Iam at the end of my rope on FSX. I am not tech savvy but I have upgraded my system and I have tried many many tweaks on several forums and I cannot, I repeat cannot get over 15 FPS. A system I had that was much older performed much better than my current systems Is there anybody who can help me? I am jaded and frustrated! My system is as follows:Windows 7 Home Premium 64 BitNvidia GTX 4804GB RAM500 Western Digital SATA HDIntel Quad Core Q9650 3GHZ Software SetupFSX with SP2Fly Tampa-Tampa RebootedQW 757Wilco Airbus Volume 1 A320Wilco Boeing 777Friendly Panels CRJ-700 add-onTraffic X

Hi Vagrant! Welcome to Avsim! It may take a day or so, but there's lots of folks here that will help you. For me - my first question is - you quoted a 9650 at 3 gig. Is that the current speed that you run the PC/FSX at? or are you just quoting Intel's spec for it? If you are running at 3 gig, then you need to get that up to at least 3.6 with 3.8 - 4.2 gig being good. 3 gig is too low.That's a first. There are many more suggestions to come as others chime in. My next Q. would be - can you get a second hard drive to put FSX on, as FSX and the operating system will be continually fighting over disk usage. Cheers,

Welcome to the Avsim Forums. My suggestion is simple... Go to the following link and read this excellent guide on setting up FSX and tuning it: http://www.simforums.com/forums/topic29041.html . Other than that, I would rename your fsx.cfg to fsx.old and restart FSX and let the config rebuild itself. This is the default settings for your system. Load up a flight and see if the frames improve. If so, you moved your fsx settings too far to the right in the original fsx.cfg. You need to slowly move your settings to the right until you reach the right balance for YOUR system.Best regards,Jim

Do make sure you're not trying to run every slider to the right.

Paul,That is the spec Itel quotes. Are you saying I should overclock? If so, how do I do that?

Paul,That is the spec Itel quotes. Are you saying I should overclock? If so, how do I do that?

Ouch! Go here, start at page one and read for a week.. :( Yeah, 3's not much good when you are on approach into Chicago O'Hare (pick any fair-sized city) in a PMDG MD-11, with clouds, 30% AI traffic, 10% road, with most sliders 3/4 to the right. You do want to see other airplanes, right? :( ... and houses? and a few cars? and some nice fluffy clouds, or rain, fog? Yeah, you need at least 3.8 and some cooling. :(

You can try overclocking the 9650 to 3.6 to 4Ghz which will make a big diference. Did some hunting around for you and 9x445FSB seems to be what others have managed 4Ghz on your chip (with aftermarket coolers). Here's a C2Q guide I found:http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=515316Also, your graphics card is more than capable, so to transfer more work off the processor and onto it, you can try and run Bojote's automated tweaking tool.

You can try overclocking the 9650 to 3.6 to 4Ghz which will make a big diference. Did some hunting around for you and 9x445FSB seems to be what others have managed 4Ghz on your chip (with aftermarket coolers). Here's a C2Q guide I found:http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=515316Also, your graphics card is more than capable, so to transfer more work off the processor and onto it, you can try and run Bojote's automated tweaking tool.

It does rather irritate me somewhat when the advice to overclock is given in threads like this without the proper caveats, ie it will void your warranty, lessen the life of your CPU, needs a very good after market CPU cooler, requires a well ventilated case and it is a lottery as to how much any individual cpu can be overclocked - a few quite a lot, most a moderate amount and some (if you are unlucky) not much at all. It is not a task for the non IT savy and with poor FS performance the first options should be rebuild of FSX.cfg and system tuning such as that advised by NickN.Bruceb

It does rather irritate me somewhat when the advice to overclock is given in threads like this without the proper caveats, ie it will void your warranty, lessen the life of your CPU, needs a very good after market CPU cooler, requires a well ventilated case and it is a lottery as to how much any individual cpu can be overclocked - a few quite a lot, most a moderate amount and some (if you are unlucky) not much at all. It is not a task for the non IT savy and with poor FS performance the first options should be rebuild of FSX.cfg and system tuning such as that advised by NickN.Bruceb

Exactly my thoughts, if the PC is a brand name one overclocking is mostly likely disabled anyways.For a Core 2 Quad 9650 it will probably not clock to 4ghz very easily and will require a powerful cooler since C2Q is known to suck power like crazy when overclock and they usually max out around 3.6ghz

