Upgrade PC

[Barrington]

Hi Guys,
This has probably been thrashed about many times before, but was looking for some advice on the following.
I have a good size tower box, plenty of air, 450watt PSU, 160gig HHD, CD/DVD read/write drive, keyboard, scroll mouse, Sidewinder Joy stck, CH 19 button Yoke,
3200+ AMD Athlon, 1.5gig of 400 ram, Nvidia Gforce 7600GT graphics card, 19" BenQ flat screen.
My present system is fraught with FS9 graphics problems etc and so I feel that I am now forced to upgrade and happy to do so. However, after discussing this with a PC Tech he suggested the following that would be within my budget of around $1300 to $1500.
AMD Athlon 64 x2dual core 4200+CPU
AM2 motherboard (or higher)
2 gig of DDR-2 high speed ram
Nvidia Gforce 880 GTS graphics card with 640mb on board (hopefully DX 10 ready).
I am really interested in ..............
1) would this system meet the requirements to run fs9 and FSX with fair frame rates etc
2) If not, then what would you change
3) totally forget AMD and go with Intel at much more money
Real interested in the feedback as I want to move forward and get back to flying.

[Charl]

Nothing wrong with your present spec for FS9, you should be looking for configuration issues if you're not getting performance out of that rig.
As to the upgrade, the key is RAM and that 8800 GTS which is a good choice for FSX.
We'll see what FSX SP1 brings because at present your dual-core CPU will spend half its life wondering why the graphics card is worling so hard!

[lowellyerex]

There are many things to consider when upgrading; budget, compatibility with up-coming tech, target performance etc. You seem to have the budget and performance targets loosely pinned.

I build my own systems and try to keep up with hardware trends and reviews. If you want to rebuild now, my advice would be to forget AMD and base the system on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, probably the entry level E6320 (4MB L2 cache for the same price as the E6300). Pair it with a good P965 chipset motherboard (e.g. ASUS P5B Deluxe). With this board you should be able to set up a good solid overclock on the E6320 and get the performance of an E6700 at 3 times the price! Now that's a bargin.

Get 2 GB of high-spec DDR2-800 RAM. You might get away with high performance DDR2-667 RAM, which should allow you about a 350MHz FSB speed while maintaining a 1:1 memory:FSB ratio. Note that the P5B Deluxe m/b will support up to DDR2-1066 RAM, but that will probably blow your budget.

The other big ticket item is the GPU. If you can afford an 8800GTS, then buy that. It will ready you for DX10 and Vista when the FSX DX10 patch comes out. However, under DX9, you should also get excellent performance out of a 7900 series GPU. I had excellent frame rates with a core 2 duo and a 7800GTX running FSX! Just goes to show how much FSX relies on the processor, and how super-duper the Core 2 architecture is. The lovely thing about the 8800 GPU (I have an 8800GTX), is that you'll be able to run other 3D games with all settings maxed out on that 19" monitor (not FSX however, as it does not yet make efficient use of the power of the 8800 - but DX10 should see to that).

[lowellyerex]

Disagree with Charl's comment about the graphics card working hard, FS does not yet stress 8800 GPUs. SP1 will make better use of dual cores though.

Forgot to mention hard drive - you probably have a PATA drive. With my suggestion you will want to swap that for 2 x SATA drives hooked up in RAID 0. This will double your average read speed for FS texture loads.

[Charl]

Disagree with Charl's comment about the graphics card working hard, FS does not yet stress 8800 GPUs. SP1 will make better use of dual cores though.

Forgot to mention hard drive - you probably have a PATA drive. With my suggestion you will want to swap that for 2 x SATA drives hooked up in RAID 0. This will double your average read speed for FS texture loads.

Early days for me and FSX, but I see the 8800 temperature go up a couple of degrees when the sim settings are upped.
The one half of the E6600 dual-core that's involved just idles along...

[Barrington]

Thanks very much for your knowledgeable input and I will certainly look down that track. Any thoughts on what to allow for the budget as pwer your suggested hardware?

[lowellyerex]

Yes, well I blew out your budget a bit. That lot will probably cost you $2000 without the RAID hard drives - but you will have a smokin' hot system. Sorry, I'm not very good with money when it comes to computers. Try www.pricespy.co.nz for pricing.

By the way, that 2GB of RAM should be purchased as a 2x1GB dual channel memory kit. Something like the Kingston Hyper-X DDR2-800 5-5-5 dual channel kit (probably get a bit of overclock out of that).