Hi,Just wondered if anyone here could help me out with graphics cards specifically for FSX (as that's pretty much all I use this PC for)!I currently have a Zotac GTX 285 which feeds a 1920x1080 HDTV, along with a Core i7 920 running at 4.0GHz, and 4Gb DDR3 RAM. It used to be 6Gb but my Asus P6T Deluxe v2 motherboard decided one day to only register 4Gb. I've tried everything I can think of from flashing the BIOS to reseating each of the RAM sticks to reseating the CPU but nothing's helped. The only thing left would be to RMA the board, and as it's now 2 years old I might as well upgrade the whole thing!Rather than upgrade the whole thing now, which obviously would be to a Sandy Bridge system, I decided to wait for Ivy Bridge, as aside from the RAM my 920 runs quite nicely and cool at 4GHz, and I heard that Ivy Bridge is intended to be the 'true' successor to Bloomfield.One thing I want to do now though is replace the graphics card. In FSX, with the relatively recent scenery releases like Earth Simulation's Guernsey and FTX which rely on lots of high detail autogen, my 285 struggles to cope. Frame rates are low and often I get artefacts and spikes, and GPU load is near 100% a lot of the time. I'm considering the eVGA GTX 560 Ti Superclocked Edition, as i'm drawn to the particularly high clock speeds this model has. There are a few different variations available. They also do a 560 Ti with 2Gb of memory, but this does not have as high clock speeds as the 1Gb Superclocked models. In addition there is a 'DS' model, which the only difference appears to be that it has two fans rather than one. My question is, out of these, which would be better (purely for FSX performance), and more broadly, is the 560 Ti a good choice?Many thanks,Tom

Hi Tom,I have the same motherboard as you and twice have I've noticed only 4GB running instead of 6GB. I cause the problem by overclocking the base frequency and drive the RAM to hard. To fix I select XMP mode so the timings are as per manufacturer then adjust the memory divider so I dont go much higher then the rated memory speed. I use a cpu multiplier of 20 to achieve the best combination of cpu and memory speed. Getting your extra memory bank back should help fsx as you now have 50% more bandwidth!I don't think you'll see much improvement between the 285 and 560. My advice would be wait until the new Nvidia chips come out. As well as new design they'll be on 28nm fabrication so will be higher clock speeds/cooler.

Hi,I did try XMP and it didn't work for me. Still only POSTing 4Gb. It started doing it around the same time I replaced my CPU cooler with a Noctua NHD14, and I've read around a lot that it could be caused by bent pins from the weight of the cooler. Seems weird to me, but nothing has managed to fix it yet.Interesting you say about the graphics card not making much difference. I'm inclined to think it would (and have heard elsewhere), particularly as the near 100% GPU usage in some scenarios almost definitely means the GPU is the bottleneck, and the Superclocked 560Ti has much higher clock speeds than my 285.

All I can say is if I was in your position I wouldn't do it. http://www.hwcompare.com/8920/geforce-gtx-285-1gb-vs-geforce-gtx-560-ti/What frequency is your memory rated at, and what is it running at?

Interesting info.It's rated at 1600MHz 9-9-9-24 and it's currently running at 1236MHz. Using XMP sets it to 1600MHz, but the Bios still only reads 4Gb. In CPUZ it reads 6Gb though. I have tried swapping the sticks around and deduced it was always the middle orange DDR3 slot that wasn't registering.

I wonder if you ran everything at stock speeds it would appear.I'm not an expert in this field, suggest you try asus forum or overclockers etc.Send me a pm if you resolve it though,