What is the bottleneck of my system?

[JDH24591 0]

Dear readers,

I would like to improve my performance for my favorite game: FSX.

My system:
- Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3 iP55
- Intel Core i7 860 2.8GHz 2.5GT/s Box
- OCZ 4x2GB DDR3 PC10666 CL7.0 Platin. LV
- MSI Videokaart PCI-e GeForce GTX275 Lightning 1.8GB DVI/HDMI
- OCZ GameXStream 700W
- Samsung 1TB SATA300 32MB, HD103UJ

Recently, I purchased a Noctua NH-D14 cooler and succesfully overclocked my i7 860 to ~ 4GHz. Still, I am not happy with the FSX performance. I play FSX with a few add-ons, such as: PMDG 737NGX, Ultimate terrain X, Some Aerosoft sceneries as well as the IVAP online multiplayer. Also, I did the standard FSX tweaks ( such as 

          [DISPLAY] TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=40
          [GRAPHICS]
          TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096
          [Main]
          FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.15 and more)

Current performance: I run FSX at a mega airport with all sliders maxed out (but not slides such as the light boom) at ~ 11- FPS.

Goal: I would like to run FSX at a mega airport with all sliders maxed out at ~ 20+ FPS.

I have some thoughts how I can improve my performance:
1. Buy a SATA6 SSD ( such as the Samsung 840 EVO 250GB). If i am correct, I do also have to buy a new motherboard in order to improve the transfer rate of data.
2. I am not sure but my RAM frequency might be a bottleneck (1066MHz), So maybe buy other RAM?

Can you tell me if my thoughts make sense and what you think is the bottleneck of my System?

Many thanks,

 

Jasper

[Bob Scott 7,704]

An SSD will not help your frame rates at all.  If you were to make a single change, I'd recommend something like a GTX 660Ti video card (or perhaps a used 480 or 570).  I used to run an i7-975 at ~4.4 GHz, and moving up from a 275 to a 480 made a significant difference.

 

That said, piling a bunch of the latest add-ons in their full glory on to a 3-generation old CPU and mobo is not going to be very satisfying--you have to carefully pick which features mean the most, but you can't run them all on that machine.

 

Regards

[cryptomaniac 4]

Your CPU running at 2.8G doesn't help

Your video card is pretty much a minimum these days

An SSD isn't the answer for you

Higher RAM freq won't significantly help

 

What is your OS?

[Humpty 751]

          TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096 too high.

 

Have you done the Bufferpool tweak ? you need it.

 

Reduce the sliders you can not run it with max and expect 25 fps on your system.

[ryanbatc 12,770]

Agreed with the video card upgrade. Definitely the best upgrade for the money.

 

Otherwise a whole new system would be my next recommendation.