Looking at a CPU upgrade

[bouma1874 0]

I've been splashing out a little recently on some new toys but didn't run with a CPU upgrade. Currently I have an i7-3770k clocked at a stable 4.7ghz and I do get decent performance but not quite the smoothness I was looking for at payware airports mainly. Would a new CPU help and if so are they easy to replace on my current Motherboard??

 

Current specs:

Windows 7

Gigabyte z77x-ud3h

2x4 GB Patriot RAM 2133mhz

Intel i7-3770k at 4.7

K2 Mount Doom CPU cooler (air)

EVGA 4GB GTX 970

2x SSD (one for windows one for FSX)

[PieEater 10]

Your motherboard doesn't support any better processors than the one you currently have - see here - So a CPU upgrade would also entail a new motherboard. If you're currently thinking of an upgrade I would wait for the next generation of Intel CPUs to be released (Skylake) because you would gain very little if anything upgrading right now.

 

/Edit - You could check to see if an upgrade from 8GB to 16GB of RAM would be worthwhile, run FSX with all your add-ons in windowed mode and have task manager / resource monitor running so you can keep an eye on physical memory useage. 

[bouma1874 0]

Your motherboard doesn't support any better processors than the one you currently have - see here - So a CPU upgrade would also entail a new motherboard. If you're currently thinking of an upgrade I would wait for the next generation of Intel CPUs to be released (Skylake) because you would gain very little if anything upgrading right now.

Thank you so much for this..saved me a few pennies for now

Just checked my memory usage in flight and it seems to run at around 55% compared to CPU usage of around 81%. I seem to recall somewhere seeing that fsx can only use 4GB of RAM??

[PieEater 10]

Just checked my memory usage in flight and it seems to run at around 55% compared to CPU usage of around 81%. I seem to recall somewhere seeing that fsx can only use 4GB of RAM??

 

Some add-ons run outside of FSX so it depends on what you're running as to how much RAM you need, sounds like you don't need to worry. As your hardware is good perhaps you could to look at some of the tweaking guides to see if you can get that additional smoothness you're after. With these guides there is no one-size-fits-all approach so it's good to check out one tweak at a time, see if it works for you and if not put it back.

[bouma1874 0]

Im just in the process right now of trying all these tweaks out there lol ! there's a few addons I'm running on my fsx machine

 

UT2 (sliders very low)

Ezdok

Rex

Orbx openLC

PMDG 737NGX

 

Would these affect RAM performance ?

I have pro-atc and ASN running off a network too

[PieEater 10]

Would these affect RAM performance ?

 

RAM performance doesn't decrease with usage, at 55% you've got plenty left to play with, you can always go back to task manager to check how much physical memory is being used if you add new software. Have you tried DX10 preview mode? I use it with Steve's fixer and have found it beneficial in terms of performance and visuals and wouldn't go back.

[bouma1874 0]

Ahh so ram wouldn't help the situation .. yes I am in DX10 with Steves fixer and visually it's brilliant ,, it seems tho I can't really budge past about 23fps at uk2000 EGBB with it dropping at various points making it very stuttery. Sometimes the EGBB on approach will fade in from a black outline so maybe there's a cfg problem rather than a CPU performance problem ??

[PieEater 10]

Ahh so ram wouldn't help the situation .. yes I am in DX10 with Steves fixer and visually it's brilliant ,, it seems tho I can't really budge past about 23fps at uk2000 EGBB with it dropping at various points making it very stuttery. Sometimes the EGBB on approach will fade in from a black outline so maybe there's a cfg problem rather than a CPU performance problem ??

 

Yes, as I said previously your hardware specs are good, if you're not happy with performance you'll need to look at tweaks.

 

These are the few performance tweaks that I use and work for me, I would try them one at a time and test to see if they work for you, maybe do a bit of research so you know what they do;

 

[JOBSCHEDULER]

AffinityMask=84

 

[bUFFERPOOLS]

Poolsize=0

 

[GRAPHICS]

HIGHMEMFIX=1

 

[Display]

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=120