>If only it were so, but there's nothing magic about that>hardware. Enabling multicore functionality is entirely in>software's court. >>I'm working through Crysis right now. High settings are>completely playable . . . in typical Fry Cry glory. It's magic>what these guys can do. My 4 cores are hoppin' with equal>gusto all the way through. Managed to get out of that darn>mountain last night . . . at 0300! The 8800GT is working fine.>The screen always comes right up at 1920x1080 in DX10 . . .>and it just works. What a nice change from battling FSX. I'm>still convinced this is the gaming software group that is>leading the way. >>The 9800GTX will be a double. Nvidia's release will be driven>by an ATI double and ATI's got nothin'. If you are seriously>wanting to wait, don't expect the 9800GTX until next>Christmas. >>The GT's price point has always been $200. It's only the>shortage that has the price at $300. I had to bribe-a-geek to>get mine last month, but I made my first sighting of an 8800GT>'in the wild' on a Best Buy shelf just today. Right out in the>open. There were 3 of them. It's a sign. >>A year is too long to wait. bite the bullet. The MSI version>can be had for $225 here and there. >>I was always going to run 3-4 monitors on my system and needed>2 Vcards (that's really why I went with the P5K). The 8800GT>had not come out yet so I bought my second(ary) Vcard first. I>ran my 8400GS as a primary card for a month. FS ran, but at>very low visual settings. It was such a pleasure to get that>GT on board. It was the first time I had ever experienced the>impression of weight with the PMDG 744. It was all I could do>to handle the 'feel' or a real airplane. The GT will provide>maximum eye-candy. Just get a good terrain addon and leave>AI/Autogen low-to-lower. It'll run silky smooth. >>You are so close. Don't give it all up for an extra hundred>bucks. Without a compatible Vcard, the Q is, ahhh, . . . >significantly underutilized.Yer the man Sam. I went to bed last night moving in that direction, so I will go for it, but pricing isn't quite that low now. I'll stop by BB n see what's up.I DO want to try for one with the quieter HSF, which I am aware was revised. I see this guy for $269:112 Stream Processors Edition MSI GeForce 8800GTS NX8800GTS 640M OC Video Card - Retail GeForce 8800GTS 640MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 But I will look for a GT OTW home tonight n see.

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_fsx_techtips.html

It is done. I found a card that met my needs. I'm not sure what the overclocking potential is as it is one of the few that are sent out at reference spec of 600mHz, but I'm happy with its lifetime warranty and newer cooling solution design. I'm guessing it will definitely have some o'clock potential as it is a GT chip, and again, the cooling solution is supposed to be quieter and effective. For $259:EVGA GeForce 8800 GT Video Card - 512MB DDR3, PCI Express 2.0, SLI Ready, (Dual Link) Dual DVI, HDTV, Video CardI probably would have grabbed the 700mHz clocked ZOTAC, however they were out of stock at the lower prices. It's also a newer cooling solution, however has a 1y warranty only. My BFG6800GT had a lifetime warranty, and I got to use it since the card died after about 3y or so. They sent me a new (fresh manufacture date) 7800GS, which is comparable I guess. I hope you are right about IQ. Going from my 6800 to this 1950 Pro the latter has superior IQ by a signficant margin. Same same for the 7800--iffy IQ compared to this guy.Anyway, we should be doing the mix n match procedure on my current machine, whose guts are headed into a new case for my beloved wife, and I will keep my SCSI's and start a fresh install of XP SP2 for now. I will wait a while then dabble in Vista 64.Thanks again for the ideas and . . . nudges . . and I'll be back with some good news of trouble free set up!Noel

The 8800GTs run hot. They will run at their default speed of 600mhz at up to 100C. I typically see mine at 90+. This is not damaging anything. It's how they are designed to operate. 700mhz core should be doable without much trouble. The trick is to bump the fan speed up manually. Get Riva tuner and 3DMark06. Riva will let you control clock and fan speed. 3DMark06 will be the bencher/stress tester. I have mine at 720mhz/core. Let the shaders stay locked to the core RPM. Memory O/Cs won't do much. The lower you can keep the temp, the higher the potential clock. I manually increased the Vcard's fan speed until its noise level was just below ambient (about 50%). At that fan speed, the GT successfully ran 3DMark at 720mhz with a VCore temp of 85C. It appears the biggest performance difference between the G92 GT and the GTS is the cooler. For instance, I'm seeing forum posts where the GTS is getting 780mhz, but its bigger cooler is maintaining 75C. If I could get the GT's temp to stay at 75, I'll betcha it'd go there too. The GTS's extra 12 shaders are nice bonus, but Vcore clock speeds get the bigger bang.There's a mod out there that suggests a $3, 80mm fan can be used as additional cooling. These mfgs really enjoy selling us penny mods for big dollars. It was just a bit of extra cooling that let that ZOTAC run at run at 700mhz. Heck, we can do that!

