I've had my build up and running for about nine months and the OC is stable and FSX runs a pretty consistent 28-30FPS. I recently installed and activated the Intel Rapid Start, Rapid Storage and LucidLogic MVP motherboard features. I use a 16Gb partition as a hibernation mirror in front of my system drive (WD 1Tb Black). I also use a second 20Gb partition as my iRST cache. My Win7 load times are about 1/3 of their previous WD 1Tb drive times. A cold and dark restart takes less than a minute after the WIN7 blossom screen opens.

 

My question is other than speeding up the system loading from cold and dark or from hibernation, is there anyway to benchmark these features as alternatives to exclusive SSD system and FSX drives? I can switch the SSD cache from supporting the system drive to supporting the FSX drive which is a WD 300Gb VRaptor. My FSX starts are really long because I use quite a few photorealistic scenery areas and third party airports and aircraft.

 

I've experimented with the 120Gb SSD as the system drive and also as a lite build FSX drive. I don't notice much of a difference between the SSD system drive and using iRST with a 20Gb cache. I haven't tried FSX from an exclusive SSD because my Photorealistic Scenery and REX Essential + HD and all of my other addons take up close to 400Gb and my SSD isn't big enough to hold everything. I know that the SSD for FSX will only help load times and won't improve my FSX benchmark by much. I was just wondering if anyone else has experimented with these features?

 

I also enabled my registered FSUIPC and a WideFS client on my i3 laptop to handle FSCommander,charts, plates and my POHs and route planning. I can move things like REX Ess+OD over to a Q9550 media computer and enable that as a client also. Any experimenting dne along those lines?

 

The iRST technology has some promise to it and I would like to see if there is any point in using it.

 

My ASUS Sabertooth Z77 also supports Lucid's Virtu MVP graphics utility. This lets the system off load some of the GPU overhead and shares functionality with the onboard iGPU 3000 graphics platform. I have another question along the same lines mentioned above whether or not there is any benefit to enabling it. All of these features setup quickly and seem to be very stable so if they add any performance edge at all, they might be worth adding to the FSX mix.

 

Let me know if any of this has merit.

 

 

Thanks,

You are delving into things most care not about so odds of finding someone with accurate feedback on all these drive, intel features and FSX layouts will be slim to none.

 

If you search for loading speed, simple answer is to buy more/larger SSD and use that, doesn't get any faster than that. Anything else is just 2nd best or painful and time consuming testing (or to many a "waste of time").