PC Upgrade Advice Please for Improved FSX Performance

[mcjimmy1]

Hi Everyone and A Happy New Year


Whilst I am not particularly unhappy about the perf of my FSX installation I feel there is still room for improvement and I am looking for some sound advice as to some possible upgrade options based on cost benefit.

My current system specs are briefly. Asus P5K Premium mobo with Intel Q6600 overclocked to 3.4Ghz.  4Gb (2x2Gb) of Corsair Dominator PC8500 Ram. BFG nVidia GTX260 OC Graphics Card. Win Vista Home Premium SP2 OS. Hard Dive is a WD 160Gig Raptor with around 50Gb of disk space unused. Available RAM to the system is showing as 3.12Gb.

I have ruled out a total upgrade to an i7 based system for the time being due to the total cost and I also feel my current pc has more mileage if better configured for FSX.

Some of the possible upgrade options I am considering (but not all at the same time) are:-

Replacing the mobo to an Asus P5Q Deluxe (P45 Chipset)
Adding a dedicated WD Raptor hardrive for the FSX installation
Adding a dedicated SSD for the FSX installation
Replacing the Q6600 CPU with a Q9650 and overclocking it to around 3.8Ghz

I would be grateful for any suggestions or advice as to which of the above would be best to implement first on cost benefit/bang for buck.

Thanks in advance to all those simmers that are able contribute with their relevant technical knowledge and first hand experience.

[macdrack]

Hi There,

[The Snake 87]

You could go for the Q9400 for only about 20 bucks more than the Q6600 is right now, even though you already have one. 4 cores, 6mb L2 cache, you would be very happy.

Maybe find a SLi board too and get another GTX260. Again, FSX will love you.

[macdrack]

Can't say I noticed a great deal (if any) from GTX260 SLI on FSX, other games sure, but not the CPU hog that FSX is.
Currently run a GTX285 for my FSX machine.

Also, not sure your going to see much improvement unless you can get a CPU upto 4GHz the increases you've talked about so far are pretty small compared to the 3.4GHz you've already achieved...

[Speed of flight]

Also consider a 64 bit OS upgrade. This will allow you to use more than 4 GB RAM, and even though FSX only really runs 32 bit (I think, but only because it still goes into a X86 folder on the install), you could see a performance gain in this.
CPU is probably the biggest component for FSX's operation. I don't know much about Intel's stuff, but their number-crunching logic is far superior to AMD, and I use AMD (that was tough to admit... )
New components aren't necessarily going to get you better performance, however. I'm using a 2 year old GPU, My FSX install is on the same HDD as the OS, and I can't say that my machine is all that great. I think getting into the BIOS and OCing and lining up the timings for things is the most effective power-producing trick.
Some people see big gains by upgrading their power supply to something over 600W. I did, and that was probably the best upgrade for me. Even though the box says your GPU needs minimum 450 or 500W, it never hurts to have more available, incase demand gets high, and because who knows what the max wattage will really creep up to.
CPU and RAM I believe are the most important, and power it all. You've got really good hardware already.
I was running pretty good on my old Phenom 9850 @ only 2.8GHz.
Does your Intel chippy do tri-channel? If so, you can run 12 GB RAM, and smoke us all! I don't think that FSX will use more than 2.5 GB or so, but having plenty available can't hurt. Hope I was some help here, I know I'm pretty random...

[BikePilot]

Hard drive upgrades aren't likely to help anything except for application launch times.  If you do want to speed up the hard drive, you may find better overall results by moving to a raid array and create an application partition on the outer edge of the discs. 

If doing a single dedicated disc I'd chose an SSD over a raptor -quieter, cooler and faster.

I don't think additional video card power will help any - my dad's business computer, an i7 920, 12gb ram and a 9600GSO runs FSX extremely well (and that gpu is less powerful than yours).

I run a 64 bit OS with 4gb of ram.  I've never seen FSX use more than 3gb of it though.

Your P5k board should be able to run all the FSB the Q6600 can take and more so not really anything to gain by upgrading it.

Bottom line I think more cpu speed is about all that'll improve your fsx performance.  I'm not sure if the difference between the better wolfdale 775 chips and your q6600 is enough to justify the cost.  If it were me I'd probably stick with what you have and save the $$ until an i7 becomes a possibility.