For full on gaming, I do use my low-tech, not bad cost cooling solution: how about a nice 9K BTU thru-the-wall air conditioner from Sharp. Not quite as quiet as water cooling, but it's pretty effective and has a nice way of cooling everything off. It sits about 6" away from my case, and its output blows directly into the Lian Li case with its business side panel off for handy cooling over all DIMMs, CPU, GPU, heck even the case itself chills bigtime! No probs with condensation as I'm in a low humidity area plus the Sharp unit has excellent control over temp, and can be run as fan only. It's a low-pitched, pretty much soft white noise sound, so it works. It's beyond me why more folks don't do this as it's quite cheap, and really doesn't bloat my utility bill in any meaningful way. Plus, it works on all systems :(). It took me very little time to install it, and it uses AC. When I do the new build, I am going to create some low budget ducting, and route a little more flow directly into the intake of the QX, which I did once as a trial, and that added about another 60% more cooling to the CPU. With the shotgun approach I have now I get idle temps of 34C (50C without the AC on), and 54C (70+ sans AC) under load. I recall when I routed the air directly to the CPU, at least 50-60% of it, I was seeing idles in the 19C range and I forget what peak temps were. I did not improve the overclockability of my Northwood, so I took the ducting off and opted for more general total cooling. There is a handy compromise so when I pull the box away I will set up the proper ducting for better flow on the CPU, but some on the rest as well.To round out the package, I located a nice LSI 64-bit U320 SCSI controller, for single channel operation as I don't need RAID. I was on the fence on RAID when I found a brand new controller on Amazon, selling thru a private party, new and sealed in the box for . . . $70! That, is a deal. Newegg has them lowest on the web at $140 and they go up from there. I am using a 32-bit U160 LSI that is 5y old, and if I'm not mistaken (could be!) the U320 PCI-x controller will double transfer rates basically as all my drives are U320 and have been restrained as a result. Oh well, mainly needed the spiffy access times so it was not an issue, but what the hey might as well use these expensive honeys!

Ahhh, storage. The new SATA II buss will facilitate transfers of up to 3Gb/s (aka 375MB/s). The 10K RPM raptor was the fastest drive (by xfer rate) at 70MB/s for quite a while. The 15K SCSIs are the fastest today and max out at 125MB/s. SCSI's U320 designation describes that buss' capacity. This buss can facility transfers of up to 320MB/s. As usual, buss capacities for both SATA II and U320 SCSI are considerably beyond what Any single, drive can use. For a single drive, even U160 (at 160MB/s) or the old SATA I (at 150MB/s) or the even older EIDE 133 (at 133MB/s) was not a bottle neck in Any way . . or even now, for the fastest drives available today. All of these busses had WaY more capacity than any single drive could use. The drives were . . . and still are the bottle neck, not the busses. To pain the race car analogy . . . If a car has an absolute top speed of 70 mph, providing it a racetrack with a speed rating of 160mph will not make that car go faster. Increasing the track's speed certification to 320mph won't help either! The car is the bottleneck, not the track.However single, consumer, 7200 RPM drives (the cars) have come a long way, baby. Seagate's new -11 SATA drive can sustain transfers at 100MB/s at access rates of 6ms. They provide a linear scale in Raid 0. For instance, I'm running 3 of these in raid 0. This array can sustain 280MB/s at 6ms access. Keep everything tossed out to the edge with Ultimate Defrag and the initial splash screen appears in < 5 secs. Compared to my previous experience, the load-bar just zooms along. . . . and the setup is cheap. The controller is built into the P35 chipset's southbridge and three of these Seagate 250s (or 750GB if very fast storge) cost about $210. Finally, we have the means to actually use our fancy racetracks, but it takes a Raid 0, 5 or 10. (BTW, the P35 will do 'em all, plus mix and match 'em with a Raid 1 from a single array. Yes, it's magic). Single drives (15K SCSIs, 10K Raptors, XYK TheResters) won't get close to using current storage buss capacities for at least a few more years.It's this "Selling da Big Buss to a lay audience" game again. Startin' to sound familiar?

