I was thinking about the microstutters I was having with my i7 920 4.2Ghz/GTX 480 combo, and I am wondering if this is due to some sort of hardware latency. I am using an affinity mask of 14 to help reduce thread collisions, and I have assigned all programs that run along with FSX to core0. My FSB is running at 200Mhz, but I left the PCIe bus at the standard 100Mhz. I read a thread on the i7 series and microstutters, and NickN made a statement about PCIe bus latency:"The primary fix (right now) for a clocked i7 (3.6-4GH) system on a 64bit OS and a GTX 285 (or equal) vide card appears to be to disable HT, set a Texture Bandwidth Multiplier of 80 or 90 (most are finding 90 the sweetspot) and reserve bufferpools to 100000000 (100MB). For some reason the larger Vmem video cards when BP is set to 100MB drops latency on the PCIe buss and the increased texture bandwidth appears to change threading calls on terrain, effectively smoothing the result" - NickNI tried these settings, and indeed it has nearly eliminated any microstutters. This leads me to looking at the PCIe bus latency, and finding a way to further reduce it, so I am considering overclocking my ASUS P6T PCIe bus speed above 100Mhz.Does anyone have any experience doing this and have any technical/precautionary advice? I have done some research and have read warnings about corrupting OS files and damaging drives.Thanks,Shane

I've been able to get mine as far as 108 MHz...it made no difference I could see, and pushing it too far can indeed do unhappy things like scramble your HDDs, because the disk controller(s) are also on that bus. I speak from experience... :( That's not something I'd recommend even trying unless you're in the initial stages of a build/rebuild with nothing to lose if you dork the file system and have to rebuild Rome.My take is that the overwhelming majority of users are probably nowhere near saturating the PCIe bus to the point more bandwidth there would help FS performance. Also, DPC latency is generally NOT accompanied by PCIe bus saturation...its most common cause is IRQ collisions between devices that are misbehaving and/or have poorly-written drivers.CheersBob ScottColonel, USAF (ret)ATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VColorado Springs, CO

Thanks, better safe than sorry. I have way too much time invested in my OS/FSX and add-ons installs to risk screwing it all up. I am considering looking in to lower latency memory. Right now I have 6GB of OCZ Gold 1600Mhz with 8-8-8-24 timing. Would memory with lower timing have much of an FS performance impact?

Thanks, better safe than sorry. I have way too much time invested in my OS/FSX and add-ons installs to risk screwing it all up. I am considering looking in to lower latency memory. Right now I have 6GB of OCZ Gold 1600Mhz with 8-8-8-24 timing. Would memory with lower timing have much of an FS performance impact?

With your CPU at 4.2GHz it might help with microstutters if they're related to video card DMA bandwidth limitations. I use CAS 6 Mushkin DIMMs, and if I relax the timings to CAS 7 I do see some increase in small microstutters when I have the CPU at the higher overclocks (over 4GHz).Most of the available benchmarks for memory I've seen were run with CPUs at stock speeds, and down in the lower 3 GHz clock speed region, the differences between memory speeds and timings isn't tremendous because the CPU isn't really starved for memory bandwidth. In fact at 3.2GHz, 1333 GHz CAS 6 RAM appears to be just keeping up with the CPU.Bottom line, though, is it will depend on how well balanced multiple components of your system are. I think it'd be worth a try...best if you have the option to send it back if it doesn't help.RegardsBob ScottColonel, USAF (ret)ATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VColorado Springs, CO

Thank you Bob. I am going to try out 6 gigs of Mushkin Redline CAS 6 1600Mhz DDR3.