My 3 year old relic

[shally17 1]

Hello Everyone,

About three years ago I built my dream system to run FSX boxed edition and finally had a system that ran it reasonably well. I delidded my i7 3700 3.5 GHz and with water cooling successfully overclocked it to 4.0GHz. Combined with the then top of the range GTX 680 2Gig Graphics, SSD drives and 8 GIG of Gskill RAM running at 2000, I was in heaven. Sadly after a catastrophic event last week (in computer terms) I am faced with loading everything including hundreds of add-ons from scratch. If I am going to upgrade, now is the time. My question is this. Is there anything out there now, some three years later, that will give me significant enough gains in FSX performance to warrant an upgrade?

Regards,

Steve.

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

If you can rescue your current system, it will still do the job.  :smile:

 

If not, suggest a 6700K and GTX1070 on a good, fast motherboard.

[shally17 1]

Thanks. Given that FSX is so CPU dependent, I was wondering of the GTX 1070 would give me much more than my GTX680.

[martin-w 3,235]

Not 6700K.

 

Go for 7700K, Kaby Lake. IPC is more or less the same, however Kaby Lake overclock's better. Expect 5 GHz or higher if the silicone lottery does you any favours and your cooling is up to it.

 

Kaby Lake also offers other new features that may be of interest. Z270 Motherboard.

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

Not 6700K.

 

Go for 7700K, Kaby Lake. IPC is more or less the same, however Kaby Lake overclock's better. Expect 5 GHz or higher if the silicone lottery does you any favours and your cooling is up to it.

 

Kaby Lake also offers other new features that may be of interest. Z270 Motherboard.

 

Not everyone would agree - see other posts on same question..

 

http://www.avsim.com/topic/502912-6800k-vs-7700k-for-simming/

Thanks. Given that FSX is so CPU dependent, I was wondering of the GTX 1070 would give me much more than my GTX680.

 

Depends on how you define "much more"..  as I said, you current system will do the job..

[martin-w 3,235]

Not everyone would agree - see other posts on same question..

 

http://www.avsim.com/topic/502912-6800k-vs-7700k-for-simming/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don't have to see those posts you linked to Bert, I was part of the discussion.

 

Jim Young, myself and three others favoured the 7700K. One guy had ordered the 7700K but ended up with a 6700K because he found a cheaper deal.

 

The only guy that didn't favour the 7700K, went for a 6850K, because he favoured the bigger cache. So wasn't deciding between the 6700K and 7700K anyway, so not relevant.  

 

If the OP ends up building a new system, it makes no sense at all to opt for a Skylake system. Unless he's intent on W7 of course and fears any issues. Although I'm told that in practice all is well in that respect. [Currently] The price is similar so why opt for the previous generation.

 

I recall a similar discussion you and I had when I built my 6700K system. You were very anti Skylake. We had quite a debate. Now you've reversed that opinion and favour Skylake. I recall your objection to 6700K/Z170 was that "it was new". I presume that same "newness" is swaying you in the direction of Skylake now?

 

If so, "newness" isn't an issue. There are no significant issues. Just as there weren't with Skylake. 

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

I don't have to see those posts Bert, I was part of the discussion. 

 

Sorry, this was not directed at you - but to the original poster..

[TheFamilyMan 280]

Thanks. Given that FSX is so CPU dependent, I was wondering of the GTX 1070 would give me much more than my GTX680.

The gtx 1070 will give you much better cloud rendering performance and better performance using higher AA (anti-aliasing) settings. I made an upgrade from a gtx 780 to a gtx 1070 and was very impressed with the enhanced performance in these two area.  I can now run AS16 with 8 cloud layers at a 130 mile max range using REX soft clouds; no problems flying though that...which would devastate my gtx 780.  Running this in my 3.5 years old relic, a 4.5Ghz OC 4770k w/2x8Gb 2400 cas 10 ram driving a 2560x1440 monitor.

