Your opinion on hardware if you have it

[Jack C 8]

Hi all. I am thinking of upgrading in the near future. Here is my current specs:QX9650 (OC'ed to 3.6)8800 Ultra/7800 GTXGigabyte X38-DQ6Corsair 4 GB dominatorThis current hardware runs FS9 like there is no tomorrow. Like watching a movie. Sure the there will always be the occassional stutter for whatever reason Win XP is doing. Heres what I am looking at:i7 940 (not sure if i want to spend the extra $$ for the 965 EE. But if you know first hand the the 965 will give me 15 fps more than let me know plz)eVGA GTX 295 (i heard ati is coming out with the 4890. Let me know which might be better. Personally I used to like ATI better for FS but I dont know what they are like since AMD bought them)Asus P6T Deluxe OC Palm X58 or the Gigabyte GA-EX58-ExtremeCorsair 4GB XMS3-1600 DHX PC3-12800 or Corsair 4GB XMS3-1600 DHX PC3-12800 (I am kinda of up in the air about ram but will do some more research as to what would be the best ram out there)OK what I am looking for is the FSX to get a solid 35 fps with all sliders maxxed, addon scenery and aircraft that is hardest on FPS and of course active sky weather. If any of you have a system like this can you please let me know how you are doing. Please don't tell me you get 40 fps and forget to tell me not all your silders are maxxed.I would like ot see the obove performance. thanks all!

[Guest simjunkie]

Hi all. I am thinking of upgrading in the near future. Here is my current specs:QX9650 (OC'ed to 3.6)8800 Ultra/7800 GTXGigabyte X38-DQ6Corsair 4 GB dominatorThis current hardware runs FS9 like there is no tomorrow. Like watching a movie. Sure the there will always be the occassional stutter for whatever reason Win XP is doing. Heres what I am looking at:i7 940 (not sure if i want to spend the extra $$ for the 965 EE. But if you know first hand the the 965 will give me 15 fps more than let me know plz)eVGA GTX 295 (i heard ati is coming out with the 4890. Let me know which might be better. Personally I used to like ATI better for FS but I dont know what they are like since AMD bought them)Asus P6T Deluxe OC Palm X58 or the Gigabyte GA-EX58-ExtremeCorsair 4GB XMS3-1600 DHX PC3-12800 or Corsair 4GB XMS3-1600 DHX PC3-12800 (I am kinda of up in the air about ram but will do some more research as to what would be the best ram out there)OK what I am looking for is the FSX to get a solid 35 fps with all sliders maxxed, addon scenery and aircraft that is hardest on FPS and of course active sky weather. If any of you have a system like this can you please let me know how you are doing. Please don't tell me you get 40 fps and forget to tell me not all your silders are maxxed.I would like ot see the obove performance. thanks all!

Not in order: 1) Don't get the GTX295. Complete waste because FSX will not use that 2nd GPU. Get the GTX285 instead.2) 6Gb ram for core i7 and FSX. Nothing more, nothing less. Fastest and lowest timings you can get.3) Both good motherboards4) You don't need the 965 to reach 4GHz but you do get the extra memory multipliers. Performance wise there's no difference. 5) Nothing will give you solid 35fps full sliders everywhere, repeat, nothing. Core i7 will perform better than Core2 if you use the faster memory and clock the cpu. But you still need to manage your sliders, especially road traffic and water effects. All the scenery sliders can be maxed but you might need to drop autogen down in a few areas. You DO get a lot more autogen-handling performance out of the i7 and can run that full slider most of the time.I believe the DDR3 2000 ram with low timings will be coming out in the next 2-3 months as well as new stepping i7 cpu's for perhaps better overclocks. Maybe it would be best to wait just a little longer. If you can run FSX on your 4GHz core i7 system with low latency DDR3 2000+ then your in for a treat!-jk

[Guest Nick_N]

I believe the DDR3 2000 ram with low timings will be coming out in the next 2-3 months

They are based on Elpida 50nm DDR3 IC's which is why they can run DDR2 2000-2250 @ CAS 7 http://www.corsair.com/products/dominatorgtand should be released to the public next month.. https://shop.corsair.com/store/item_view.aspx?id=766411but like anything else high perf, they come with the premium price. I would not expect their price to drop till the end of the yearAs for why FS9 runs so good and FSX does not.. LOL Simple, the maximum number of objects per 256x256 tile is 500 in FS9.. buildings and treesThe average number of objects per 1024x1024 tile in FSX was increased to the thoroughly idiotic amount of 4000 + 3000 (and can be edited to render more) which should have been limited to 3000 per tile build+trees and you can not use the autogen restriction lines or it totally screws up the priority to AG to the PCIe buss the way they designed the FSX application. If you do use those lines in the config.. expect stuttersThis tool actually attacks the problem and works great for most: http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?s=&...t&p=1551461Add to that, any tree forest automatically renders the MAX of 4000-6000 objects which is why flying near large forests can bring a system to its knees (pines are worse because they render 3 trees per target) and why if a large pine forest is located near any urban or airport in the boonies, like up in Scandinavia, the perf drops like a rock.. we actually fixed part of that with GEX Europe which will trickle into the rest of the world when installed.Add too that rediculous number of objects placment the number of objects such as jetways and other complicated modeling/calcs going on and you have a nearly 100% increase in CPU resources needs and dang near 200% video card over FS9 on the same settings... FSX is an 800lb gorilla that is based on a year 2000 triangle rendering engine and is so outdated it will never catch up to the hardware for perf since hardware is becoming more and more modern shader engine based

[Guest simjunkie]

but like anything else high perf, they come with the premium price. I would not expect their price to drop till the end of the year

True dat! I neglected to mention that small $$$ thing, LOL. I know I sure as heck can't afford $600 RAM. There is some slightly higher latency Kingston and Gskill DDR3 2000 on the Egg, but they can't keep the Kingston in stock. Also, it looks like there's some lower latency (CL7, CL6) DDR3 1866 and 1600 too, like the Mushkin Redlines. That might be a decent alternative. I know I get very nice results from my Corsair DOMs @ DDR3 1600, CL7. These seem to get good reviews too:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820227375and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820227381-jk

[Guest Nick_N]

True dat! I neglected to mention that small $$$ thing, LOL. I know I sure as heck can't afford $600 RAM.

The chips are made by Rexchip http://www.rexchip.com/ for Elpida using 193nm (ArF) immersion lithography technology I posted I was running DDR3 2000 on i7 back a few months.. and that would be the Corsair product and they just recently lifted the NDA. I have managed to run 1T CAS7 up through 2250MHz however I did have to exceed the i7 max limit for DRAM by quite a bit to hit 2200 @ CASThe moral of that story is the stability.. @ 1T unlike DDR3 of the past with Intel QIts like plug-n-go with a few voltage changes.. no messin with lectronic engineerin stuff in the BIOS

[Jack C 8]

Thanks guys. Very informative. I think I will wait for the new i7's since the upgrade was going to be a month or two anyway. I like to prepare a nice system that has components that work well with each other. I don't know how many times I have told friends to switch to different RAM brands because their computer wouldn't boot at all. Every time my solution worked. Why couldn't they have just made FSX from the gorund up!!!! Oh yeah.......economics. I sure hope the next sim runs tip top.