We are SAYING 3 gig is no good for FSX - it NEEDS a minimum of 3.6 to get any real meaningful enjoyment out of it. Minimum. He will never be satisfied with 3 gig. And please don't try to start a flame war between AMD and Intel.In spite of all of Nick Needham's tweaks, in spite of all of Bojote's tweaks and discoveries - it still comes down to PROC POWER. 3 gig doesn't cut it - and neither does 3.6. If you want high detail, full autogen, full complexity, texture sliders to the right, a good amount of traffic, some good reliable heavy weather and the ability to fly into La Guardia, Boston, O'Hare, Seattle, LAX in a Maddog, or any top-level airliner - all at the same time - even 4 gig will barely cut it. When you're getting 30fps with your rig - you have most heavy-duty stuff turned way down and a lot at minimum or not selected at all. You can have a nice Seattle with almost zero traffic and no clouds, and that's with minimum LOD. You can get a mediocre Seattle with some AI traffic and a PDMG tube, but you can't get everything that an overclocked i7 will give you. To get all the above at the same time you need horses. You need at least 4 - or better yet - 4.2, a high-end gpu such as your 470, and a cooling method. We "Intel guys" know what o/c'ing can give you. I and a lot of other "Intel guys" waited an awful long time to fly FSX the way it was intended - and now we can and do. ...and I expect - when Sandy Bridge gets here - we'll probably be able to run it without the tweaks.

If you think PCs and FSX are money pits, wait until you enter the OC world. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. I finally invested in a decent PC and am quite happy with FSX now that I did. I could get more out of it by OCing but why bother. How much more real-time can you get than real-time? My advice, you could just turn the sliders down a bit. When you're in the air, the eye candy on the ground matters not. Much of it can be turned down or off. Then when you can afford to do so, buy a premium machine that the tech savvy folks designed to do what you want it to do.

That's right! Didn't think about that! You could "turn the sliders down a bit". Until you can finally afford to buy the latest and greatest "premium Dell" machine. And he's right - you "don't need to look at the ground". It's "eye candy"! Who needs it? Run it at 3 gig, and tweak and tweak and tweak.Aaaaargh!!! Did you even read Vagrante's original post?Let me get out of here. :(

So sorry. I never suggested Dell. Nope, don't buy a Dell. Not overclockable. Shoulda kept my mouth shut. Have a nice flight.

Now that I've woken up the exchange above bothers me so I have decided to try to help. Having been in the overclocking world in the past, I have a question: What motherboard do you have installed and does the BIOS support overclocking? If not, forget about it until you swap it out with one that does. That said, I agree with posters above that you could start with a freshly generated fsx.cfg and don't change anything and see what you get with FSX's default choices, including screen resolution (for me, that's the first thing I change but you want to see where your issue lies, so don't change the res yet).Secondly, you can check what apps are running in the background on your system as some could use up precious resources. I have turned off the Windows Search service, for instance, since I don't do much searching for files. That service keeps my drive churning for an hour sometimes.You can open performance monitor while FSX is running (type perfmon in the start menu, click "resource monitor" link, and click the CPU tab) and see what is using CPU cycles. You can sort the list for the highest cycle number and if it's a program you recognize that you can do without, shut it down.The suggestion to put FSX on a separate drive is a good one but I can't say for sure it will get you that many more FPS. A friend of mine has FSX on a solid state drive and he gets little if any better frame rate than I do once the sim is loaded. But his loading time decreased greatly!Hope this helps.Dolph

Now that I've woken up the exchange above bothers me so I have decided to try to help. Having been in the overclocking world in the past, I have a question: What motherboard do you have installed and does the BIOS support overclocking? If not, forget about it until you swap it out with one that does. That said, I agree with posters above that you could start with a freshly generated fsx.cfg and don't change anything and see what you get with FSX's default choices, including screen resolution (for me, that's the first thing I change but you want to see where your issue lies, so don't change the res yet).Secondly, you can check what apps are running in the background on your system as some could use up precious resources. I have turned off the Windows Search service, for instance, since I don't do much searching for files. That service keeps my drive churning for an hour sometimes.You can open performance monitor while FSX is running (type perfmon in the start menu, click "resource monitor" link, and click the CPU tab) and see what is using CPU cycles. You can sort the list for the highest cycle number and if it's a program you recognize that you can do without, shut it down.The suggestion to put FSX on a separate drive is a good one but I can't say for sure it will get you that many more FPS. A friend of mine has FSX on a solid state drive and he gets little if any better frame rate than I do once the sim is loaded. But his loading time decreased greatly!Hope this helps.Dolph

Wherever you put your FSX installation, don't forget to defrag that partition and often.