5 months and still tweaking!

[laurits]

Hi. Great forum I found here, I need an opinion... 5 months now and still tweaking most of the time and flying sometimes!
I have this year 2007 "edition" of a PC which I'm trying to squeeze every bit of extra performance out of, cause I'm on a budget, and the budget does NOT mention an i7 f.ex.!

Here goes:

Intel Q6600 B3 - @3,69 Ghz - Voltage 1.48 - temps OK, have NorthQ Siberian Tiger 2, which keeps it at 55 to 60 C. under load.

RAM: Crucial Ballistix DDR2 PC 64oo CL4 800 Mhz @984 Mhz 4-4-4-12 T2

GFX: Asus 8800 GTS 640 Mb - clocked to 676 Mhz.

MOBO: Asus P5Q-E (cannot run DDR3 RAM...)

My question to the "experts" here:

Where's the bottleneck in this set-up?

Can I improve anything?

Thanks very much for your help!

Cheers...

[SubZer0]

How much RAM is in there?

And welcome to Simviation!

[laurits]

Thanks!

RAM: 4 x 1 Gb

[grizzard]

What kind of "bottleneck" are you experiencing?  You need to be more specific here ....

[SubZer0]

Everything really seems to be in order for those specs...

What problems are you having within FSX? We can help you directly with that issue and get you going right without having to spend money on any upgrades

[laurits]

No major problems with FSX (except the usual small annoying stutters and tree-shimmer!), everything is set according to NickN's excellent advise, with nHancer and XP 64 bit OS.

What about the RAM, any gain in buying a new set of 1066 Mhz DDR2? (1066 is max. for P5Q-E to my knowledge).

Is the 8800 GTS still an OK card?

Thanks...

(Did you guess it? -  I'm a PERFECTIONIST!, LOL)

[SubZer0]

You have your current RAM at 984mhz at CL4, that's already pretty good really... If you could get it to work at 1T instead of 2T (might be hard) it might help... FSX really likes fast memory, but I just don't think it's worth going out and getting 1066mhz

You might gain some performance with a newer video card, but the GeForce 8 series has always been strong in FSX. If you upgrade to a newer video card, I really don't know if it'll be a bottleneck or if it'll be worth it :-/

Those are my two cents... if Nick gets in here it'd be of good help to you, as he might have some different suggestions

[laurits]

Thanks for the advise...

Yep, I think the same about the RAM, will try change to T1, they work pretty good, have two small extra fan's blowing on them!

The 8800 GTS is still OK, so all in all, keep this rig a couple of years more I guess and then buy "The Ultimate FSX Machine"!

If that machine will be here someday.. :-?

[SubZer0]

If that machine will be here someday.. :-?

I'm pretty close with my set-up (see my sig)

[laurits]

Yep, seems pretty close, but can you fly "The Thing" (FSX) without any of the known issues: stutters in turns and spot view, treeshimmer etc, etc.

Would think that you needed at least an i7 940 and the GTX 285...

Just want to know, so I can plan how much money I have to take from the Mrs.'s food-budget!

[SubZer0]

Yep, seems pretty close, but can you fly "The Thing" (FSX) without any of the known issues: stutters in turns and spot view, treeshimmer etc, etc.

Would think that you needed at least an i7 940 and the GTX 285...

Just want to know, so I can plan how much money I have to take from the Mrs.'s food-budget!

Never had any stutters or tree shimmer with this hardware... I'm running nhancer as Nick says but I'm on windows 7

the i7 940 is recommended over the 920 for ease of overclocking and reaching 4.0ghz, but I've managed to do that easily on a 920 with the right cooler (even in summer time in southern FL temps are fine) and it's not even the newer D0 stepping which is MUCH easier to OC

the 285 does have an advantage over the 260 in that it has better clock speeds, higher memory interface, and more memory... FSX will love that. however, the 260 does the job for me just fine (though I wish I had a 285 lol)

[laurits]

Sounds great!

Maybe an i7 set-up is within reach for me then, when it's that easy to overclock and of course the diff. in price compared to the 940 or 965.

I'll prefer watercooling though, it's very easy with "NorthQ Siberian Tiger 2" (- what a name!).

Keeps my HOT B3 stepping at 55 / 60 C. load...