Your ideal FS machine . . .

[Travis]

I want to get some feedback.  Been thinking of getting a new machine, and want to gear it for the perfect FS experience.

I'd also like to keep the price down a bit, as I don't want to go spending $5000+ on a piece of hardware that will be obsolete in a few years.

I don't want to have multiple monitors, or a twin setup or anything like that.  Just a simple, powerful tool that can run FS9 or FS10 with all the sliders maxed.

Any thoughts?

[legoalex2000]

we have beeen discussing this for a while. take a look at the computer forum, especially in the hardware thread.

Ramos

[Travis]

I would hardly call what is going on in that section "discussion".  Everyone's basiclly throwing crap at each other, posturing and trying to one-up the next guy.  Its so hard to find usefull, uncomplicated information that I just gave up on looking through all that and posted here, just so I could get the rest of the community's thoughts on it, as well.

[eno]

Unfortunately ........... this is the place to ask.  ::)

[Jimbo]

Hello!

Take a look throughout the whole* thread here:

http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb/ ... 1141856319

Some Very usefull information from the "Experts".

Cheers
James

*The thread has been updated ALOT from my original post, as you can see.

[ctjoyce]

Ideal FS eh?

Motherboard : Asus A8N32-SLi Premium
CPU: AMD 4000+ Clawhammer
RAM: 2 GB Corsair XMS (PC3500)
Video Card: eVGA nVidia 7900GT
HDD: 2x WD Rapter 150GB SATA 3
Optical Drive: Plextor Lite Scribe
Case: Lian-Li V1000
PSU: Hiper Type R
Cooling: Danger Den Watercooling

Total $2252.75

Now that would lead to some sweet overclocking. With the motherboard you have room for the future, and after finally useing one, I am a big fan of them. Their chips are suppost to have bugs, but never expirenced any on the rig I was useing.

The CPU is the more powerful sister of the 3700+ Which means you can get some pretty crazy overclocking out of it, and its stable as a rock. Now I could have said the FX-60, however the FX-60 is way over rated, and not needed esp for FS. If you really want to do dual core look at a 4400+ or wate for intels Conroe to come out.

The video is quite the card, and preformed better than expected. Also with the V core tweaks I have seen people get that thing to a stable 850Mhz core. The reason I only suggested one was that FS dosn't support SLi, and therefor running a SLi rig for FS would be just a waste of cash.

The RAM I suggested would be overkill for a normal system, however if you are going the overclocking route PC3500 is a good way to get those higher clocks.

The HDDs I suggested are amazing. 150GB each and 10,000 RPM will make these the optimal for those who want large amounts of storage, and dont want to wate to acess their data. Now they do run hot, but they are going into the watercooling loop, and therefore heat is no longer an issue.

The Optical I suggested is one of the fastest and most relyable burners on the market.

The Case I suggested is one of the nicest however most expensive on the market. It is a reverse ATX, so your hottest componants are on the botton and not the top near all of the hot air collection. Its also one of the easiest cases to work in and with. That and the Silverstone TJ-07 would be what I would use.

The PSU I suggested is by far the best on the market. 640W and modular, you just cant get much better than that. Its also the most stable that I have ever used, and not one has failed on me yet.

The cooling I suggested is by far the best water cooling on the market. Danger Den makes some of the most advanced blocks on the market, only to be seconded by Swiftech. Coupled with a Swiftech pump, and PC ICE liquid, this setup will be unbeatable.
TDX 939 CPU block
TDX GPU block
Black Extreme II Radiatior
Swiftech pump
Dual Bay resovwar filled with PC ICE


Now that would be a system, and coincidentally is what I'm building, just substatute in a Intel Conroe for the 4000+ and a SLi board to support the conroe, and a second 7900GT / New DX10 card.

Cheers
Cameron

[JBaymore]

Locke,

Personally, I'd start with the name "Cray", and be looking for a local supply of liquid nitrogen.  


best,

........................john

[Travis]

John, that's great . . .

Cameron: that's exactly what I wanted to know.  Thank you for laying it out there for me.  I know what I need now, and can work from there.

And while I'm here, I might as well find out what I can do on my current rig to make it move a little smoother.

Specs:
Dell Dimension DIM2400
Intel Pentium 4 - 2.66GHz
1 GB Ram
NVidia GeForce 6200 - 128 Mb
Windows XP Service Pack 2
Direct X 9.X

Anything else I should mention?  I know this isn't a great system to be working with, but I had to make due with what I had, so I bought the GeForce and 750 Mb memory, which upped the performance considerably.  Unfortunately, I now get occasional system failures and crashes, along with several bugs (like sound going out and not coming back without a restart).  Any fixes/solutions/thoughts?

[congo]

You can get an enormous improvement with a new video card alone on that rig, perhaps an overclock on the CPU, depending on what the actual hardware is.

My P4 is a 2.4ghz model and it happily runs at 3ghz, but this will depend on your individual hardware. If you care to specify the mainboard and cpu model numbers, maybe I can tell you if it's a likely proposition.

The upgrade to a 6200 was an ill informed one, those cards were the el cheapo and severely crippled one in the range.

Your PC's problems could be anything to be honest, from an actual hardware fault to a virus.

The hardware needs to be configured in BIOS correctly, and if it performs fine after that, great. If not, then components can be tested individually by process of elimination. Most problems are configuration/software  issues however, and re-installing windows from scratch is often the quickest cure. There are methods to make the re-install as painless as possible, probably the best and most useful is to buy another hard disk and set it up from scratch while retaining your current hard drive for backup and transfering all your data/FS9 files etc to the new one.

