Tom Wright

FSX because it has better graphics, better scenery and better aircraft.

All the time! Sometimes I'll break for a few months at a time. I always end up coming back to it though.

Just install Acceleration over the service packs. FSX with Acceleration is a higher version number to FSX and SP2 anyway.

Out of all of those the only one I have is Gary Summons' UK2000 Heathrow Xtreme. Very impressive scenery, and much better performance than the Aerosoft Mega Airport LHR.

I don't hate X-Plane. Far from it, I have enormous respect for the team at Laminar Research. It's just from my own personal perspective, there's too many things about it that I don't like for me to switch from MSFS (which I've been using for many years and owned multiple versions of). I'm not fond on the graphics, even in XP10, I don't think the new scenery looks particularly real, especially with settings down lower, and there's no airport buildings. The Virtual Cockpits in most of the aircraft I've looked at are still vastly inferior to what I've seen in FSX. And its just so difficult to use, the UI is a mess and a real pain to navigate. I have a fairly average joystick, yet I still had to go and manually set most of the axis and the buttons to work properly. And I still can't get to grips with the viewpoint system, there's so many and they're so difficult to cycle through and find the best one.

That's a very unusual spec for a home PC. I thought the Xeon was normally found in commercial use. Is it an ex server or business workstation?

You either pay the developer's price for it, or you go without it. If you thought anything for the Flight Sim community you'd put your hand in your pocket and help support the developers who work hard to give us amazing products, not steal their work without giving them a penny for their efforts. No true Flight Sim enthusiast supports software piracy.

I don't have those so can't comment.

Looking through your list it looks like you like your airliners, but the Aerosoft Katana 4X is good fun to play around with, and the most immersive GA add on there is. You have to do walk around checks, maintenance, replace damaged parts, wash it etc. Highly recommend. Other add ons I'd recommend: Real Environment Xtreme, which totally transforms the look and feel of the whole sim. Flight 1 BN2 Islander, great model and fantastic sounds and VC, plus easy to fly and perfect for short hops into small airfields. Concorde X from Flight Sim Labs, iconic aircraft and a highly realistic and immersive rendition - you'll be studying it for weeks! Also scenery wise, anything from Orbx, Pacific Northwest probably a good place to start and a couple of airports, Orcas and Darrington or Concrete. Truly amazing scenery. Finally, Earth Simulations have some amazing scenery of the Channel Islands and Isles of Scilly, which are stunning.

Interesting info.It's rated at 1600MHz 9-9-9-24 and it's currently running at 1236MHz. Using XMP sets it to 1600MHz, but the Bios still only reads 4Gb. In CPUZ it reads 6Gb though. I have tried swapping the sticks around and deduced it was always the middle orange DDR3 slot that wasn't registering.

Hi,I did try XMP and it didn't work for me. Still only POSTing 4Gb. It started doing it around the same time I replaced my CPU cooler with a Noctua NHD14, and I've read around a lot that it could be caused by bent pins from the weight of the cooler. Seems weird to me, but nothing has managed to fix it yet.Interesting you say about the graphics card not making much difference. I'm inclined to think it would (and have heard elsewhere), particularly as the near 100% GPU usage in some scenarios almost definitely means the GPU is the bottleneck, and the Superclocked 560Ti has much higher clock speeds than my 285.

Hi,Just wondered if anyone here could help me out with graphics cards specifically for FSX (as that's pretty much all I use this PC for)!I currently have a Zotac GTX 285 which feeds a 1920x1080 HDTV, along with a Core i7 920 running at 4.0GHz, and 4Gb DDR3 RAM. It used to be 6Gb but my Asus P6T Deluxe v2 motherboard decided one day to only register 4Gb. I've tried everything I can think of from flashing the BIOS to reseating each of the RAM sticks to reseating the CPU but nothing's helped. The only thing left would be to RMA the board, and as it's now 2 years old I might as well upgrade the whole thing!Rather than upgrade the whole thing now, which obviously would be to a Sandy Bridge system, I decided to wait for Ivy Bridge, as aside from the RAM my 920 runs quite nicely and cool at 4GHz, and I heard that Ivy Bridge is intended to be the 'true' successor to Bloomfield.One thing I want to do now though is replace the graphics card. In FSX, with the relatively recent scenery releases like Earth Simulation's Guernsey and FTX which rely on lots of high detail autogen, my 285 struggles to cope. Frame rates are low and often I get artefacts and spikes, and GPU load is near 100% a lot of the time. I'm considering the eVGA GTX 560 Ti Superclocked Edition, as i'm drawn to the particularly high clock speeds this model has. There are a few different variations available. They also do a 560 Ti with 2Gb of memory, but this does not have as high clock speeds as the 1Gb Superclocked models. In addition there is a 'DS' model, which the only difference appears to be that it has two fans rather than one. My question is, out of these, which would be better (purely for FSX performance), and more broadly, is the 560 Ti a good choice?Many thanks,Tom

