Hi Rhett,Sorry for not replying earlier. I'd unsubscribed.:-eek <No. I wasn't aware there could be problems. Have I missed something? No warning klaxons are going off due to overheating.<I wasn't aware it was user configurable. As I'm not currently overclocking it's unlikely I;d need to change the stock speed. I have to say everything is amazingly quiet when you consider the horsepower under the bonnet. :-)

Hi ChrisE, It's never too late to join in.Frame rate has never been my issue. Problem I'm having is with SP2 turning into a blurry mess after a few minutes of running. It starts out fine, but turn into YUK.I'd like to try Acceleration, but if I can't get SP2 to work, why bother. A little history, when FSX first came out I had an Intel P-4 Prescott 3.2 GHz. ATi X800 AGP 256 meg. But framerate was slow, but things looked pretty darn good.About 10 months ago I upgraded to an Intel E6420 (now running Q6600). But In that 10 month period, SP1 and SP2 have come out for FSX and it seems that I've spent the last 10 months tweaking more than flying.Thinking that I may have "tweaked" myself into unknown problems, I've tried fresh loads on different hard drives to see if it is something I've done or a possible FSX addon or some other background program causing issues. Since everything works so well with the original release and SP1... SP2 has me baffled. Is there something defective with my video card??? If so why does everything else run so well?System: Intel Q6600 (1333 FSB) 3 Gigs DDR-667, EVGA 8800 GTS 320 meg, hard drives are 160 gig WD YS and a 320 Gig WD KS. Using a second 160 Gig WD YS as a test drive.

I am going to ask this as a new separate topic. Please reply there.Chris

One review I read about this card indicated that the fan speed/noise tends to vary under load and this can be an annoyance. Interesting card but I would like to some reviews that use FSX benchmark comparisons.Bruceb

Hi,FWIW I promised to post my experience with my new HD 3870 card here. I received it last Friday and have spend quite some time messing with it -- coming from the NVidia world (7900GS 256 MB) I had to figure out how the drivers work, which utilities are must haves etc.The card is the "Toxic" model from Sapphire which shines by only taking up one slot, being slightly overclocked from the factory and sports a "vapor-x" cooler that is pretty silent.As suggested in this thread I only downloaded and installed the raw driver from ATi and then installed the free light weight ATi Tray Tool utility for configuration purposes. I must say this works like a charm and is much nicer and more intuitive to use compared to NVidia's control panel and NHancer.The graphics in FSX is now much nicer than before! However, I doubt this is solely because of the ATi brand on the box, but more likely because of the increased horse power and ability to crank up the settings. Things look really good and I lock my frames at 25 with middle to high settings in FSX (exact same FSX settings amd frame rate lock as with the 7900). The GPU monitor normally shows a load in the range 50-80% -- in heavy clouds this gets maxed out though.So, at the end of the day I am a happy camper and very satisfied with the purchase except from one major issue -- the issue that actually made me upgrade in the first place: The lack of VSYNC in windowed mode. VSYNC can be forced on in full screen, but I just cannot make it work in windowed mode (I need windowed mode to use my two monitors). I even tried the older Omega drivers as suggested in this thread, but to no avail. As I would like to actually try to complete a flight from A to B one day in the sim, I have now given up and try to get to love the tearing that MS has forced upen on with the service packs....A remaining issue I have yet to solve is to figure out how to force my monitor's refresh rate to 50 Hz. The reason is that stutters (most obvious in turns) is heavily reduced if the framerate is locked at a fraction of the refresh rate -- this counts for both full screen with VSYNC enabled and windows mode. As I run my sim locked at 25 FPS I need a refresh rate of 50 or 75 -- something that I have not yet been able to achieve even though the ATi Tray Tool has a feature that suggests this should be possible./ Cheers, PoulWindows XP SP2 (regularly patched and polished)FSX AccelerationIntel E6600 @ 3450 MHzSapphire Radeon Toxic HD 38702 GB memory2 LCDs (22" + 17")

Well I Have found one brief review of the ATI 3870x2 over at Tom's Hardware and unfortunately the results are not encouraging at least at 1900x1200 and above. Furthermore there is this throw away line: "Multi-GPU solutions aren't only useless when playing Flight Simulator, they can even be harmful in some cases."Any thoughts?Bruceb

Bruce,That review was using Vista and DX10. No mention of whether it was 32-bit or 64-bit Vista. The 8.3 Catalyst drivers are producing very different results with improvements in Vista but big performance drops in XP. For now I'm back with the 8.2 ones.It would be interesting to perform a test with the same three cards on XP and DX9.I would expect the drivers to improve with XP with subsequent releases.But I accept for now that if you're in the market for a top DX10 card then the 3870X2 would not appear to be the best choice. I do find it frustrating no mention is made of what the FSX options were set at.This is from Phil Taylor's blog on choosing cards...In terms of what parts of these specs are more critical for FSX, at least 3 of these are critical:

Hi Poul,Be aware that Ray Adams is currently tweaking ATI Tray Tools for the 3870. I suggest you go to Guru3D and pick up the latest beta version. http://forums.guru3d.com/forumdisplay.php?f=52I don't think you need VSync except for Vista.The Omega drivers are not yet avaiable for the 3870X2 but may be for the 3870. The Catalyst 8.2 drivers seem best at the moment.I haven't seen a way to force the refresh rate to 50Hz but as my display always defaults to 60Hz I think I'll stay with that.Cheers,

