PC Upgrade Advice

[Gerabus 0]

Hi Guys, I'm in the process of upgrading to a new PC and at the same time making the transition to FSX. For all you PC hardware guru's can you please advise a relative novice of the below specs if they are a good upgrade for amongst other things to include a good standard of performance for FSX serious scenery and aircraft addons PMDG Etc and sceneries like Aerosoft and the likes.Any advice will be gratefully received.Cheers in advanceGerry.The new spec PC I'm looking at is.Over Clocked Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-950 (3.06GHz @ max 3.8GHz)Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 BitASUS® P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI12GB KINGSTON HYPER-X TRI-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (6 x 2GB KIT)1536MB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX480 GDDR5 PCI EXPRESS - DirectX® 111TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)1TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD1002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAMCORSAIR 850W PSU (TX850) 80+ ULTRA QUIETCOOLIT ECO A.L.C (ADVANCED LIQUID COOLER)ARCTIC COOLING MX-3 HIGH THERMAL[/b]

[bushpilotwannabe 0]

That's a nice build, pretty much as good as you can get without going completely insane, haha. I'm not a guru, but I'll speak based on what I discovered when putting together my recent build, albeit with a tighter budget than yours.Depending on what else you plan to do with it, the GTX 480 is probably not necessary. FS is much more heavily dependent on the CPU, and you can save a lot of money stepping down to a GTX 460 with a minimal loss of performance in FS. But if you're bent on getting the performance it offers for other games or whatever, I'd recommend running two 460s in SLI. Two of those will outshine a single 480 and save you a wad of cash in the process. If you did that, though, you might want a different motherboard that'll run two cards at x16. The The GTX 400 series also overclocks very well, so don't forget to bump it up a bit once you've got everything put together.As for the CPU, you should easily be able to get past 3.8 GHz with a liquid cooled setup. You can see in my signature what I've managed to do, somewhat conservatively, and that's with air cooling. I'd be surprised if you couldn't hit at least 4.2 GHz on water, especially with hyperthreading off. FSX doesn't have much use for HT, and it adds about 10-15 degrees to your temps (at least on air), so that headroom is better used for a higher clock.12GB of RAM probably isn't necessary for FSX, but again it may be worth your while depending on what else you'll use the computer for. Besides, that'll be more future-proof.Can't go wrong with WD or Corsair; good choices there. I don't really know much about the motherboard, but for the most part Asus is a good brand.Others, chime in if I'm leading him astray. Let us know if you have more questions. Good luck!

[ryanbatc 12,803]

The system looks solid.I wouldn't mind seeing more details on that RAM. Make sure the CAS latency is lower, at least 7... 12GB is fine... perhaps a bit overkill thoughI don't know anything about the liquid cooling you have, but on liquid, that i7 950 should go above 4.0GHz with ease.I'd recommend a SSD and put FSX on that, OS and other programs on the WD HDD, a good SSD would be one such as this:(80GB variety)http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167023&cm_re=intel_x25m-_-20-167-023-_-Product(160GB)http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167024&cm_re=intel_x25m-_-20-167-024-_-ProductBut they're not cheap hehe... the main benefit of an SSD for FSX is much faster loading times and also some in-game scenery/texture loading.

[dazz 69]

seriously, tripple channel is flat out overkill for FSX and pretty much anything else out there. HT as stated above is useless too, so pick an I5 7xx or an I3 and overclock it like there's no tomorrow12 GB of ram will not provide anything over 6 (or 4 if you go with an LGA1156 build) and the more sticks, the worse your CPU will overclockFor the GPU see mike's post

[Guest CRJ_simpilot]

FWIW, the write speed for SSD's are meger compared to a SATA II. Unless you buy a small SSD just for FS... At that point I'd go with a RAM drive. But for me, my FS install is well over 20 GBs! lol RAID 0 short stock is what I do. Although RAID 0 has no fault protection. RAID 1 does. Of course you can buy a couple SSD's and use RAID with that.If you use that 12GB of RAM. Make a 9-10 GB RAM drive and install FS to it. LOL http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-serverJust have to make sure the FS install doesn't go past the 9-10 GB used for the RAM drive. Choose removable first. Then format the drive to NTFS in My Computer. Save the image. When you reload the image make it fixed. Should stay NTFS if files are in it at save.