Upgrade - RAM & / Graphics

[Guest]

Quick question for the FS2002 hardware brigade:Thanks to the beloved taxman overcharging me last year I now have a couple of quid to spend on some system upgrades at the moment I have:P4 1.3Ghz, 256Mb RAM, GForce 2MXMy initial thought is to upgrade the RAM to 512Mb and swap out the 2MX for a 4Ti4200, I guess the alternative being to forget the RAM and go for a 4Ti4400/4600. Would be interested in suggestions - I am particularly interested in upping the "frame rate", losing the occaisional "jerkiness" and (hopefully) finally killing the blurry textures (don't want much do I??)....Thanks for any suggestions,

[Guest gasebah]

Hm...that is a very hard question. I will try to answer it to the best of my limited knowledge. Ram seems to be very important in FS2002 although I always had the feeling that it is more the speed of Ram that is important rather than the amount of it. It really depends on how you are using FS2002. If you have running lots of stuff in the background like FSFlightmax, RealityXP and whoknowswhat I would probably go for the Ram and the cheaper card. If you are using FS2002 without many stuff running in the background it will hardly make use of the 256MB thus I would go for the faster graphics card.Alex

[Guest]

From memory when I am running FS my system is "using" about 300Mb of RAM which means that there is at least some swapping between RAM & hard disk - although I only tend to leave AV / Firewall running when I am using FS.

[Guest]

Speaking as a Win98SE user, and not knowing your OS, I think FS2002 alone will use all of your residual RAM and some, thereby making use of the Windows swap file inevitable. If, for example, textures are swapped to and from the swap file you would likely see the hesitations - so I'd go for RAM for fluidity.I've read here that 2K2 is "cpu intensive" - but an upgrade from a GF2 MX must surely improve frame rates.On balance, and if a choice must be made, it would be more RAM if your game displays hesitations, but a card upgrade if frame rates are the problem.Which ever, good luck with your choice.PH

[Guest]

Sorry - you are right missed that off - Win2k is the OS.The problem is a little bit of both which is why I was looking at the Ti4200 & the RAM rather than the more powerful graphics card.

[Guest]

I think you've figured it pretty well. IMO, the best choice, other than a CPU upgrade, is to add the RAM and go with the Ti4200. With either Win2000 or WinXP the additional RAM is really a must and you will see very little difference, or, more probably, no difference at all, between the 4200 and the 4600 when running FS2002. But you will see a huge difference in the texture quality between the 4200 and the GF2MX. All that said, it's really hard to guestimate the impact of those changes on your framerate. My feeling is that it's not going to be much of a change because of the CPU limitations. But everything will run much more smoothly and look much,much better.TripNorthwood 2.2a at 2.72Ghz Abit TH7II-R512MB Samsung 40ns PC800Gainward 64MB GF4 Ti4200 300/57040.41's DX8.1 WinXP ProInwin case / Enermax 431W PSU3DMark2001SE = 13089http://service.madonion.com/compare?2k1=4330740

[Guest]

Just in case you're considering a chip upgrade (seems most opinion is that this has the biggest effect on frame rate in FS2K2) I got a P4 2.53 Mhz (533 bus) chip here in London for