Might be worth taking a look. If its an air cooled unit (which it sounds like it) then over time the vents will suck in dust which will block the filters and reduce the airflow through the case to cool the components. I think what is happening with your PC is it has detected it is too hot and is shutting down as a safety measure to reduce risk of damage.Usually if it's software related the program will just crash to the desktop. A complete shutdown like that almost always points to a hardware problem of some kind, most likely excess heat.

If it just shuts off like that, it sounds to me like an overheating issue. FSX is quite intensive and it will heat most PCs up a bit. If you don't have adequate cooling it may cause problems. I assume your PC is well ventilated? Have you checked the air filters for dust?

I really wouldn't recommend running something as demanding as FSX on a virtual pc. I doubt you'd see very good performance. If you really want to run FSX on your Mac, I think Bootcamp is your best bet. I know it means rebooting, but hey - you did buy a Mac! And that's nothing against Macs at all because I have one (as well as a PC) and they're awesome, they're just not the greatest choice for FSX. If you want to run a flight simulator that's native to Mac OS X, try X-Plane!

Hi Paul,I think it was your post I found that made me set the poolsize to that value which has helped greatly with the artifacts, so thanks! The problem I describe here is not really artifacts, it's like the whole screen flashes outside the cockpit.I've already got the HIGHMEMFIX=1 and the reject threshold in there. Water i'm running at 2.x Low. Setting 2.x High brings the frame rates into single figures, particularly at Orbx airports!My specs, if it helps: Core i7 920 at 4.0GHz, 4.0Gb DDR3 RAM (should be 6.0Gb but having Motherboard issues at the moment and it only registers 4Gb), GTX 285 1Gb (stock), 120Gb OCZ SSD (with FSX on), 1Tb Spinpoint HDD, Windows 7 Pro 64 bit.Regards,Tom

Hi,Until recently I'd been having major problems with autogen related artifacts, but after reading some advice in another topic on here I added the line Poolsize=8388608 to the Bufferpools bit of the CFG and this has almost completely cured it.The last couple of days I've been flying the PMDG NGX between various Orbx Australia airports, mostly Canberra and Melbourne. It's pretty expected that FPS will be low approaching these airports. However, during the flight at various points (i'd make a guess and say roughly every 10 minutes or so) there is a flicker that lasts less than a second, but is noticeable none the less. Difficult to describe but the picture outside the aircraft flashes darker for a split second then back to normal.Not much to go on but does anyone know what this is or has seen it before themselves?Thanks,Tom

Just Flight 737 Pilot in Command for FS2004.

FSWC (FS Water Configurator) is worth a try. It's highly customizable. It's not compatible with Shader 3 though so uninstall that first.Regards,Tom

Out of those three, the PMDG NGX expansion without doubt.However, GA wise, I highly recommend Aerosoft's Diamond DA-20 Katana 4X. It's the most advanced and detailed simulation of a GA. Also worth mentioning is Flight1's BN-2 Islander.

I've noticed this on mine too. Not quite as bad as yours, but I've certainly noticed it just sits there at 6% for several minutes (making you think it's frozen) before picking up again. Regards,Tom

I used to run it on my old HP laptop, Centrino Duo 1.83GHz, 2.0Gb RAM and a 128mb Geforce Go graphics chip (which eventually melted, but that's not relevant). REX ran fine, even with HD textures enabled. It's a seriously brilliant add on. I'd use the water too if I were you, some of the water sets are equally as amazing as the clouds, and it allows you to play around with the colour tones, resulting in much more realistic colour tailored to the environment you're flying in - I use a much more greenish colour for my water because I do most of my flying around the UK.Regards,Tom

It's a de Havilland Dragon Rapide. Regards,Tom

+1 for Shade, it's great! Has lots of different profiles. Generally darkens the sim, adds shadow to the terrain in the crests of hills, also dynamic shadowing to the cockpit - when turning the cockpit gets lighter/darker relative to the sun. Great little add on and at no FPS hit.Regards,Tom

No worries!Yeah it can be a very 'pretty' sim if you have the horsepower to be able to wind the settings up to see all the eye candy! Give it time and put some add ons on it and you'll soon see how slow and demanding it can be!No need to rummage around files. Just use the uninstaller provided and you should be fine!Regards,Tom