it. I'll try to remember to post some results after I get the system put together.

[Luke Kolin]

Yeah, I think I'm just gonna go for it.

 

That's the spirit!

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[Ross Carlson]

The parts have arrived ... it's going to be a long night.

[Opher Ben Peretz 882232]

Hello Ross,

just saw your post, purchased this:

Intel i7 920 Quad| Asus P6T DLX| 6GB 1333 DDR3| Windows7 Extreme| Asus GeForce X260 896MB DDR3| Acer 22" HD Display| Thermaltake M9D- 3 x 12cm and 1 x 20cm fans| Thermaltake 700W PSU, 2 quality 250 and 500GB HDs, quality DVD/RW. etc...

 

The cost was 1000 euro (incl. display) 6 months ago, in the US it should be now less than that in $$.

With this system I never had to look at frame rates, tweak or OC anything, sliders all at full right, can run any other needed program I need in parallel.

Edited November 25, 2009 at 06:07 PM by Guest

[Ross Carlson]

Hello Ross,

just saw your post. purchased this:

Intel i7 920 Quad| Asus P6T DLX| 6GB 1333 DDR3| Windows7 Extreme| Asus GeForce X260 896MB DDR3| Acer 22" HD Display| Thermaltake M9D- 3 x 12cm and 1 x 20cm fans| Thermaltake 700W PSU, 2 quality 250 and 500GB HDs, quality DVD/RW. etc...

 

The cost was 1000 euro (incl. display) 6 months ago, in the US it should be now less than that in $$.

 

Thanks Opher. How does it perform in FSX? If you could mention what level you have most sliders at, and what add-ons you run, that would be appreciated.

 

I just finished building my new PC last night, and haven't loaded FSX yet ... I'll be posting here after I do some performance tests and tweaking.

[Opher Ben Peretz 882232]

Added relevant info in my previous post. Running alongside FSX SP2- Acrobat 9, Navigraph, AS (latest), SB or FSInn, and all usual processes, services and programs usually loaded at startup [in the zillions ].

[Ross Carlson]

Awesome ... can't wait to see how my new rig performs ... it's very similar to yours with a little more video ram, so it should be quite good.

[Ross Carlson]

Okay, so I built the PC last night, and everything went smoothly during [Mod - Happy Thoughts]embly. I installed FSX this afternoon, and fired it up with default settings using the default C172. The framerates were quite good, but the sim was very stuttery. The FPS would jump from 80 to 20 and back again.

 

First I tried setting all the sliders to their minimum level, and even then the stutters were still there. It felt like the sim was constantly reloading textures as I panned my view around. If I stopped panning, the stuttering would settle down. Then if I started panning around again, the stutters would return.

 

It seemed to have something to do with ground textures and/or autogen textures, because if I panned my view up to the sky so that no ground was visible, the stuttering would vanish and the FPS would jump to 200 or so.

 

I tried various combinations of all the settings, and found that I could max out all the settings except for water effects and autogen without much change in performance or stuttering. As soon as I increased the water effects or especially the autogen, the stuttering would get REALLY bad, and the FPS would drop to less than 5. It didn't really matter if the autogen was on light, normal, or dense ... no amount of autogen worked smoothly.

 

So I scoured as many FSX tweaking sites as I could find, messed around with buffer pool settings, texture bandwidth multipliers, and all that. Increasing the buffer pool size made a very slight difference in the stuttering, but I still couldn't use autogen without making the performance unbearable.

 

I tried reinstalling the video drivers, tried lots of tweaks using nhancer, you name it. Nothing worked.

 

Nothing worked until I decided to poke around in the bios and maybe try some overclocking. My first attempt at overclocking was apparently too aggressive, since the machine wouldn't even boot. However, that lead me to reset the BIOS and try something else. The "something else" that I tried was setting the memory configuration in the BIOS to XMP Profile 1. I figured I'd try that, touch nothing else in the BIOS, and see if it made any difference. I had read somewhere that XMP Profile 1 is needed with the Corsair Dominator RAM that I bought in order to use the lower timings and get the most performance from the RAM. I figured it was worth a shot to see if it might help the stuttering. (Although I was skeptical because I couldn't see how a slight change in RAM timings could turn my very poorly-performing FSX into a usable sim.)

 

So I saved the BIOS, booted up the sim, and was welcomed by FPS anywhere from 40 to 100 (depending on scenery object density) and zero stuttering! I then maxed out all the sliders one-by-one to see what I could get away with, and I was able to max out every single slider, including autogen, and still have very good FPS (around 55 to 60) with no stuttering. Maxing out the water effects slider is really the only one that had a noticeable effect on the frame rate. If I keep that turned off, I get 60+ FPS. If I max it out, I get 30 to 40. If I set it in the middle, I get 45 to 60.

 

After a full day of frustration, I'm now a happy camper.

 

Now it's time to install some REX/GEX/FEX. (If anyone comes out with a Sound Environment Extreme add-on, that'll make for an acronym that really sells. )

 

Thanks everyone for all the suggestions ... I appreciate it.

[Aggrey Ellis 964561]

Now it's time to install some REX/GEX/FEX. (If anyone comes out with a Sound Environment Extreme add-on, that'll make for an acronym that really sells. )

 

Thanks everyone for all the suggestions ... I appreciate it.

 

 

Ya I guess I wasn't the only one who thought of that today. I've got REX GEX ASX UTX and I was wondering.

 

 

Have you maxed car traffic. I run max sliders everywhere except cars airline and GA traffic since I fly online. Tell me how your FPS are after you install your addons.

 

The trick to no stutters is when your in a performance intensive area (NYC,London) set your FPS lock to unlimited for best FPS. When you're in a area with high FPS (Above transition alt or anywhere that your FPS are high lock it to the refresh rate of your monitor. It's quite simple.I'll try to find the FSX tuning guide I used for you. It's got good tricks for i7s and newer GFX cards. Curious, you running DX10?