Hello,I'm a big fan of the PMDG products.In fact, I strated flying again in FS only because of thisawesome product.Yet, I have two question: especially for the 737NG and the upcoming747, I have recently bought a new PC:It's based on Asus P4C800-E, CPU P4 3.2Ghz (Northwood), 1Go DDR 3200 Corsair Twinx and Asus ATI Radeon 9800XT and WinXP SP2.The two question are: should I deactivated the HT (because I've already read here on this forum that some guys do so)And, which setting should the AGP aperture size be set to?I was used to set it to 256, but suddenly had the idea that it maynot be good, as I also read that 64mo is better in some case.I'm also wondering where the sound crackling I never had before comefrom: I installed the sound driver after the SP2.But I didnt install DirectX after.The sound setting in FS is set to medium.Awaiting your answer,Regards,Arnaud Solvay (France)

Aperture size most often don

Arnaud et al>Disabling HT in games gives just about always better performance in >games but again trial and error :)This is not always true! As with so many other tweaks it is heavily system dependant. I have HT enabled and didn't notice any, say any difference in performance for FS9. As for AGP aperture size this again is dependant on your system setup and your video card memory size. Try to change the aperture size and do some tests. That's really the only way to go.The sound crackeling sounds like the outdated SB Live driver issue discussed zillions of time on this forum. Do a search for this and you shall find! :-)Hope it helps,

Thanks P

As far as HT goes, it depends on your system. HT requires applications to use this feature and applications such as FS up until FS2004 are not yet able to use HT and sometimes HT does more bad than good and can cause a system to underperform.In your case you have a pretty good system and the performance hit cause by enabling HT is so small it can hardly be noticed.I have a P4 2.8 9600 Pro and a megre 256mb RAM and I do get a small performance hot when HT is enabled.As for the AGP Aperture this signifies the megabytes of RAM used by your AGP card in excess of the memory onboard your AGP card. For example if you set AGP aperture setting to 128mb, this gives your AGP Video card the option of using it's onboard RAM plus 128mb of RAM.This is one option that can cause a lot more problems than any good. This willprobably not cause any performance hit at all but can cause noticable texture corruption or the loss of AA and AF when used with less RAM like me.Although highly debatable the most usual suggested is using a quarter of the RAM as you AGP Aperture setting, example 1gb would mean 256mb Aperture setting, but as far as FS is concerned I have my AGP aperture setting at 4, the minimum it can be set to because of losing AA and AF at times which does not occur with this low setting.

Hey Arnaud I have the same motherboard and you should definately have HT on. I would recommend a 32Mb AGP Aperture size, overall smoothness seems to be better. I used to use 256 Mb for a long time but now im staying with 32 Mb.P4C800-E Deluxe, Corsair PC3700 Ram, Radeon 9800ProArmen L Cholakianwww.veryquiet.com

The old rule to set the aperture size to half your mem size is nothing but a myth and has never been true ;)www.rojakpot.com is a good place for information about various hardware settings :)It tends to be many such myths going around. The human eye can

Wow!Thanks again guys, this is even more than I had expected as answers.I was one who believed strongly about the FPS lock: I really thoughtthat asking too much FPS from the system would slow it rahter thananyting else.Probably many other 'myths'.But for the AGP aperture size, I feel the truth is given up there.As for the HT, I will perhaps follow Armen recommandation then.

Salut Arnaud, comment va?I've just set my AGP aperture size to 32Mb down from 128Mb and I am getting a 2 to 3 FPS increase on my AMD FX-51 box most notably in very heavy traffic/scenery (I set max frame rate to 24). While changing this probably breaks other games, a small aperture seems to help FS some.Not sure about HT since my AMD chip doesn't have that.Hope this helps,

Hey Etienne,Well, this AGP setting seem to be really interesting.I have till now downgraded it to 64mo.I will try 32 tomorrow.What anoys me now is that with HT enabled, I seem to get stutters,from time to time, but more unpleasant are those crackling soundI havent succeed in getting rid of tonight.And maybe those stutters are caused by the sound issue rather than HT.I've been upgrading my SB drivers, tried several things in thesound acceleration settings, still have those.And now I understand all those fellow upset by those crackling sounds.First time for me.I will seek the forum, coz up now I give up.Regards,Arnaud Solvay

>I've been upgrading my SB drivers, tried several things in>the>sound acceleration settings, still have those.>And now I understand all those fellow upset by those crackling>sounds.>Your crackling settings are due to an IRQ conflict between the SB card and other devices.The bad news is there's no way in XP to change the IRQ assignment to your SB card - it's picked automagically. What you CAN do is move the card to a different PCI slot, which will force the assignment of a new IRQ.the problem probably occured with your new motherboard, which forced a reassignment of IRQs, and I'll bet your SB card is sharing an IRQ with a mouse driver, or possibly a network card.So, please try moving the card to a different slot and seeing if it clears up.

Timothy,Thanks for reminding me this nightmare of the shared IRQs under XP!But in the present case, my SB live got its own IRQ, it's notsharing with any other device.The only shared IRQ is the one for the Graphic Card and some of theUSB hub.But so far, in my previous system, the AGP IRQ was also shared withUSB and there were no crackling sounds though.I was filled with hope, reading your post, but alas, I have now to keep on searching.Regards,Arnaud Solvay (France)

Hi ArnaudI have also just updated my system to one very similar to yours. I am obsessed with tweaking but never ever over clocking. So for a change i decided to invest in as much memory as i could afford and i managed to get 1Ghz for my new machine. I have left every magic tweak setting like aperture and hyperthreading alone and keep with default settings. To my surprize i am getting frame rates over 30 and locked it there. So it seems to my simple mind.....invest in memory and leave all the clever tweaking to the gurus. I play around with the fs sliders for my own convenience thoughJohn Calleja

Yes, well getting the hardware abstraction layer in XP to behave can be as difficult as getting HAL to open the door in 2001: A Space Odyssey (probably why they have the same name) - I'm sorry Arnaud, I can't do that... Changing the IRQ by changing slots should be possible and is the easiest. IRQs are normally assigned from first to last, so place the Sb card in the LAST slot so its gets first pick. That won't necessarily help but it's worth a shot. It also helps to turn off devices you do not use (extra USB controllers, etc...).A good reason for crackling can also be an issue with the chipset driver (the usual case is that you do not have the right chipset driver for the OS). Some newer BIOSes know the problem and can handle the HAL and force IRQs to what it wants, not what the HAL wants.Relevant link on windows XP IRQ assignments:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;315278Now returning to a PMDG forum thread...

About HT:you can benefit from this technology if you use some other programs together with FS.You can assign each program a virtual cpu.Say for example you run FS and AS:you assign FS to one of the virtual cpus, and AS to the other.This could improve overall performances.I don't know by how much anyway.This change can be made from the task manager (ctrl+alt+canc) rightclicking on the process name, and selecting "processor affinity" or something like that.There are programs available on the net, that allow you to create shortcuts for your prefferred programs, in which the cpu affinity is already set.So you don't have to select it each time you run those programs.