Pleading for help from anyone here...The new system is now up and running and FS9 performance is miles better (was 15-20FPS, usually around 30-40FPS)But every three-or-four seconds there is a split-second pause (the dreaded stutters - Even on the 'select a flight' page, the stock cessna - pauses it's pirouet every few seconds).and it's driving me utterly spare!- I have FS in it's own partition, freshly formatted and rebooted- I have the latest Catalyst ATI drivers (5.4) and DirectX- I deleted the FS9.cfg to ensure it created a default one.How come the system is able to push-out around 70 frames a second (panning round the cessna on the threshold at KSEA) and then every couple of seconds - freezes of a fraction of a second?If it were performance-related (i.e. XP services) I'd have figured the basic frame rate would be affected?Cheers,Chris.K8N Neo2 Platinum - Athlon64 3200Dual (2*)512Mb Corsair 3200XLWD Raptor 74GBSapphire Atlantis 9800Pro (Catalyst 5.4)DirectX 9.0c

Have you installed the latest chipset drivers? Is there Norton Anti-virus on your system? Possibly tried some older drivers, your card is not the newest and it is possible the new drivers may not work as well.

Are you running any other programs in the background?

Hi Chris, apart from what has been mentioned, I'ld recommend sticking everything into one large partition. Using multiple partitions on the same drive causes more HD-head travel and it signifies you're not using the fastest sectors either. Another thing worth looking at is to disable HD-indexing. Hope this adds to thoughts, good luck and kind regards Jaap

Thanks for the suggestions guys.I do have Norton running in the background - as I (would) usually use the 'download weather function', disabling the AV and Firewall would be a risky step security-wise.I'll try-out a few of the earlier ATI drivers.Chipset-wise, I've so far kept with the Mobo drivers provided by MSI, but would be interested if there were alternatives on NVidia.The only other item I forgot to mention in my first post is that I was running with the onboard (Realtek) sound chip. But I disabled this in the Bios and the pausing remained.Cheers,Chris

I would place a bet on the AV program... as a test, disable it and see what happens. I use on-board sound as well and have no problems with it.The reason I suspect the AV program, is that you report regular "interruptions" = pauses. That is indicative of some other process briefly taking priority to do whatever it needs to do.Video drivers or chipset drivers do not have a habit of doing things like that.Now, if you were to say that the stuttering occurs when you bank the plane, I would quickly point to texture loading, which is pretty much unavoidable although a well tuned system will do better that a poorly tuned one.

Bert you were right.After a spot of research into other AV programs. I uninstalled Norton and replaced it with a less 'demanding' equivalent.And instantly - no freezes or pauses.Thanks for the help and advice.Cheers,Chris

Well it seems like you have solved your problem. I however have the same problem with stuttering on a superfast system. I dont know what is making this happen. Mcafee and everything else is shut down.