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I currently have my OS and FSX + all addons (UTX, GEX, FEX, Megascenery) on my 150Gb raptor.

I currently have my OS and FSX + all addons (UTX, GEX, FEX, Megascenery) on my 150Gb raptor.  I also have O&O set up and defrag regularly (complete/name only) It takes my flights around 2 minutes to load.  I am considering buying another raptor and setting up the following:

Raptor 1) XP and sim addons (except UTX)
Raptor 2) FSX and Ultimate Terrain X only

Would this offer an improvement in load times or smoothness?


Thanks for your advice.

-Jim

I really think that the actual size of your hard drive FSX is on will not make that much difference. About the only way you might see any change would be in data transfer rates. The quicker the transfer the faster the through put as far as the drive goes that is. Of course other things will effect how quick you actually see it like amount of ram the type of video card and the speed and type of CPU you use. 8-)

Load times can be affected by the speed of the drive

But in FSX 2 minutes to load a flight indicates one or all of 4 things to me..

1. The CPU is slow and car traffic is set too high in FSX

2. You have a huge amount of 3rd party AI aircraft installed with flight plans. FSX must scan all sim objects before booting the program and a large amount of AI can also slow the flight load down too. This issue affects the program boot more than it does the flight load.

3. UTX has night lighting and other hard hitting features enabled which the CPU must calculate before the flight is booted

4. The AV solution is hindering the load. This is especially true with Avast, AVG and a few others when UTX is being used.


The solutions:

1. Get a faster CPU and reduce car traffic to 10% even with a fast one

2. There is nothing you can do about 3rd party AI other than make some name changes to the aircraft.cfg due to FSX searching for "sim.cfg" before 'aircraft.cfg" to load the planes, but, I would not mess with that. It affects program boot more than flight load anyway and has no affect on FSX performance itself.

3. Turn off the UTX night lighting features. There are a few other features in UTX that can cause long load times especially if you are not on a fast quad CPU but the 2 night lighting features hit the system the most.

4. Shut down the AV completely and make sure you have ended the process on the service too. The only AV I am aware of that will have no affect on FSX is NOD32




and as always a fragmented hard drive can affect loading as well however since you are on a Raptor and did follow my instructions I am sure that is not an issue here.

Thanks for the replies.

1) I have a C2D E6850 clocked at 3.8 GHz, car traffic is set at 15%
2) I only have the Iris F-14 tomcat, the xtreme prototypes X-15, and Just Flights F117 stealth fighter.

Turn off all UTX lighting

that and the combination of the CPU are most likely the reason for the long load time.

forget about GHz in flight loading, thats only one part of the equation. CPU speed does factor in but for flight load times the number of CPU's factors in most

UTX must be installed into FSX, no choice on that one. GEX and FEX can be installed on another drive or with the OS and they will send the FSX drive the updated textureas as they are called.

Megascenery can probably be installed elsewhere and the scenery library set to use a different folder but I have never done it because i do not use their products. FSGensis is best left where it is although it can also be installed to a separate scenery folder and activated in the scenery library

I install any 3rd party software which acts as a database and does not require being installed in the FSX directory, like FEX and GEX, OFF the FSX drive. I usually leave scenery installs where they wish to by default.

I can't afford a penryn or a QX6850, or even a QX6700.  I CAN afford a Q6600 easily.  I've been thinking about that for quite a while now.

I could get a Q6600 and set it up at around 3GHz, maybe more depending on heat and the cpu itself (right now my self-imposed limits are 1.45 vCore and 65 degC under load).  Would that be faster then a 3.8GHz C2D?

Turn off all UTX lighting

that and the combination of the CPU are most likely the reason for the long load time.

forget about GHz in flight loading, thats only one part of the equation. CPU speed does factor in but for flight load times the number of CPU's factors in most

Are you saying FSGenesis is best left on the same drive as FSX and in the default folder?

UTX must be installed into FSX, no choice on that one. GEX and FEX can be installed on another drive or with the OS and they will send the FSX drive the updated textureas as they are called.

Megascenery can probably be installed elsewhere and the scenery library set to use a different folder but I have never done it because i do not use their products. FSGensis is best left where it is although it can also be installed to a separate scenery folder and activated in the scenery library

I install any 3rd party software which acts as a database and does not require being installed in the FSX directory, like FEX and GEX, OFF the FSX drive. I usually leave scenery installs where they wish to by default.

Are you saying FSGenesis is best left on the same drive as FSX and in the default folder?

UTX must be installed into FSX, no choice on that one. GEX and FEX can be installed on another drive or with the OS and they will send the FSX drive the updated textureas as they are called.

Megascenery can probably be installed elsewhere and the scenery library set to use a different folder but I have never done it because i do not use their products. FSGensis is best left where it is although it can also be installed to a separate scenery folder and activated in the scenery library

I install any 3rd party software which acts as a database and does not require being installed in the FSX directory, like FEX and GEX, OFF the FSX drive. I usually leave scenery installs where they wish to by default.

Thats up to you. I leave it alone.

If I was going to start placing scenery outside of FSX I would install a 3rd drive and have it all by itself away from FSA and away from Windows.

I do not use that method

Thanks Nick.  It sounds like splitting FSX/addons up between 2 drives is not worth it unless it's RAID, set up correctly of course.  

I posted another cpu question in the hardware forum (Quad core post).  Can you take a look at it?

-Jim