Ivan Kovacevic

Mine works like a peach after I purchased the GTX460, too :)In fact, I failed to see a noticable difference in FSX between a GTX460 and my friend's GTX480 when we flew the same planes with the same scenery and settings on the same resolution. ;)If you're building a computer predominantly for FSX, you'll be wasting money on a GTX480. It's far far better to invest more in a proper power supply (Corsair, Enermax, Seasonic, Chieftec...) and an SSD, than to spend 200+$ more on a card FSX won't even use.

UTX only, Dazz.

Apologies, I mixed the two up. Those were on GLOBAL settings, the MAX settings are those that crash my sim :)By the way, I was doing the test at 1920x1080 with x8 Supersample AA and 16x AF, with x4 Transparency AA.Aaand, here are the MAX SETTINGS results as well.It comes as no surprise that they are terrible: Frames Time (ms) Min Max Avg3367 300000 ..............3.... 20...11.223

@Bangoman: Here's my fraps results with the Max settings. I couldn't do the "global" because for some reason it crashes my FSX every time before it even starts loading. Frames Time (ms) Min Max Avg17348 300000 33 79 57.827

I don't see how flying a default CRJ700 could possibly make a realistic comparison between the listed computers. I'm personally interested in how it behaves in the premium addons (PMDG MD11, 747, FSLabs Concorde) with premium scenery (FlyTampa, FSDT....).Plus, I've noticed on my PC I get roughly the same FPS (28-30 minimum) regardless of whether I fly the concorde or MD11, and whether I'm flying in FlyTampa Hong Kong, Boston, Aerosoft Heathrow or FSDreamTeam KJFK.

I'd be happy to participate in FSX comparisons between i5 and i7. I've got an i5-750 clocked at 4GHz with 4GB of RAM at 1900MHz (CL7).

I thought the 'reasonably priced' Sandy Bridge processors won't be overclockable in the way we're used to overclocking. They may provide 10% more performance on stock clock, but what about a comparison with a Lynnfield at 4GHz?

Yeah, I believe so - the famous mod by ******* (Hay-Sus, not Jeesus :P ) Altuve.

I'm using all the standard tweaks (AffinityMask,BufferPools,ShaderMod, HighMemFix) and a few terrain values changed to make it look better (LOD Radius, etc...)ShaderMod by far makes the most difference in sheer frame rates - without it, I get about 20, with it over 30 in most demanding situations.

Depends which sound card you get. If you get some 4$ card - it's gonna be the same (if not worse) quality than onboard audio. But, if you get something like the ASUS Xonar D2 - and you have a pair of proper quality speakers (usually means old, too - since they don't make them as they used to), you will indeed enjoy an improvement.

I had the exact same Gigabyte board you wanna get, and I was quite happy with it. Albeit, I only had an E7500 on it, clocked at 3.8GHz

I never actually tested the frames with stock CPU speed, but I've always wanted to do it. At the moment, I get 35+ frames with PMDG MD11, FlyTampa Boston, an overcast of 4096x4096 REX clouds and ASE - at FULL HD resolution. All sliders (except Autogen which annoys me by it's presence) are maxed out. Adding Autogen in the picture increases loading times, but doesn't reduce FPS by more than 1.

The V10 has only managed to beat the stock Intel cooler and a few of the cheapest ones. It's nowhere as good as the price and size suggest.

At those clocks, even a proper air cooler can do "low 50s":D

Most of the 'overclocked' editions are overclocked to 725MHz core. But, it appears that the core clock doesn't make that big of a difference in FS, since I clocked mine up to 900MHz and it made absolutely no difference in FS.

I think it depends which type you actually have. There are SSDs which have about 83% of it's actual capacity available to the user, and the rest is used for wear leveling. That one, I reckon, shouldn't slow down at all when full.

Having flown about 30-40 hours together with a friend who has a GTX480, on pretty much same scenery/weather/airplane and FS settings, we more or less get the same performance. I've got a 460 and it seems to keep up with the GTX480 in FSX without problems. Both of us have a 24'' monitor with 1920x1080 resolution. Other games are a different story, though - I need to turn off HBAO in Battlefield to get 60FPS constant in FULL HD resolution, and he doesn't :)

Is your mind set to a kit, or might you be interested in buying the parts separately? The reason I ask is because performance of kits is usually lower that the performance of a custom built system. At the same time, a custom system will let you change parts in the future easily. If you want to upgrade to a better or quieter pump, or add a bigger radiator and include a graphics card into the loop...When I say a custom built system I don't mean something custom machined just for you, but instead using individual production parts easily found in most liquid cooling shops and assembling it yourself. Also, what's your budget?

Neither would give you huge gains. The i3 is a two core CPU which will probably have a negative effect on performance in FSX, and the QX9770 should bring an improvement, considering you already got the best G-Card you can possibly have in Flight Sim. The QX will probably overclock like a banshee, too. :DIf you can get it at a decent price, that's probably the better option, unless you intend on switching to the LGA1156 platform and buying an i5-760 or an i7 in the near future. If that's the case, the i3 may work as an interim solution.

I was just making a general point :)People sometimes buy big coolers and get surprised when the idle temps aren't much lower than the stock cooler's idle temp. :)

Haven't tried the H70 myself, but I can hardly believe you could dissipate enough heat through a single 120mm radiator. The great thing about liquid cooling is that you can put as many fans on it as you want. The max number of fans you could put on a traditional air cooler is two, maybe three on the NH-D14 or the ThermalRight Arrow.On a liquid cooling system, you are pretty much limitless. You have single, dual, triple, quad and even 'grid' radiators that can fit anything from one to 12 fans - depending on your needs. Mind you, a triple radiator can dissipate about 400W of heat which is enough for a single overclocked CPU and a GTX4xx graphics card.

Big coolers tend to perform just as good as smaller coolers with low thermal load (like a dual code at stock clocks or an idling CPU) but it's the overclocked load temps that count, and then - size is everything! That's why big cooler reviews at stock clocks are totally meaningless. On an i7-920 at stock clock, the difference between an NH-D14 and CM Hyper 212+ (a quarter of the price of a Noctua) is only a couple of degrees.

I built a water cooling system for my PC. Mainly, it's a really expensive way of lowering your overclocked PC temperatures or making your PC quieter than with traditional air cooling. My current system only cools the CPU with water for now, but I'll soon be cooling the graphics card with it as well. In terms of performance, I've got an i5-750 clocked at 4GHz with max temperatures under full load floating around 50*C on the cores (not the CPU body temperature), all while the noise of the PC is quite low. But as I say, it's quite a costly solution - the cheap systems made by Thermaltake, Corsair, CoolerMaster and others are really not worth the hassle or risk of putting a gallon of water inside your PC - they perform as good as a quality air cooler. It's only when you get to the $300+ range that you actually justify water with performance. My system has been running on a 19hr/day schedule for about 3 months now with water cooling, and I haven't had a single problem yet.

Has anyone actually tried (compared) performance while running FSX on the system HDD as opposed to a separate hard drive?

I'm not too keen on using those 'one click fix' solutions, for two reasons:1) They probably do increase FPS, but at a huge cost on visual quality. They don't have an intelligent human brain to decide what looks good and what doesn't. 2) I've already applied every FSX cfg edit known to mankind. :D