New Hardware

[richardd43]

Well, I just upgraded to an AMD 6000, Asus Crosshair and Mushkin 6400 Extreme memory.

I am waiting to see what the next line of GPUs have to offer before I upgrade my graphics.

I am still running XP so I can use the 7950s in quad mode.

My question is, is it worth the time to tweak FSX to this system if I plan on upgrading the GPU to a DX-10 board.

Will the settings be that much different.

I am not a real fan of 3DMark06 but this thing hit 8900 out of the box and never went over 39 deg on the stock cooler. Seems to be a very stable setup.

If anyone is familiar with overclocking this board I would be interested in what settings you used.

[Nick N]

Well, I just upgraded to an AMD 6000, Asus Crosshair and Mushkin 6400 Extreme memory.

I am waiting to see what the next line of GPUs have to offer before I upgrade my graphics.

I am still running XP so I can use the 7950s in quad mode.

My question is, is it worth the time to tweak FSX to this system if I plan on upgrading the GPU to a DX-10 board.

Will the settings be that much different.

I am not a real fan of 3DMark06 but this thing hit 8900 out of the box and never went over 39 deg on the stock cooler. Seems to be a very stable setup.

If anyone is familiar with overclocking this board I would be interested in what settings you used.

I do not own the board Richard but I am sure doing minor clocking is the same as any other. I would have to read the manual to review settings.

As for going from the 7950 to DX10, yes settings will be different however most of the sliders should remain the same. The majority of the change is in the frame lock, fiber frame time factor, Autogen trees and building numbers, autogen slider and traffic sliders. All the other sliders will remain the same until the actual DX10 patch for FSX. The 8800 will take a hit from the water slider, much worse than the 7950, due to shader issues. 2x would be the max I would run the slider and even that drops a good 4 (or more) worth of frame resources off the 8800.

Since you are running quad with no problem, going to a single 8800 may be a drop in some areas. Since I have never run the type of system you have I can not comment on the difference very much. I would think you will drop frame rate quite a bit, probably locking the 8800 somewhere around 20-24. SLi when running right actually wants the frame lock much higher so FSX does not throttle the system.


SP1 is about to be released for FSX in about 2-3 weeks which will also change things, mostly frame lock -or- higher autogen. I also hear they may be dropping the higher water features to 1 pass instead of 2 by FSX for rendering which means the higher water features will not hit the card anywhere near as bad.

Your older system was limiting you because of the CPU/memory. The new one will probably allow a greater amount of autogen be displayed. Page 4 of the thread FSX & SLI in the FSX forum has base slider settings to start with for just about any system running decent hardware but with quad SLI the frame lock will probably want to sit higher and the FFTF higher as well.

[richardd43]

Hi Nick, thanks for the reply.

I am still debating the 7950 issue (do I want to scrap $1500 worth of cards).

With the 4400 installed and working through some of the previous information you posted, FSX actually run fairly decent in XP but I could not get Vista dialed in. I also had to remove one of the GPU cards with Vista.

I am trying to figure out the ram settings in bios right now. Is a lot more settings there than I am used to.

Also, am thinking I might wait for SP-1 before I do any heavy tweaking in FSX.

I am getting to old for this, I need to go back to school to learn how to work the new bios.

[Nick N]

Hi Nick, thanks for the reply.

I am still debating the 7950 issue (do I want to scrap $1500 worth of cards).

With the 4400 installed and working through some of the previous information you posted, FSX actually run fairly decent in XP but I could not get Vista dialed in. I also had to remove one of the GPU cards with Vista.

I am trying to figure out the ram settings in bios right now. Is a lot more settings there than I am used to.

Also, am thinking I might wait for SP-1 before I do any heavy tweaking in FSX.

I am getting to old for this, I need to go back to school to learn how to work the new bios.

Nvidia and Vista are a tough combo right now. I really hope they get that sorted out soon. I can tell you that MS pretty much planned the development around a kiss-arse partnership with Intel for Vista so that should be an indicator of some of the pitfalls you may see. I do think SP1 will change things quite a bit. The system I flew SP1 b1 on was not Vista or SLi but the difference was very obvious. I do know they are addressing quite a bit so perhaps you should wait before pulling hairs (or if you are like me, hair as in 1 or 2 strands)

Like I said, the major sliders will remain the same. The tweak part comes from autogen, frame lock/FFTF and traffic. If you clock up, it will change those 3 major elements again and if you add the DX10 card it will again change things but the majority of the sliders will remain the same. It

[Mees]

Why not get 2 X2800XTX's if you have the money to light a cigarette with a $500 bill.

[richardd43]

Why not get 2 X2800XTX's if you have the money to light a cigarette with a $500 bill.

Haven't seen any for sale yet......

[john_uk]

Why not get 2 X2800XTX's if you have the money to light a cigarette with a $500 bill.

Haven't seen any for sale yet......

could be because they are not for sale yet
the release of those cards is going to hit my bank account so hard, i wont be laughing...until the card is isntaleld

[Nick N]

Why not get 2 X2800XTX's if you have the money to light a cigarette with a $500 bill.

