Speedbird 217

Just a quick thought: Did you make sure to install the latest drivers?

Thanks, glad you like it!It's gonna be hard to choose the paint scheme on the -800 for my next flight to Seattle. They just have so many special c/s for it... Dreamliner, Retro, the inverted all-blue and the Lei flower tail. But I'm gonna keep the latter for a flight to Hawaii some day.

Just on that HDD matter: I recently bought a new WD1002FAEX 1TB Black for my rig and I am very pleased so far. Before I had another WD HDD, which I wanted to replace after 5 years of service just out of precaution and the fact that new HDD's perform a lot better than old ones. I can't say that it's really noisy, even though I have it in a Xilence cooling case with integrated noise reduction ability - so I don't know how "noisy" it will be without that case. My guess is that you won't hear it in any scenario, as the GTX 580 should create a fair portion of noise anyway and if you're not using a water cooling system all the fans will be louder than your HDD. In addition I also have a last generation Velociraptor and I'm very pleased with it after 1.5 years of service so far. Not really noisy either and very good performance.Like the other posters already mentioned, a lot of people that write negative reviews are often too "stupid" (excuse my choice of words) to operate their hardware the way it's supposed to be. Of course there are also people that have bad luck or when a majority of the reviews are negative there probably is some truth to it. Anyway: Somebody that is pleased with his product is more likely not to write a review about it than somebody that is not pleased. If you look at reviews of the above mentioned products on amazon.com, they have pretty good ratings. I can only back that up from personal experience. So good luck with your new rig and as a last tip: If you want to know about some specific piece of Hardware you consider to buy, just ask in this forum. The people here are more likely to give you objective reviews and experiences about certain parts than on many other sites and they can also tell you if the chosen Hardware will be suited for your needs.

Get ready for the last leg on our Alaska adventure. Today I flew from Anchorage to Juneau. This was a perfect way to end this tour, with a beautiful and challenging approach into Juneau's runway 8 that requires a diagonal approach due to dangerous terrain on short final. All pictures unedited straight out of my FS9 again.Here's a little selection of the pictures from the full report that can be found here: Discovering Alaska Volume 6: ASA 62 – ANC to JNU

Thanks for the kind words, John! And I guess you will be happy to hear then that my next 3 flights will be on the NG as well. :(

Thanks :( What makes you think this route was "wrong"? Usually there is no "right route" for a flight as they always depend on weather and other external influences. The route comes from a reliable flight planning software that gives me great results most of the time. If you take a look at flightaware.com or other sources you will find that there are indeed different routings flown on the flights from Deadhorse to Anchorage every flight. But you're right, it's a nice flight in a very remote part of the world. I'm afraid I can't fly the NGX in my FS9. This is all unedited FS9, but it seems my fresh installation really worked wonders if you guys think it's FSX :(

Simply WOW!

Very impressive, great shots! Does the engine exhaust effect come with X-Plane or is this edited?

After a little break I finally got to fly again today. I reinstalled Windows and FS last week on my new HDD and therefore this also was kind of a test flight if everything worked well. There were some technical difficulties (ATC cancelled my IFR flight plan after EVERY single handoff for no apparent reason. On a second short test flight a few minutes ago this was solved, hopefully for good) but all in all it was a nice flight. I also enjoyed my new textures which give my FS a fresh look. Still a lot of work to do though until everything is back to normal...Pictures are all unedited, since the color saturation is a lot better now with REX Overdrive. Repaint is my attempt on N959BP from ConocoPhillips for Ifly 737NG. If you want it, just shoot me a PM and I'll send it to you. Don't expect high quality though, this was my first repaint...Full report: Discovering Alaska Volume 5: CON 132 – SSC to ANC

If I had to take a guess I would say it's the PSU. The HD6750 shouldn't demand to much w, but a no-name 450 PSU sounds very, let's say "venturous", to me. If it comes to PSU's you should always go for quality from a well-known brand. A few years back I had a no-name PSU and it killed my GPU one day. Also overclocking with such a thing is very risky as the specs almost never match up with what really comes out of that thing. According to your sig you also overclocked your CPU, so chances are good the PSU can't keep up with the new power consumption in your rig. Go for a PSU with at least 600w I would suggest, and get one from Corsair or another quality supplier. That should give you enough room to overclock everything you want and run a stable system with enough power, even for the future.

After I reinstalled Windows, I wanted to check how my system deals with FSX. So I ran FSXMark, according to the instructions, today and got the following results:Since I get really bad results when installing any addons like NGX, GEX, REX, UTX and so on (FPS go down to 10-15 in the NGX, sitting at an airport like Heathrow with a little weather. If I add AI-traffic they drop down to 6 or so), I was wondering if this might be related to my GPU after all. There is another entry in the Benchmark result spreadsheet from user bruguima. He has basically the same setup I have, but he has a GTX 570 in his rig and achieved 10FPS more than I did!Is this really due to the GPU, and if I decided to buy a Nvidia GPU would I really get 10 FPS more? I find that hard to believe. Before I invest almost 300 Euros in a card with similar specs, I would like to hear some opinions on that. Also, is there a huge difference between the GTX560Ti and the GTX570 (except for the 100 Euros difference in price...)?Thanks in advance.

I use the new 1TB for Windows, applications, FSX and other games. In addition I have a 300GB Velociraptor in my system that runs FS9. I'm in the installation screen right now. I think I'll create a 200GB partition for Windows and applications and the rest for FSX and games...

