Helo dear flightsimmers,I would like your advice on upgrading my motherboard, as I

Hi,Given your RAM and video card, I would strongly urge you NOT to buy a new motherboard but to invest in those instead. Your PC2700 RAM is quite old and unlikely to be able to overclock much. Your video card is also quite dated. These two together are presenting significant bottlenecks in your system. What budget do you have?People may differ on this but IMHO, I do not suggest investing in new hardware JUST to overclock. If you buy a new machine, you may want to try overclocking it a bit to extract more performance but changing one component simply for the *hope* of overclocking is, to me, not worth it.Hope this helps.Edwin

Thanks alot for your opinion, my budget is around the 100 dollars, I can raise it if necessary, what are your suggestions? I'm getting plus or minus 20 fps in fs 9 taking off Bahrain airport with the PSS 330 and aircraft settings are set to ultra high and scenery to high and weather to minimal.

Hmm... that budget is rather difficult to work with. With, say US$250, your options would be much better. For example, you could get a new video card for ~US$165 (either the NVIDIA 6600GT or the ATI 9800 Pro) and then 1GB RAM (two sticks of 512MB) for say, US$85.When you say you "can raise it if necessary", to how much can you raise it?Edwin

Thank you for your reply, regarding the ram I was planning to buy an additional ram (1 512 mb stick) as I already have 2 256 mb sticks I'm not using because I must install a 512 stick to match the available stick (due to dual channel technology).My budget can be raised to get a new graphic card (NVIDIA 6600gt or the ATI 9800pro) as you recommended, my point behind changing the motherboard was having a high performance motherboard that can improve the system's performance in general and in flight simulator.

Hi Desert Eagle, Edwin is giving you some good advice regarding the RAM. Personally, I would dump/sell the 2 256MB PC2700 sticks and replace them with 2x512MB PC3200. You'ld benefit 2-ways; first, you'ld be using the full FSB speed of your CPU/board and 2nd, more RAM will make the simming experience smoother. I wouldn't mix different RAM denominations and I stronly advise to always buy pairs, even if you don't need them that very moment. As for the display adapter, IMHO it depends most on the resolution you require. Case you're not exceeding 1024x and you don't have a 'SE' (second edition), I fear a display adapter upgrade won't make much of of a difference. Generally, a 9800pro should outperform the 6600GT (specially with lots of clouds). OTOH, the difference between a 9800pro and 9600pro is exactly zero, nada, zip, zilch @ 1024x. Just to give you an example... One can quickly go overkill with display adapters. My pretty simple guideline here; adapt the display adapter to the attached display (aka resolution) and you should be fine. Hope this adds to thoughts, good luck and kind regards Jaap PS, Edwin, I wish you heaps of fun with your new FlyTendo and congratulations! It looks awesome. Case you haven't done so yet, perhaps make sure you install the Cool 'n Quiet driver and set the OS' power settings to 'Minimal Power Management' (not my find!). I realize it takes a while to setup everything, but I would be pleased to hear about your impressions and experiences. Cheers, mate

Thank you for your point of view

Hi Jaap,Just wanted to let you know that I did indeed read your post and that I am not ignoring you! :) It's just that I haven't had much chance to "fly" yet so I figured I'd wait a bit to reply (been re-playing Far Cry in my spare time, just to enjoy the graphics again! I'm running 1600x1200 with 4x AF and 4x AA, everything maxed and it's still smooth as butter!)In terms of FS9, I've only had about an hour to fly with it and I didn't even land that flight (had to do something urgent mid-flight). I'm surprised that with everything (and I mean everything, including hardware lights and MIPS) maxed, frame rates are still quite slow (mid teens)! However, at the default hardware lights and MIPS level, I'm getting FPS consistently in the low 30's (locked at 40FPS) - VERY smooth. I fly the PSS A330/A340 most of the time and I've found that increasing the refresh rates in the MCDU also makes a pretty big difference but makes for a much more realistic experience. I'm going to experiment some more to find the best balance between FPS and image quality. BTW, I'm using the ActiveSky V 512bit (MIP enabled) cloud set, which I know has a pretty big negative impact on frame rates.Thanks for your pointers about Cool N Quiet. I saw the same thing in my A8N-SLI manual so I have already done that, I don't notice any difference either way though.Edwin

Hi Edwin, thanks for the update and infos. You're really pushing it hard there! If memory isn't failing you're using 1600x. If so, I tend to believe an article Greg 'Soarpics' posted a while ago, which more or less stated; when aiming at such high resolutions with relatively high AA/AF settings, 512MB of GPU RAM would be way to go. I could confirm this analogy for 1280x; I exchanged the 128MB-9800pro for a 256MB-X800pro and noticed smoother performance. I didn't necessarily gain much regarding the highest framerates, but the lowest and average framerates are higher with 256MB. On the 'CPU side of life', you have a couple of interesting options (which -I guess- you're testing to the max!). Personally, I wonder what's FS is like if you put only FS on the 2nd core (leaving AS and the all the other OS-functions on core #1)? Good luck and kind regards Jaap

Hi Jaap,You just proposed something very interesting for me to try! I'll certainly give that a shot soon (i.e. assigning FS onto one core and ASV and other programs to the other core) although I think I remember seeing somewhere, that it yields negligible impact when used on Intel CPUs with HyperThreading. Certainly, the result could be very different with dual-cores (i.e. two *physical* CPUs rather than simulated or logical ones) but I think the reasoning was that Windows actually does a decent job of allocating processes to different CPUs.What I'd love to see though is if FS could actually split the rendering of scenery and/or weather and/or panel and/or physics to multiple cores. That way, for example, a CPU-heavy panel (e.g. PSS or PMDG) and weather would be rendered by one core and the scenery by another core. WOW! I guess that'll have to wait until FS10 (or beyond)!Edwin

Hi Edwin, outsourcing FS onto a 2nd, 'fake' CPU never seemed interesting IMHO. And my AMD64-3200/s754 ate my good 'ol P4 3GHz Hyperthreader for breakfast! I can thus only imagine what the second core could be good for. Either way, one of the cores will be almost unemployed... The advantage with dual cores could be, that FS doesn't pause because of other system-threads? Having said that, I'ld consider FS as smooth as can be and a -fairly rare- quick pause nevertheless occurs from time to time. Maybe this one won't occur anymore if FS is effectively alone and on a second, real core? Are you using XP64 yet? Speculating about the future of FS a little bit, I believe 64-bit support will come before the support of multiple CPUs/cores. Why? Because it probably is much easier to implement. Considering the fact that the 64-bit OS is only some 150MB larger than the 32-bit OS-version and includes 32-bit functionality, I guess a 64-bit FS will 'only' and mainly have a couple of other *.dll files. Specially since the rest of FS is mostly bitmaps, etc. Moreover, I could even imagine FS10 including 32-bit and 64-bit functionality on the same media and that we'll not have to buy seperate versions. Case MS adds multiple core/CPU support too, GREAT! Whilst in 'full specultaion mode', my guess is, MS will release a xBox version of FS and that the next version will be called FS'X'. As we know, the upcoming xBox-2 includes multiple cores, so perhaps MS 'abuses' this situation to rewrite the FS code to fit the PC world too? Maybe such a code re-write is the reason for postponing the FS10 (aka FS'X') release? Enough!! :-) Wishing you heaps of fun, kind regards Jaap