Hi Ray,Thanks for the info.I am already using the lastest beta of Ray Adams' ATi Tray Tool (a brilliant one by the way). The Omega drivers I found were from January IIRC and based on the 7 series of drivers. I tried them, but without success regarding the tearing, so I thought that I would rather stick to the new 8.3. And this is where things start to get interesting as you suggest sticking to the 8.2. What are the benefits of using this older version?/ Cheers and enjoy the Easter, Poul

Hi Poul,I'm not seeing any tearing but I understand that is a common problem with FSX and DX10 and especially so with nVidia cards.I switched back to the 8.2 drivers because I got much lower 3DMark06 scores. With 8.3 it was 8191 and was lower than I should be getting. When I switched back to 8.2 it went to 14307.The fact that this anomaly was being reported by others on Guru3D just confirmed there was a problem for my XP/DX9 setup. Maybe it helps Vista/Dx10?I've always been sceptical that the latest drivers must always be the best (fastest). I take everything with a pinch of salt!Have a peaceful Easter too. :-wave

>Hi Rhett,>>Sorry for not replying earlier. I'd unsubscribed.:-eek >...and I had forgotten i asked the question. :) Getting back to this nice thread now...><3870x2?>>>>No. I wasn't aware there could be problems. Have I missed>something? No warning klaxons are going off due to>overheating.I read some user reports of problems with fan speed being set too low for normal use at the factory. I see with your ASUS branded 3870x2, that is not a problem.I will have to give serious consideration to the exact brand/model you have--I like hassle-free hardware. nVidia is hassle-ware because of its driver situation.>><>>I wasn't aware it was user configurable. As I'm not currently>overclocking it's unlikely I;d need to change the stock speed.The reports I read indicated that these people were manually adjusting the 3870x2's fan speed via RivaTuner. That sounded odd to me, given Rivatuner was for nVidia cards--so I thought. Being a long-time nVidia-alternating-to-3Dfx-then-back-to-nVidia user, that was my experience--back to the nVidia Riva128, from which RivaTuner got its name.>I have to say everything is amazingly quiet when you consider>the horsepower under the bonnet. :-)Bonnet = Hood!! Tyre = Tire!! Or, "taaar" as they say in the hills west of me.I am really leaning towards a 24" display, maybe one of the LG models which I've noticed have very nice color tone to them when compared to say, a Samsung.If I do that, I think I may need a 3870x2 rather than the straight up 3870. What do you think?RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

Hi Ray,Wow, that was quite a performance setback with the 8.3! I will surely try the 8.2 as my card could use that extra juice when flying in heavy clouds. Apart from that I am really satisfied with my switch from NVidia (and I believe NVidia also has a hard time when it gets really really cloudy).Regarding the tearing in windowed mode, please remember that I am also on XP. So if it works for you I am convinced that I should be able to get it working too... puzzled as I am though.In ATT, what have you set the "wait for vertical sync" setting to? Have you added any of these two lines to your FSX.CFG: ForceFullScreenVSync=TrueForceVSync=TrueI have read that they should not work with FSX SP2 (you are using SP2, right)?Thanks a lot for helping out here!/ Cheers, Poul... who is off to an IVAO flight :-D

Hi Poul,If you're running XP is there any benefit to Acceleration? Perhaps I'm wrong but I thought it was only beneficial to DX10 users.<>It's set to 'Always Off'. I've always used that setting. Again, I believe it helps DX10 but doesn't do anything positive for DX9.I don't have either of those entries in FSX.CFG. I've done virtually no tweaking whatsoever. There were a lot of tweak suggestions when FSX first came out but with SP1/2 I'm not sure what needs teaking now.Is there a guide somewhere for post Sp2 tweaks?<Yes. Fully up to date with all service packs. :-)

Thanks Ray for your observations. Yes looking at those numbers you wouldn't expect there to be much difference so perhaps it is drivers but then it is the driver issue with nVidia cards that has led me look at ATI in the first place (and because ATI supports linux much better than nVidia). However, I would want a card that performed well at 1900x1200 just in case I decide to replace one of my two 1600X1200 monitors with a 1900X1200 one - less bothered about DX10 - so this review is a bit concerning and it would be good to have a DX9 and XP comparison. Glad you are enjoying your new system I'm looking to get something quite similar mainly to make FS9 really shine and in the hope of acceptable FSX performance. Bruceb

Hi Bruce,Rest assured the HD3870X2 performs just fine at 1920*1200. There's no difference in frame rates at that resolution compared to 1280*1024 because FS is CPU bound.I've found what really drags down FSX performance is cloud layer depth. If you setup one cloud layer 2/8 cumulus base 1200 with a depth of 11000ft it kills the frame rate. However, set up two with a depth of 1500 each and the hit is far less pronounced.The 3870X2 also seems unbothered with huge amounts of AutoGen and scenery complexity. I have both on a minimum of Dense and can still achieve frame rates in the 20s. It's the cloud depth that's the killer.I'm currently back flying FS9 and with this horsepower it's a delight. Once you're up at FL350 the differences between the two versions aren't that huge but when I can fly into EGLL with 100% Ai and still get 30+ frame rates I know which version I prefer!