Well, that was quick. Today my new HDD already arrived. Now, before I take the leap, put in the new drive and install a fresh Windows: Is there any advice on how to format the drive? Does it make sense to use partitions or should I just create 1x 1 TB partition?Any help is appreciated, thanks!

I'm experiencing the same today. My guess is that 90% of the time I'm getting a screen like the one you posted. Reloading the page only works in some of the cases.It seems as if this problem really got worse yesterday, and especially today...

Beautiful shot!

No new day without a flight report at the moment. This time we went north. 70N to be exact. Our destination was Deadhorse, AS and the temperature there was a pleasant -25.6F. Cold enough to let us land with contrails. Not too many pictures though today, the ice desert for the most part of the trip was not that exciting...Full report can be found here:Discovering Alaska Volume 4: ASA 55 – FAI to SSC

Lol are you serious? That's 740 bucks in total! For basically what you can buy today for 28 bucks at amazon.com. It's called FSX and for the remaining 712 dollars you can upgrade your Hardware to run it on maxed settings. Sorry, but I would NEVER pay anything near that for the above mentioned. Especially because that would still be stock FS. I am always happy to pay money for good addons from third party developers, but what you are talking about is just the basis to run all that other stuff on...which won't happen for Flight! anyways since they excluded third-party developers.

Thanks for the feedback!Indeed it's FS9. Tuned to the limit... You're right, the Anchorage scenery is awesome. Finally someone closed this gap in the FS world. And the Ifly is just a joy to fly. I hope they start working on a new project soon, just imagine them developing a 777 for FS9...! :(

Thanks for the info! I'll wait until I get my new HDD and then I'm gonna run the Benchmark on a fresh FSX installation. Similar systems like mine with a NV GPU received around 36 FPS on average, so it will be interesting to see what results I will get. Since this benchmark is only vanilla FSX - how much drop in FPS can I expect when running addons like NGX, REX, GEX, UTX and complex sceneries with AI traffic? Like I said earlier, when running FSX out of the box I get high frames in the 50-60 FPS range...it's just all the addons that bring it down.

In my previous rig I had an NV8800 Ultra. This thing was High-End back in the day and I had a ton of problems with it. In the end it blew up and I received 2 malfunctioning replacement cards over the course of half a year, before the warranty period expired. This thing got hot as hell. That's when I decided to go for ATI in my new rig. I am very pleased with the results I get with anything I throw at it, except FSX...Like you said, I find it hard to believe that an almost identical card (specs-wise) would help me to get from 10-15 to 25-30 FPS. But on the other hand my CPU is pretty good, even though it's not the latest generation i7. But running an i7 920@3.8 GHz should be enough power to run FSX nicely, in my opinion?!

I ordered a WD1002 Black Caviar today. I'm happy with my VelociRaptor that houses my FS9 installation, but I read that the WD1002 with 64MB cache is pretty much the same in performance as my last generation Raptor. This saves me 50 bucks and gives me 400 GB more in capacity plus double the cache of the Raptor. I guess I won't notice much of a difference and it's a lot faster than my 5 year old WD anyway.Two more questions though:1. Does anybody know a way how I can backup the FS9-relevant registry files in my Windows installation? I will have to reinstall Windows on the new drive and my FS9 is on the Raptor. I don't really wanna reinstall everything, this would take me ages. But Addons like the PMDG, Ifly, Level-D and so on depend on registry keys in windows...2. Any other opinions on the "Bottleneck" that gives me such bad performance in FSX? Can anybody confirm that switching from my HD5850 to a GTX560 Ti would work miracles?

Same here! I usually click on the forums tab on the main page and end up on the above shown page. I can also confirm the problem with landing on the calendar page when I select the forums under the community tab. Probably started 2 or 3 weeks ago, maybe more.

And yet another report from my Alaska tour. Part 3 was from Anchorage to Fairbanks. We were lucky and had some very nice weather in Fairbanks, meaning vis below 1 mile, dense clouds/fog and snow!Full report can be found in my blog: Discovering Alaska Volume 3: ASA 183 – ANC to FAI

Searching the forums would have given you plenty of info on that. Prepar3D is the source code from FSX, further developed by Lockheed Martin for commerical customers like Flight Schools etc.They also offer a monthly subscription at 10$ a month or so, correct me if I'm wrong.Some say it has better performance than FSX. They announced that v2 of Prepar3D will offer a huge amount of improvements on the lousy code MS created for FSX and may support DX11 and stuff like that.I flew in Prepar3D at a fixed based simulator the other day and didn't notice any big differences to FSX at the current stage.

Thanks for the replies so far.Are you sure that changing to a GTX560 Ti will solve all my performance problems? When I compare them on hardware sites they seem to be pretty much the same performance wise, with the HD5850 even getting better FPS (up to15%) in some games. Since FSX is always said to be CPU-hungry I just can't imagine to double my FPS by putting in another GPU that basically has the same specs. I am considering to take the leap from FS9 to FSX finally, even though I love my old FS9. But if I can't run it on nice settings and fly with weather, full AI traffic in the NGX into JFK, getting a stable and smooth 25-30 FPS, I'd rather stick with the old platform for now where I don't have to worry about FPS at all.Regarding the HDD. I was in favor of the Velociraptor 600. It's around 55 Euros more compared to the Black Caviar 1TB and offers 400 GB less, obviously. I just want to know if the gain in performance justifies the 400GB less capacity for almost a third more in price?