HyperionXL

Uhmmmm. Is that just a really poor quality picture, or are all the components just caked in dirt and dust?

BTW, Don't think there will be any 6-core cpus from Intel at $300 coming out anytime soon. Intel is busy working on their next new architecture which isn't due out for another year or so.My Falcon II SSD workds great for FSX. I've heard its not the best SSD in the world, but its better than any physical harddisk available.

Crashmax...Any tips to help me get my 980x stable. I can't figure out this chip for the love of me.I actually think I got a pretty aweful chip. Having trouble getting stable at anything above 4.2. Lame lame lame.

Runs decent, but with the huge LOD I had to kick that back to get decent Frames with higher traffic levels. I like to see my airports swimming with traffic! Also kicked back cloud draw distance and saw that helped around major ports.However, I had no problem with settings at Max in areas lesser flown. Asia, africa, etc.

Yeah. Mem is overclocked up there. 6 sticks in total.And if you are building this strictly for FSX, go with the 480. I've heard some things about using them in SLI and there is an improvement to stutters, but doesn't give any significant performace boost as far as FPS. I've been thinking about getting a second one to test it, thoughIt sounds like you have some money to play with, so you might wanna stretch and go for the i7 980x. There won't be any significant updates to CPUs for another year, so it might be a good investment if you're looking for max everything. There's another thread on here from crashmax who uses these together and the results are gorgeous

How are those 2x 5970s working for you in crossfire with FSX. Any actual benefit to running 4 gpu cores versus just using 5970s out of crossfire?

do yourself a favor - save up your cash and buy the gtx480

Alllllrighttttt. Can anyone do a test flight for me at VTBD? Tell me if it's full of traffic at 100%.How about any of the smaller airports in Thailand? VTCH. I mainly fly around there, and with TrafficX, every parking spot is full. However, I'm not sure if UT2 is mainly for US/Euro flyers or fills up every single airport with a parking spot.

I'm not sure about your memory problem. I bought 2000mhz sticks that run 1066 stick and with overclocking run up to 1600. I think that might be the problem... that it won't run those speeds stock, but you have to OC.The motherboard though, is a joy to work with and over clocked very easily. It looks very nice, as well.Only problem I had was with the pcie slots. I removed my ATI 5870 to be replaced with the gtx480. The clip the holds the card in place is very difficult to use and while it should have released the card and popped right out, it ended up snapping the pcie slot in half and coming out still attached to the card at one tiny little pivot point where the clamp hadn't let go. Could have been user error, but I think the clamp may have been faulty.Luckily, I installed that card in the second available slot, so when I put the gtx480 in, it blocked off the view to that slot. The motherboard still works perfetly, although I was given quite a scare by that.And I would suggest not using ATI's 5 series with FSX if that's all you're using the PC for. Been there, done that, bought the 480 and was very, very impressed by the increase in clarity and IQ as well as smoothness of all my flights. With ATI, you won't be able to use max clouds or autogen without some serious stuttering. You'll also get a headache from Vsync issues.Just my two cents.

How are traffic levels outside of North America and Europe. Is there a lot of traffic in Asia?

VCDefault SceneryMaxed AI with TrafficXMed x WaterMax Cloud cover and distanceMedium Airport Vehicles10% Ground/Water TrafficTried Using Nhancer and it just didn't look right. Anti-Aliasing was making some text a little fuzzy for me. Then again, I probably did something wrong there. Not using it now and FSX looks and works just fine.

So here's whats up.I have yet to deal with Nhancer except forcing VSync. Ahhh! No more tearing with the 5870. Yay.Things overall run smoother, and autogen doesn't bother this thing at all. Clouds are set to max and I get little to no stutters when they are loaded in or flow in to. The ATI really struggled with both of these giving me stutters and a bit of lag when flying over dense forests or thick clouds.My test flight gave me 13 - 18 FPS flying over KSEA airport. Once I got about 1000 AGL and turned away from the airport towards the mountains, I was hitting 30 FPS no problem. There were some spikes coming, although they were coming at 32 - 33 FPS. I think I have some playing with to do on my CFG file, but overall, I am very satisfied with the card. Everything looks very crisp, and the night lighting at airports looks a lot better for some reason.I'll see what I can do with Enhancer to make things shinier.

