first this is a report for discussion, not just a problem solving thread. just trying to gather some advanced level knowledge that we dont find in google, about i7 mainly.
its been a week since i set up my i7 920 hardware.. Its on a P6T (non V2), with 6GB 1600 9-9-9-24, gtx 280 factory oc'ed, 320gb 7200.10 hd and a 600W zalman psu. Did all the tweak guides by Nick, following by the letter mainly on the time to buy and choose the parts. The lack of faster ddr3 is due the availability of it in my country, such as prices of a new psu wich i'll try to change as soon as possible. It was pretty easy to achieve 4.0ghz even with HT enabled and default occt sessions run (the heatsink is a lapped TRUE with a good fan). The only exception to the list is that i'm running vista x64.
After everything done i hit up to the fsx. First impressions were very good, thought i expected more about smoothness on higher level of image quality. Then, i started tweaking with the things that everyone knows, such as poolsize and TBM. On stock fsx.cfg i was getting pretty descent performance, with no blurries at all, 50% of mytrafficX and extreme autogen. Some problems i noticed were flashing sky and clouds, some water textures when low flying and other textures that not the common known problems, all those sparse and too random, but irritating and challenging. Also i was experiencing sound problems for the first time in FSX, some cracking like static noise on almost payware and default aircraft i have. Tried all the standart solutions such switching drivers, reinstalling add-ons (such TSS sound for LVL767), changing samples rates on sound control panel, and lots of tweaking inside FSX, lasting the better for the end, bufferpools and tbm.
Now the strange thing, shouldn't bufferpools on high levels, cause artifacts, spikes? With me it was the opposed. The higher number i set, the lower problems i experienced, been that on 490mb it solved all of my corruption and faults with display and sound!
The problem that i noticed now are the thrilling stutters, after some time of flight, about 10 minutes around o'hare with extra 300, wich is my default test flight. Before this time, everything is perfect and smooth.
About the performance overall, on this system, changing autogen from extreme to very dense or even dense doesn't matter nothing, as just traffic. Bellow ~59% of airlines and GA its all of the same fps rate (minimals, average) and smoothness i get. The only things i noticed that drains too much perf. are water slider and bloom, as everyone already knows. Seriously, theres nothing i can do to reach the stutter-free setup, the sliders acts like theres no performance hits on the setting i mentioned. I've tried the frame limiter from the inside and the tool outside from the FSX with many values of TBM and BP, ranging from default to 100 and 490mb, accordingly.
Once when the heavy stutter started, i noticed the HD was over heavy loading by its sound and LED blinking, and that gives me the ideia to turn off pagefile. Also, doesn't changed nothing and no problems with OOM too, even after a long flight. And that is a point too. The stutter is much worse if i remain in some place or region of a city, such the skycrapers on chicago and manhattan. If i fly in a straigh line, just like a jet route, the stutter barely appears. When it happens, the fps reaches 3, 4, 5.. Also i tried with and without nhancer, recent drivers or the 182.50, it's all about the same.
The system never got a bsod, crash or shutdown since i've found the correct voltages and all, its pretty stable. I'm almost sure this is some of vista problem with video memory managing. Do you think i should give XP sp3 a try?
This night i was investigating through everest the resources of the system while flying in those bad conditions, such cpu usage, voltages and temperatures. All absolutely normal except to cpu usage, according with what you can see in the pictures. The whole time the cpu spikes show up were that i was under stutter.
Forget to mention that tryed playing with affinitymask on 15 and 255, with HT on and OFF. HT off and no affinitymask set seems to be the best option for me, but almost unoticeable.
Don't you think guys this cpu use graph is too straight? It follows always the same pattern as you can see, just like if i was flying in a circle..
