I have a Gigabyte MB in this PC and I had an Asus one in my last PC. Both rock solid and reliable motherboards.

Outofphaze has it right.

There's no way I believe that guy when he writes about the fact he can play another game alongside FSX while referencing VAS - they have NOTHING to do with one another lol

 

Then he goes to say that all boards except l337 ROG boards are junk - what a pile of poop!

 

You can check the reviews at newegg, tiger, amazon, wherever - and everyone once in a while has a bad board. My GB hasn't been the best but it's been ok. I used a Foxconn board I hate but my Asus for my old old old AMD build was nothing but solid.

First, Ryan, I have a name. I am not "that guy".

 

Second, VAS as I understand it is affected by system load regardless of what you"re running. If a real software guru would like to step in and correct me, that's fine, I admit I can be wrong.

 

Lastly, I said "for me, if it's not ROG, it's junk." This is my opinion. Just like you, I have a right to my opinion, which is based on years (25 to be precise) of building computers and extracting every last iota of performance out of them. I've been known to OC to the point that the bus traces burn off the board.. So if you want to quote something I said, please do not misrepresent my words.

 

To quote a website defining VAS:

On a 32-bit Microsoft Windows installation, by default, only 2 GiB are made available to processes for their own use.[2] The other 2GB are used by the operating system. On later 32-bit editions of Microsoft Windows it is possible to extend the user-mode virtual address space to 3 GiB while only 1 GiB is left for kernel-mode virtual address space by marking the programs as IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE and enabling the /3GB switch in the boot.ini file.

On 64-bit Microsoft Windows, processes running 32-bit executables that were linked with the /LARGEADDRESSAWARE:YES option have access to 4 GiB of virtual address space;without that option they are limited to 2GB. By default, 64-bit processes have 8TB of user-mode virtual address space; Linking with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE:NO artificially limits the user-mode virtual address space to 2 GB.

 

Note that I have no page file in my system. It is set to zero.

 

Also note in the quote above, if you're running a 32-bit version of windows, either XP or 7, not he limits on the VAS size.

 

@ the OP.... you asked a fair question and you received an answer that I hoped would help you. Your question was not stupid.

 

There is a solid retlationship in that OC is useless if your data stream is slow.  All you're doing is crunching numbers faster.  If they can't get through the processor and RAM faster, and throught the GPU's faster, you're bottlenecking the system.  Most people OC the CPU and forget about everything else.

 

Having a faster PCIe bus should also help because most of the textures, mesh, models, and such go from the RAM into VRAM through it. Watching FSX's PCIe bandwidth usage, it's usually at 7% most of the time, but it can spike upwards of 20% when there's lots of stuff to load. You'll see this if you turn up the autogen/scenery settings. Perhaps more with P3D since they sent more things through to the GPU.

 

 

Lastly, I said "for me, if it's not ROG, it's junk." This is my opinion. Just like you, I have a right to my opinion, which is based on years (25 to be precise) of building computers and extracting every last iota of performance out of them. I've been known to OC to the point that the bus traces burn off the board.. So if you want to quote something I said, please do not misrepresent my words.

 

Now I see where you're coming from.  I'm looking for something that I can OC in the 4.5 range.  Doesn't have to be perfect.  I think when P3D fixes the stutters and gets the OOMs down then 4.5 should be adequate.  From what I've been reading most of the 4770K boards I'm looking at should be able to do that but I'm not even close to a HW guru.  I've been told the Gigabyte motherboards are very good and I see those.

 

 

 

Having a faster PCIe bus should also help

 

How do you tell if a board has a faster PCIe bus?  I probably won't use SLI.

How do you tell if a board has a faster PCIe bus?  I probably won't use SLI.

 

Easiest way? Any recent chip (Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Sandy Bridge-Extreme) has PCIe 3.0. While the older chips (eg. Sandy Bridge, Lynnwood, Nehalem, etc) are still running on PCIe 2.0. PCIe 2.0 has a transfer rate of 8 GB per second, while PCIe 3.0 has a transfer rate of 15.75 GB per second.

 

Source

 

Might want to take a look at this too. Someone did a test to show the difference in performance between PCIe 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 using his modern GTX 780 GPU, as well as his older GTX 470.

 

 

Easiest way? Any recent chip (Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Sandy Bridge-Extreme) has PCIe 3.0. While the older chips (eg. Sandy Bridge, Lynnwood, Nehalem, etc) are still running on PCIe 2.0. PCIe 2.0 has a transfer rate of 8 GB per second, while PCIe 3.0 has a transfer rate of 15.75 GB per second.



Source



Might want to take a look at this too. Someone did a test to show the difference in performance between PCIe 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 using his modern GTX 780 GPU, as well as his older GTX 470.

 

Ah.  Thanks for all the info.  I'm looking for a PCIe 3.0 board.

FSX = 32bit application:  Max available VAS for a 32 bit app on a 64Gb OS = 2³² = 4Gb effectively.  As far as your FSX VAS "box" when that 4Gb box fills up with complex scenery/aircraft usage within the LOD that's it, period.  If you're not getting OOM errors then you're not pushing FSX that hard. 

I guess it's really not "Rocket Science".

 

I was hopping for a "Silver Bullet".

 

I thank everyone for their input.

 

Rick S.