Need help with new rig

[de Lattre WGA]

Hello,My good old P4P800 did not appreciated the last friday's thunderstorm over my aera, and she just died. As of an important job to finish, and having a good insurance, also generous, thanks to my wallet, I was abble to get my new rig:Asus P5B deluxe with 2 GIG od DDRAM PC5300 and a PIV 3.0 GHZ, with an NVIDIA 7600 GT 256 MO. Which I think is a fairly good trade off, while waiting another major upgrade sometime next year.My problem is that I am totaly new toi NVIDIA card, always had ATI, and I would need help for tweaks for FS9, as well as what driver to use, what NVIDIA prog, or force ware to use and so on.If one of you could direct me, that would be very appreciated.Thanks very much in advance.Cyrille de LattreAsus P4P800/PIV 3 Ghz/2 Giga DDRAMATI X800 GT 256 MegWin XP SP2 / FS9.1 PSS Beta tester

[Bob Scott]

Hi Cyrille; I'm sure hearing of a lot of P4P800 boards dying. Best place to go for nVidia drivers is www.guru3d.com Get a utility called Driver Cleaner, and another called "Nasty File Remover" Anytime you change drivers for the nVidia follow these steps:1. Use the Uninstall in the Windows control panel to uninstall the current nVidia drivers.2. Reboot, and do not allow Windows to install a new driver for the video card when it detects it.3. Run Driver Cleaner and NFR to get rid of all the lingering bits and pieces of the old driver installation.4. Reboot again, and do not allow WinXP to install or search for a new driver.5. Run the new driver installation.6. Even if it doesn't prompt you, reboot one more time after the driver install.If you're running multiple monitors, you'll want to use nView to manage that...very powerful utility. Best tweak for FS9 that you can do with 2GB of RAM and an nVidia card (but not with an ATI), is set the Very Large Cache option for your RAM (do a search on the forums for this topic). If you're going to try this out, do it early in the build so it there are writeback errors it doesn't take too long to rebuild Rome. With an ATI card it can corrupt your system possibly to the point of requiring a Windows reinstall. It generally isn't a problem with the nVidia drivers...it has worked great with my nVidia-configured systems (8800GTX, 6800Ultra, FX5600), and does make a difference in performance. But again, don't mess with this tweak if the thought of having to reinstall Windows and FS9 is too painful. But you'll know fairly quickly after making the change if it works or not.CheersBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-V L-300Santiago de Chile

[de Lattre WGA]

Hello,Thanks very much for all those tips, I have done almost all of them, but i am having less perf than with the ATIX800GT... Strange cause I am switching from AGP to PCI express, and over all the complete rig is better...Any advices, apart of defrag and so on, it is done automaticaly with Disk Keeper 2007Cyrille de LattreAsus P4P800/PIV 3 Ghz/2 Giga DDRAMATI X800 GT 256 MegWin XP SP2 / FS9.1 PSS Beta tester

[Bob Scott]

Cyrille; Time to change your sig line. ;-) Probably any differences you're seeing are due to things other than the video card. I'm assuming you have rebuilt your system and reinstalled WinXP and FS9...in which case there are probably years worth of long forgotten tweaks remaining to be done. Ryan Maziarz has posted a nice collection of tweakage on the PMDG forum, and the VOZ forums have some valuable tidbits as well. Disabling Last File Access stamping helps a lot. One other specific one worth mention is to use FileMon to make sure that FS9 isn't going looking for texture files it can't find. That can really slow things down. I just built a new Core 2 Duo system, and am still in the installation and tweaking stage, but it's going much faster with 3+ years of collective FS9 experience available to me. But I'm still running into a few dragons long since slain on my old 3.06 GHz P4 system. Had a couple ATC.dll CTDs before I remembered to add the RemoveATC=Yes line in FSUIPC, for example.CheersBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-V L-300Santiago de Chile