Just got my 480 installed. Ended up breaking off half a pcie slot trying to get my 5870 out. Argg.. luckily still have 3 more slots to play with and the giant 480 overlaps the broken slot. The clamp system on the gigabyte board is a huge pain in the arse.Anyways, will test once I get the drivers installed and everything set up!!

I was running a similar setup before I built my computer. I ended up buying a 5870 thinking that would be the answer to my horrible FPS.It did give me some boost, but not a ton. Just said to myself eff it and bought the i7 with completely new hardware. The i7 without a doubt is the cause for my huge FPS bump. If you don't have the money, save up for now and fly with lower settings. They're won't be any new CPUs for a year so you have some time to the point where you won't have to buy another upgrade in just a month or two.

Edit: totally forgot what forum I was on >.<Prices won't drop much, if at all. You're probably looking at a price drop of 1 - 300$ several months down the line. Drop the money and pay for FSX FPS yumminess!

This is an ATI card, not nvidia.Either way, each mode I used to test was after a restart of FSX.AA, except at its very highest levels, showed no impact to FPS, positive or negative between the lowest and middle quality settings for all modes of AA.

I saw absolutely zero difference between different AA settings in the default 172 at KSEA, except when I turned the AA to the max, which dropped everything down 2 FPS on average. I had max everything except water at med x 2 and clouds at high with 60 miles visibility. AI was at 100% with trafficx. Average FPS was around 11. I turned on catalyst AI and openGL Tripple Buffering on and got 2-3 more FPS. I admit my frames are lower than what I would expect from my machine which makes me wonder if I've done something wrong. Done the ******* buffer pool and general tweaks, so it all runs generally smooth... just lower FPS than I'd imagine I should be getting with all the power in my machine.However, Low and mid AA settings showed absolutely no change in FPS for me.

I'll attempt to confirm this when I get home from a short vacation I took this weekend. We have virtually the same system.

I have, but I still get huge drops in fps around autogen and bad weather. I'm just like you. I want max everything on fsx. If the 480 puts me in the right direction to getting there then I don't mind dropping the cash. Plus I like buying new shiny stuff. Gets me away from my cockpit. Lol

Alrighty then.Thailand never got the 285, so I was stuck with the 5870 or Nv 250. The 5870 works great, but stutters a hell of a lot around autogen, ai and has the annoying vsync issues that make playing with TrackIR no fun. I also have to tune down clouds to mid settings.I'll keep my eye on this thread until the 480 comes to town, hopefully, sometime next week. Probably still keep the 5870 just so I can run extra monitors for panels or a future rig in wideview.

I'd like to know this, too, actually, please and thank you.Is this the card to get, or not, for sure, or not.

Right click my computer and go to manage then to disc management. Right click your D drive, go to extend volume and accept, it should take your unallocated space and put it back in to that hard drive. Should fix the problem. Answer came from a quick search using Google, bro. Learn it, use it, love it.

The 5870 still lags with clouds and extremely dense autogen (flying over forests kills my gpu), but works fine for very dense. It still struggles with REX clouds, and I keep the clouds visual to 60 m at minus 1 - 2 notches from the max.Vsync sucks with the ATI. I still can't figure it out with the ATI tray tools.I'll probably be upgrading the the 480 when I hear how it performs for others.But general consensus is that the 285 is the best card released (as the 480 isn't proven yet, and only one test run with the 470 from 1 member here)

I'm looking for a decent tree replacement for FSX. I tried Natural World Trees, but they aren't really what I'd expect from payware.Any other suggestions, freeware or payware?Thanks!