>Ahhh, storage. The new SATA II buss will facilitate transfers>of up to 3Gb/s (aka 375MB/s). The 10K RPM raptor was the>fastest drive (by xfer rate) at 70MB/s for quite a while. The>15K SCSIs are the fastest today and max out at 125MB/s. Well, I bought these dudes 5 years ago because I wanted the absolute best random access times, no so much for file transfer rates. The other two considerations were CPU utilization, and the 3rd and still signficant one, a little better service life, or at least the warranty. I think with the 15K.x's I've met all three goals well. 3 of my four drives have been in service over 5y now, so who knows when they will begin to go.Can you recommend a good utility to assess drive health, that isn't too hard on the drive? I do have SMART reporting thru SpeedFan, and the old drives show 100%, and 100% fitness, though I hear SMART isn't that . . . smart. The seek time issue had to do with Gigastudio, which ran best on systems with fast access time HD's. And the transfer rates have been good 'nuf.On the bus issue: my drives are U320 drives, but when I run HD Tach, I'm not seeing anywhere near 320mb/sec. Under what circumstances would these drives EVER approach there maximum rated transfer rate? Even HDTach shows on their perf graph the U320 running at 320mg/sec burst speed I guess. Is that what they are referencing, burst speed? Since I have so many of these suckers I'm kinda stuck with u320 SCSI for a while.

The best strategy is always, If you buy it the smartest, it will last the longest. I expect those drives are Still serving well. Use either HDTach or HDTune. Google 'em. They're both free. These will get you health status, run xfer rate and access time benchmarks. See what you got. The "U320" is a Buss transfer rate capacity number. It might make more sense to consider that these are NoT U320 drives. They are 15K RPM drives that communicate over a SCSI U320 buss. The old SCSI U160 drives (more simply) are drives that communicate on a SCSI, U160 buss. The new and improved U320 buss can transfer at rates up to 320MB/s but that says Nothing about the drive that is using that buss. I know this is a bit hard to get, but again, 1) This "U" number only represents what the buss is capable of, 2) It says Nothing about the drive and 3) Will Not make the drive go faster. Remember that race car/race track analogy? Use HDTach/Tune to see how fast your cars can go. These cars have absolute speeds. Having the fanciest track in the world will not make them go faster. Burst rates: You may get faster burst rates, but remember, this is simply discharging the drives onboard cache. A 16MB cache can sustain a burst transfer rate of 16MB/s for one second. It can sustain a burst transfer rate of 320MB/s for 50ms, that's one-twentieth of a second (20 x 16 = 320, right?). After that glorious mini-moment of poignant (but relatively meaninglessly) effervescences, the cache is bone dry and must reload. In other words, burst rate means virtually nothing. It's kinda like an accumulator in a hydraulic system. It just evens out the pressure. It doesn't make any. Raid up those SCSis. That is the Only way they will Ever get any where close to the transfers modern SATA's can get with raid Os on SATA 2 busses. Get a $100, 500GB SATA to back it all up. The Seagates All have 5 year warranties. That's another reason I use them.

>The best strategy is always, If you buy it the smartest, it>will last the longest. I expect those drives are Still serving>well. >>Use either HDTach or HDTune. Google 'em. They're both free.>These will get you health status, run xfer rate and access>time benchmarks. See what you got. >>The "U320" is a Buss transfer rate capacity number. It might>make more sense to consider that these are NoT U320 drives.>They are 15K RPM drives that communicate over a SCSI U320>buss. The old SCSI U160 drives (more simply) are drives that>communicate on a SCSI, U160 buss. The new and improved U320>buss can transfer at rates up to 320MB/s but that says Nothing>about the drive that is using that buss. I know this is a bit>hard to get, but again, >>1) This "U" number only represents what the buss is capable>of, >>2) It says Nothing about the drive and >>3) Will Not make the drive go faster. >>Remember that race car/race track analogy? Use HDTach/Tune to>see how fast your cars can go. These cars have absolute>speeds. Having the fanciest track in the world will not make>them go faster. >>Burst rates: You may get faster burst rates, but remember,>this is simply discharging the drives onboard cache. A 16MB>cache can sustain a burst transfer rate of 16MB/s for one>second. It can sustain a burst transfer rate of 320MB/s for>50ms, that's one-twentieth of a second (20 x 16 = 320,>right?). After that glorious mini-moment of poignant (but>relatively meaninglessly) effervescences, the cache is bone>dry and must reload. In other words, burst rate means>virtually nothing. It's kinda like an accumulator in a>hydraulic system. It just evens out the pressure. It doesn't>make any. >>Raid up those SCSis. That is the Only way they will Ever get>any where close to the transfers modern SATA's can get with>raid Os on SATA 2 busses. Get a $100, 500GB SATA to back it>all up. The Seagates All have 5 year warranties. That's>another reason I use them.