Haven't seen any for sale yet......

could be because they are not for sale yet
the release of those cards is going to hit my bank account so hard, i wont be laughing...until the card is isntaleld

Would you be surprised if I told you by the end of the summer and into the fall the higher quality hardware will most likely be cheaper than it is now?

With ATi going to 65nm for all the top shelf cards, Nvidia and ATi are going to go at each other pretty hard, in my opinion. Cost per clock I think will probably drop like a rock. Same with the release of Barcelona by AMD which is currently running a 42% better float point than the best Core2 on the market.

Let the games begin

I think what is going to happen is motherboards will go up in price and supporting components will drop from competition however we may not see that trend till close to fall.

[Nick N]

Haven't seen any for sale yet......

I will browse your motherboard manual as soon as I can and see if I can make some suggestions that will tweak you up past default Richard . It may be a week or so before I can sit down and really go through it.

[john_uk]

Why not get 2 X2800XTX's if you have the money to light a cigarette with a $500 bill.

Haven't seen any for sale yet......

could be because they are not for sale yet
the release of those cards is going to hit my bank account so hard, i wont be laughing...until the card is isntaleld

Would you be surprised if I told you by the end of the summer and into the fall the higher quality hardware will most likely be cheaper than it is now?

With ATi going to 65nm for all the top shelf cards, Nvidia and ATi are going to go at each other pretty hard, in my opinion. Cost per clock I think will probably drop like a rock. Same with the release of Barcelona by AMD which is currently running a 42% better float point than the best Core2 on the market.

Let the games begin

I think what is going to happen is motherboards will go up in price and supporting components will drop from competition however we may not see that trend till close to fall.

i can see that happening. im going to save up through summer and so will buy a new system around fall time, and hopefully get top range stuff. ATI barcelona and a x2900, i realy shot myself in the foot when i built my current system getting PC3200 RAM, need a new mobo for the build as not much 3200 stuff around these days

[DizZa]

[quote]

With ATi going to 65nm for all the top shelf cards, Nvidia and ATi are going to go at each other pretty hard, in my opinion. Cost per clock I think will probably drop like a rock. Same with the release of Barcelona by AMD which is currently running a 42% better float point than the best Core2 on the market.

[Nick N]

[quote][quote]

With ATi going to 65nm for all the top shelf cards, Nvidia and ATi are going to go at each other pretty hard, in my opinion. Cost per clock I think will probably drop like a rock. Same with the release of Barcelona by AMD which is currently running a 42% better float point than the best Core2 on the market.

[DizZa]

Sorry if this is of topic, but....

I haven't done my research, but on websites I see AMD athlon fx-74s which have 'DSDC'. That stands for Dual Socket Direct Connect..... How is that diferant from server motherboards which have been doing that for years?

[Nick N]

Sorry if this is of topic, but....

I haven't done my research, but on websites I see AMD athlon fx-74s which have 'DSDC'. That stands for Dual Socket Direct Connect..... How is that diferant from server motherboards which have been doing that for years?

Since the title of the thread is

[Nick N]

and BTW, 45nm is still a year away for both Intel and AMD



Intel will be dropping the price of their quad cores by as much as 50% (not retail) in order to try and upset the barc release which should be on for the 6th of June for initial, and full market no later than the end of June.

Here is some stuff right from the horses mouth

Hector Ruiz was most generous to Intel for the most part. Here is a direct quote from the talk.

Hats off to our competitor. They have done a good job in closing the gap. It took them four years to do it. They have done a good job. We had 4 years continuously of out performing. We are not going to change dramatically of what we were thinking of doing cause of one lousy quarter. Performance management quarter. Further understanding of integrating ATI. We know we are going to have 500 plus people that will leave the company by the end of Q2. We have changed our plans, our strategy, our customers like our plans. We are an engineering company, and we need the best and brightest we have.


In the 2nd half of May the R600 GPU will be introduced. They did say that there will be a full line up from top to bottom with 10 products that are all DirectX 10 capable. They also took a dig at Nvidia saying that they will have fully Microsoft Certied drivers, and that they do not paper launch products. Nvidia Vista driver issues are well known, and it was recently revealed that due to the difficulty of coordinating with add in card partners that Nvidia will move to paper launching some products. Those paper launches however don't seem to be of the sort that would hurt supply for Nvidia partners, but AMD touched on it during the call anyway which is the first we have seen of any jabs at their partner.

Barcelona sampled to customers in Q1. Production is beginning this quarter. Customers will be shipping product with Barcelona in Q3. There will be desktop variants of Barcelona in 2 core and 4 core models in Q3. Barcelona will be demonstrated this Summer which may well mean in June at Computex but it was not specified. AMD believes they will gain back share in the 2nd quarter, and that on the strength of Barcelona they will be strong later in the year. Their customers are excited about Barcelona which they believe bodes well. On the mobile side AMD will be refreshing their product line up, and more details will come later in the year. Certainly a platform approach will be taken, and this will be timed for the OEM chassis refresh coming in the first half of next year. AMD did not make any comments on performance as we have heard from them earlier this year for Barcelona perhaps due to the recent look at Penryn by Intel, or perhaps due to recent light criticism from ZDNet bloggers that has not been picked up as a major story in the hardware community. Barcelona is essentially ready, but they must qualify systems and get them out the door.