A new hard drive should be partitioned so that the disk can have Windows removed and re-installed at will without disturbing the rest of the data on the drive.

[Hai Perso Coyone?]

I like mine just the way it is...I don't wanna be a showoff and show my rig to everyone...I'm just happy with what I have

[kipman725]

If you like photo real sceanary you will want a nice fast HD to load it from and 2gb of ram.  Best HD's would be 2 15,000RPM drives in RAID 0 on a good PCI-X raid conroller, this would work with SLI aswell if you chose the right nforce4 pro board (the nforce pro chipset supports pci-x slots aswell as PCI-E).
Howerver this isn't rearly practical for your budget and server boards don't overclock well and 15k HD's are noisy.  This leaves you with using 10kRPM raptors which are SATA and don't need a fancy raid controller to get the  best out of them, the one with the normal nforce4 chipset should suffice.  They are still noisy and expensive though and raid 0 does give you a big performance boost with them still.

the other stuff has been pretty much covered (A64 duel core and 7900 series are very good peices of hardware)


you shoulden't have FS on the same HD as windows.  Especialy if you store FS on a more volitile raid 0 setup.

[Politically Incorrect]

First I disagree with NOT having FS9 and Windows on the same drive FS9 needs to access Windows files and vice versa, by having the two seperated you are not only losing performance in the read/write area but shortening the life of your hard drives and making your PC work twice as hard. all in which leads to loss in overall performance.


Also more than 1 gig of ram and you have wasted money, Windows can't deal with more than 1 gig, and FS9 doesn't know what to do with more than 750mb of RAM, so by having more than 1 gig is again hurting performance.

[Weather_Man]

First I disagree with NOT having FS9 and Windows on the same drive FS9 needs to access Windows files and vice versa, by having the two seperated you are not only losing performance in the read/write area but shortening the life of your hard drives and making your PC work twice as hard. all in which leads to loss in overall performance.

Agreed with the performance issue, though I don't know if that shortens the HDD lifespan enough to worry about.

Also more than 1 gig of ram and you have wasted money, Windows can't deal with more than 1 gig

Yes, it can. Which Windows are you talking about? XP can deal with 4GB RAM. Whether or not more than 1GB is necessary iis debatable and depends mostly on the software you run,  but a few current games and more future games will utilize more than 1GB. FS10 most certainly will.

FS9 doesn't know what to do with more than 750mb of RAM, so by having more than 1 gig is again hurting performance

I'm confused with this statement. Though I've never seen my RAM usage above 800mb when running FS9, I don't believe that's a limitation of the software, is it? And having more RAM available hurts performance how much?

[Politically Incorrect]

Ill try to explain without confusing myself.
I am talking about Xp.

Windows needs to be able to figure out how to use the ram and page file, with a over abundance of ram it gets confused as to what to do with it all the while trying to allocate page file. This will effect performance of your PC as a whole.

When you factor in that FS9 "communicates" with Windows on how, when and where a certain thing needs to happen or be displayed, while figuring out how and when to use memory itself while Windows is doing the same chore you can see where performance will be harmed.

As far HD life the constent searching back and forth making the drives work harder I would think can shorten the life.

Now Im no self proclaimed PC expert and most my knowledge comes from talking with those who are, reading and researching and trial and error.

Which is why I may sound confusing, but think about how Windows works and how it does what it does and it will plainly become common sense, it is all about understanding the ins and outs of Windows itself, something I still have a lot to learn on;)

You can be proficent in all the hardware you want, but unless you know how the OS itself operates then all the hardware in the world wont ever reach its full potential.

[legoalex2000]

You can get an enormous improvement with a new video card alone on that rig, perhaps an overclock on the CPU, depending on what the actual hardware is.

My P4 is a 2.4ghz model and it happily runs at 3ghz, but this will depend on your individual hardware. If you care to specify the mainboard and cpu model numbers, maybe I can tell you if it's a likely proposition.

The upgrade to a 6200 was an ill informed one, those cards were the el cheapo and severely crippled one in the range.

Your PC's problems could be anything to be honest, from an actual hardware fault to a virus.

The hardware needs to be configured in BIOS correctly, and if it performs fine after that, great. If not, then components can be tested individually by process of elimination. Most problems are configuration/software  issues however, and re-installing windows from scratch is often the quickest cure. There are methods to make the re-install as painless as possible, probably the best and most useful is to buy another hard disk and set it up from scratch while retaining your current hard drive for backup and transfering all your data/FS9 files etc to the new one.

A new hard drive should be partitioned so that the disk can have Windows removed and re-installed at will without disturbing the rest of the data on the drive.

i was an owner of the same rig,a dell dimension 2400. it has no oerclocking, and only 3 PCI slots for expansion. no spots for cooling, and if i remember, you can't just pop out the fan... idk i sold it to a friend to build my own.

nor can you expand the hard drives. you need a second drive bay (and i had no luck finding one) so i just had my 2nd hard drive hanging on one side with 2 screws in the floppy space (my 2400 was BARE MINIMUM). really had to stretch the IDE for that to work.

BIOS offers no help, you cant control bus speeds from the BIOS. thats dell for ya.

I also find Lite-ON drives in my favor. I've a couple yamahas, wont make that mistake again. also had a pacific digital,  nope. Lite-on, Right on! the only speciality of light scribe is it's light scribe technology (which i wanna see!)

a good Lite-on DVD+RW drive which
burns and reads DVD+R, -R. +RW, -RW, RAM, Dual layer
burns and reads all CD formats.
Lite-ON 1635S (i believe there is a newer one now..)
$50. i've had it for a year, no problems yet!

hope that will help your search a bit!

Ramos