As always, very relevant information you provide to the less than fully informed . . .I get it clearly, thank you.Tell me why I might need to raid up. I don't do alot of large file transfers, and to be frank I haven't ever been annoyed with slow file transfers, at least nowhere near the extent I can become bothered by either poor image quality or poor graphic performance. So, why might I want to sell the adapter I just bought, and pick up a dual channel scsi raid adapter? I only know the very basics about raid configurations, and I don't recall what happens with different capacity drives in raid 0. I can always consider moving everything with my old PC guts to my spouse's PC. I'd have to have a pretty compelling reason to do this. I just can't see it at this point. My PC use patterns don't seem to leave me feeling the need for more robust tranfers.I'll ask before any future purchases!

Storage performance is just another aspect of the overall experience of using a computer. I've been using a raid for years on OldBox. It's still running two, 7200s with a combined xfer rate of 100MB/s, 10-12ms access. That's what a single 7200RPM, -11 Seagate is getting these days. The old one feels a bit like these new florescent light bulbs. It takes an extra moment to respond. It has it's own pace. Click and wait, click and wait. It never seemed that way before! As I was shopping I had the choice of 750 GB single drives for around $200. On the other hand, three 250s were also, about $200. I asked myself, 'Which is a smarter buy?' It wasn't a difficult choice. Remember, I have a raid 0 AND a raid 1 on the same set of 3 drives. The Required Raid Redundancy factor is handled. I'm getting used to flights loading in 10 seconds and other programs just popping open on immediate command. I'm sure there are numbers to crunch somehow, but it's not about that. It just feels better. Run HDtach/Tune and let's see the numbers. The CPU (or the new controller) won't much matter. That'd give a better idea of what kind of improvement might be expected. Also, how big are these drives? I just loaded up GEX. With backup, actual program load and storing the original file, every dumb addon is wanting 10gigs these days.

>Storage performance is just another aspect of the overall>experience of using a computer. I've been using a raid for>years on OldBox. It's still running two, 7200s with a combined>xfer rate of 100MB/s, 10-12ms access. That's what a single>7200RPM, -11 Seagate is getting these days. What's a "-11" Seagate?It's worth a look, but not everyone assigns the same importance to different elements of computer performance. If I was doing something that required huge file transfers, then I could see it. But for me, when I'm done flying a particular flight, or playing a particular level in a FPS, I'm about ready for a break! I do very little with photo editing, so it would mainly come into play in loading flights, and that is kind an experience you can measure in seconds, for a flight time of maybe an hour or more sometimes. So, it's kind of arguable for me that the bother would be worth it. My storage performance seems adequate if not robust, even by today's standards:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/183455.jpgEven so, it's tempting to make a clean break from SCSI. I could put these parts in my sweethearts PC, since that's where the rest of the guts of my box are headed.OK, what would it entail? The other reason I ended up with 3 drives is that the conventional wisdom was for Gigastudio to run the best, systems evolved into a situation where you put the OS and core application on one drive, and huge audio samples on another, and just for icing on the cake, a swap file on the third. Again, I don't know how critical that would be in a current hi speed system. It was relevant in mine @ 3.45Ghz Northwood as I tested it out putting everything on one drive (well, swap was on another drive).Anyway, I'm open to arguments for SATA II raid, but still not convinced, mainly because of the issues I mentioned above. Here's a reality: I'd trade simplicity and less fail-prone over faster file transfers.And what are the best seek times?

