I currently have the following system:Asus P4P800 DeluxeP4 2.80 Northwood, OC to 3.11GB Kingston DDR400 ValueRameVGA 6800GS 256MB 256-Bit DDR3 AGP2 WD 80GB SATA HDs - RAID 0I want to upgrade but since my video card is fairly new, I want to stay with an AGP motherboard. I'm looking at the ASUS A8V (AGP) with an AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego. Will I notice a nice improvement in frames with the new motherboard and cpu? Or will I be flushing $290.00 down the drain? Thanks,Matt Zagoren

Hi Matt, tough question! :-) I think it depends on how you use the sim. If you're a bushflyer you'll probably hardly notice a difference. OTOH and looking at your Dreamfleet bird, I could imagine you're also into dense sceneries. There you'll almost certainly notice a pretty significant difference. Specially with heaps of AI. FWIW, approximately 2 years ago, I went from a 3GHz-P4 (Northwood) to a s754 3200-AMD64. In NY, FS' performance jumped by roughly 40% (in an offline environment w/ mucho AI). The only thing which changed were the mainboard and the CPU. Apropos mainboard, with S-ATA drives you might want to also look at a AGP/nForce3 combo instead of the A8V? The Via southbridge chip apparently has certain shortcomings with S-ATA HDs when the PCI-bus is simultaneously used by PCI- and/or network-devices (valid for the 8237, don't know about later ones like the 8237-R. The 8251 solves this shortcoming AFAIK). AFAIK-2, the nForce3 250Gb or Ultra doesn't have these probs. Hope this adds to thoughts, good luck and kind regards Jaap

Jaap,Thanks for your thoughts. Could you be more specific regarding the shortcomings with SATA and PCI?Thanks,Matt

First off, Matt, my knowledge about Via chipsets is ca 2 years old now... That's why I don't know the VT8237-R. AFAIK, data throughput on a plain VT8237 is a bit meager and somewhere around 100MB/s. In comparison, a nForce3 250Gb or Ultra can push over 200MB/s (just like a VT8251 although I don't know the exact figures either). On both platforms 'southbridges' - like my knowledge, this term is also a bit outdated :-) - are responsible for connecting PCI-slots (+ onboard sound), S-ATA interfaces and onboard LAN adapters. If you add up i.e. a PCI soundcard (max 33MB/s) a LAN interface (@ X) and S-ATA HDs at say 35MB/s each, it's extremely close or perhaps even over the VT8237's capacity. I like Via hardware, but with 8237 boards I'ld play it safe and recommend using traditional P-ATA HDs (which don't connect to the southbridge). Hope this answers your question a bit, Matt. Kind regards Jaap PS, a CPU with less cache should do fine too. As the chart below shows, it's mostly upto frequencies. And how you use FS... :-) http://extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1876715,00.asp