[shally17 1]

When I have detailed weather settings in AS16 my biggest problem, particularly if flying a PMDG plane in a detailed scenery area is the crash and accompanying "Out of Memory" message telling me to turn down my settings. I have Windows 7 64bit and 8 Gig of RAM. DO you not experience this? If not, how can I get around this which was my single biggest problem before the system malfunction mentioned earlier.

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

When I have detailed weather settings in AS16 my biggest problem, particularly if flying a PMDG plane in a detailed scenery area is the crash and accompanying "Out of Memory" message telling me to turn down my settings. I have Windows 7 64bit and 8 Gig of RAM. DO you not experience this? If not, how can I get around this which was my single biggest problem before the system malfunction mentioned earlier.

OOM errors are independent of the video card, and the only cure I know of, is indeed to turn down the FSX/P3D settings.  LOD radius greater than 4.5 is the worst culprit IMHO.

[TheFamilyMan 280]

I don't own any PMDG aircraft, and only a few add on airports.  Maybe my post is not a very helpful info for the OP, considering I've never experienced the dreaded OOM in FSX.

 

As professional software engineer, I'm rather dismayed that the developers of FSX didn't implement any means of releasing 'no longer in use' resources, considering the finite nature of address space.  BTW, the 64bit address space does not fix this design problem, it only provide a seemingly bottomless "dust bin" for such resources, so OOM won't occur until you run out of swap space (which is crazy to even consider happening, though well before that time you would have already been driven insane by the resulting performance hit of using swap space).  If this base design issue isn't remedied in the 64 bit future of P3D/DTG, having at least 32GB of ram will be of great value.

[Bob Scott 7,720]

I don't own any PMDG aircraft, and only a few add on airports.  Maybe my post is not a very helpful info for the OP, considering I've never experienced the dreaded OOM in FSX.

 

As professional software engineer, I'm rather dismayed that the developers of FSX didn't implement any means of releasing 'no longer in use' resources, considering the finite nature of address space.  BTW, the 64bit address space does not fix this design problem, it only provide a seemingly bottomless "dust bin" for such resources, so OOM won't occur until you run out of swap space (which is crazy to even consider happening, though well before that time you would have already been driven insane by the resulting performance hit of using swap space).  If this base design issue isn't remedied in the 64 bit future of P3D/DTG, having at least 32GB of ram will be of great value.

 

P3D already does this...release of scenery from memory in areas outside the "reality bubble" is one of the hallmark features of v3.x

 

@shally17--if you're not using DX10 (with Steve's fixer, to cure most of the side effects of the partially implemented DX10 preview in FSX), that will go a long way in helping with OOMs.

 

@Bert--the video card RAM can indeed make a difference in OOM susceptibility if using DX9, because the API requires using some of your available VAS for a local window into the video RAM.  From the Microsoft DX9 sdk:

 

"If an application creates its own in-memory copy of its video resources, or the application uses DirectX 9 or an earlier version, the virtual address space contains the WDDM video memory manager's virtualized range and the application's copy. Applications that use graphics APIs that are earlier than DirectX 10 and that target GPUs that have large amounts of video memory can easily exhaust their virtual address space."

 

Regards

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

@Bert--the video card RAM can indeed make a difference in OOM susceptibility if using DX9, because the API requires using some of your available VAS for a local window into the video RAM.  From the Microsoft DX9 sdk:

 

"If an application creates its own in-memory copy of its video resources, or the application uses DirectX 9 or an earlier version, the virtual address space contains the WDDM video memory manager's virtualized range and the application's copy. Applications that use graphics APIs that are earlier than DirectX 10 and that target GPUs that have large amounts of video memory can easily exhaust their virtual address space."

 

 

Interesting, did not know that..

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

Thanks. Given that FSX is so CPU dependent, I was wondering of the GTX 1070 would give me much more than my GTX680.

It certainly will....you will have great R.O.I. in going to a 1070 from a 680!