That P/N is still around. It's been upgraded to use the new perpendicular recording technology and now can transfer at 125MB/s. It's also a 75Gb drive that cost $200. That 5 year old is Still a top dog performer, however cost has plummeted. Now-a-days, we get 750GBs, at those xfer rates and access times for $200. Additionally, a SATA II buss provides more headroom than an SCSI Ultra 320. However the buss capacity will not matter unless you use it. For instance, I'd be right up against that Ultra 320's stop with my 280MB/s xfer rate (Gotta leave some room for overhead). For me, that SCSI U320 buss would not be enough, I need the extra headroom that SATA II provides. Here's one of those -11 Seagates. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822148298This drive has almost exactly your SCSI's performance. Even at (only) 7200RPM, access times have improved significantly with this perpendicular recording technique. They've added the same technology to your drive (it now can xfer at 125MB/s) but it's still only 75 gigs. Unless you need more room, I'd say stick with what you have. But if you need more room, get one of these -11s. How about this? Use 2 in the UberBox. One as the main boot disk and the other as a clone backup. Leave the 3rd where it is. You're main motivation for an SATA drive will be running out of room on that 'ittle bitty 75 gigger-biter. 10X the capacity, with the same performance, for the same price, makes these 10K/15K RPM drives 'bout obsolete these days.If your want to look into it, here's the 250 gig, -11 version: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822148262It is P/N'd -10, but it is a stealth -11. They had this out first to test the waters with their new tech. It worked. The P35/s southbridge has a raid setting. You plug in as many as you have, set the bios to raid, then CTRL-I at a magic moment during boot to setup your array(s). There's a floppy creator included to make a driver disk. Vista will ask for that raid driver at its F6 moment. From there, it's a normal install. Once your installed, get Intel's Matrix Storage Manager and enable Hard Drive Write Cache. You'll be hooked.http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=467848 BTW, re-viewing your HDtune run, the horizontal scale measures the xfer rate as the head travels from the outer edge of the disk to the center of the disk. The outer edge spins faster and will have faster xfers out there. Typical graphs show a characteristic drop off in xfer rate as the head moves toward the slower center (That's why we defrag to keep data at the outer edge). These graphs always start at a maximum rate, then scale down and to the right. Your graph is Extremely un-characteristic. Is there a limiter on that SCSI card? Something has that drive limited at 90MB/s. Consider: If the (almost) most inner tracks can xfer at 90MB/s, the outer tracks should xfer significantly faster. Something's got a lid on that thing.

>Your graph is Extremely un-characteristic. >>Is there a limiter on that SCSI card? Something has that drive>limited at 90MB/s. Consider: If the (almost) most inner tracks>can xfer at 90MB/s, the outer tracks should xfer significantly>faster. Something's got a lid on that thing. I've wondered about that. Is it possible its the driver for the LSI card? Maybe I should port these guys over to the old box and start fresh! So 2 RAID 0's eh? I think you are right about a brake on these things. I've seen benchmarks from other 15K Cheetahs and they were better. I'm stumped tho as I don't fully understand even the jumper situation! I do have one U160 drive in there, at least I think it's U160, the 10K, maybe that's the prob? I could try disconnecting it and rerunning the HD Tune. I will try that manana . . .

I just took a look at the HDTach database, and it would appear all my 15K's are running at least as good or better than the same drives in their db. Whew, guess it's all working ok. But, this is from the data sheet on my 73G drive:Key Features and Benefits 16-MB cache Ultra320 SCSI 68-pin interface Perpendicular recording technology for maximum capacity Up to 125-MB/s sustained transfer rate 30 percent more IOPS than 10K 3.5-inch drives Reduced RAID rebuild times Highest reliability rating in the industry Lower total cost of ownership (TCO) 5-year warranty Under what circumstances does one see "up to 125mb/s sustained . . .", is this downhill, gravity assist?! The 86mb average transfer rate from HDTune graph above is quite a long ways from 125mb SUSTAINED . . . What might cause this? Also the other SCSI graphs of my other drives show the performance dropping off as you say, so that IS weird! I think I'll just keep it as is since really I don't have much of an issue going with slow file transfers bumming me out. I have a couple of older ATA's for my sweetheart's pc so won't need to buy anything else. Perhaps when some of my SCSI's die, or if WD comes out with a 15K Raptor, I'll take the bait!