NZFF

Well I have made the decision.
Here are the specs of my new system.
All comments welcome. Will be running FS9 with lots of payware addons in way of scenery and aircraft.

Intel Core i7 860
Gigabyte P55A-UD3R Motherboard
Kingston HyperX 4G Kit DDR3-1600 CL8 High performance Non-ECC Memory
LG 22 x DVD Writer
Sapphire HD5770 1G DD5 PCI-E Video Card
Cooler master 550W eXtreme power Plus Silent Power Supply Unit
500G 7200 RPM Hard Drive

Just need to confirm wether to use XP or window7. Which of the two systems will give best performance for FS9.

Cheers, Adrian.

first off. nice pc

second, how come fs9??

and thirdly id say windows 7, because of dx10/11 mostly but i suppose you can get that running in xp too. i dont know. anyone else??

masman.
FS9 because all my addons are for that and I do not want to upgrade at this stage. Am thinking in about a year or so ???.
Was thinking XP as using it now and am comfortable with it. Can go to Win 7 though.

Cheers.
Adrian.

I highly recommend Windows 7. It'll run faster than XP - mainly because Win7 will take advantage of all that power. Seems a waste installing a decade old OS onto such a beastly PC. I have absolutely no problems running FS9 in Win7 64bit. Just check that your hardware will all work on Windows 7 and you are ready to go.

Top marks on your choice of components. A very nice list indeed. Is there any reason you chose i7-860 over the i5-750? Hyperthreading doesn't seem to have any effect on FSX and the i5 will easily reach 3GHz on stock cooler, or 3.8-4GHz with aftermarket cooler. I guess if you have the cash then no biggy, but might save you ~$150.

P.S. Forgot to mention that FS seems to run better with nVidia cards at this stage. Might be worth considering - especially for when you move to FSX.

Hi Adrian,

Regarding the video card - do you intend to take advantage of the Eyefinity feature of the 5770 at all?? I'm currently weighing up the ATI 5000 series cards versus the Matrox Triplehead2Go Digital edition.

I plan on upgrading my Simpit soon to use 3x 22" widescreens for the visuals and 1x 19" standard for the instruments. Sadly though, FS9 (Through DirectX 9) is limited to a maximum resolution of 4096x4096 - which won't fill all the monitors. FSX however (Through DirectX 10) can support up to 8192x8192 - so I am preparing myself to retire FS9 in favour of FSX!!!

From the research I've done, you'll have no problem running FS9 and XP with the 5770 - I would be doing the same if I could get it spanned across all 3 widescreen monitors!!

Best of luck - let me know how you get on!!

Regards,
Mat

pilot.masman wrote:

QUOTE (pilot.masman @ May 19 2010, 02:08 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

first off. nice pc

Yep agree - I haven't drooled so much since the incident with the Tui girls at the Wellington railway station!!!

pilot.masman wrote:

QUOTE (pilot.masman @ May 19 2010, 02:08 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

and thirdly id say windows 7, because of dx10/11 mostly but i suppose you can get that running in xp too. i dont know. anyone else??

Nah, DX 10 is Win Vista+ and DX11 is Win7 only...neither run on XP, sorry.

Mark

markll wrote:

QUOTE (markll @ May 20 2010, 10:44 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Nah, DX 10 is Win Vista+ and DX11 is Win7 only...neither run on XP, sorry

offcourse, not released by microsoft, but it is out there, had to use it too get Just Cause 2 working on my XP box

pilot.masman wrote:

QUOTE (pilot.masman @ May 20 2010, 11:33 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

offcourse, not released by microsoft, but it is out there, had to use it too get Just Cause 2 working on my XP box

Hmmm....ok, so this would have been some kind of hack fakery to make it look like your XP machine has DX10. DX10 changed much in the underlying architecture of DirectX itself, so much so that without a gfx card that 100% supports it, you don't get it. Introduced with Vista, DX10 is dependent on the newer WDM driver model, which is not compatible with XP...

As I said, in theory it's probably possible to fake it, but it'd be illegal since whomever built such a fake DX10 would have had to reverse engineer MS code, and mimic MS code signing keys. Also the performance would be massively reduced from where it could be with Vista and REAL DX10... Oh, and I'd be REAL careful to check whether it has malware embedded in it too, cos thats the sort of thing people like that tend to do...

dont ask me how they did it (i would say it is as you say, a work around or reg hack), i get it from a trusted source, no malware but runs just cause 2 fine which requires dx10 for some reason.

the only reason for its existance is for people who dont have a DX10 OS and wont buy one so they make the game work to their requirements.

personally i dont use this on my main computer as that has win7 on it anyway, it is only for my other machine which uses XP for faster teamviewer, viewing (use it as a server mostly) but which in some cases is used by my friends who dont have a proper gaming machine...

probably is easier to install 7 i agree but for some it isnt an option.

pilot.masman wrote:

QUOTE (pilot.masman @ May 21 2010, 11:29 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

dont ask me how they did it (i would say it is as you say, a work around or reg hack), i get it from a trusted source, no malware but runs just cause 2 fine which requires dx10 for some reason.

the only reason for its existance is for people who dont have a DX10 OS and wont buy one so they make the game work to their requirements.

personally i dont use this on my main computer as that has win7 on it anyway, it is only for my other machine which uses XP for faster teamviewer, viewing (use it as a server mostly) but which in some cases is used by my friends who dont have a proper gaming machine...

probably is easier to install 7 i agree but for some it isnt an option.

Yeah, maybe, but I have yet to hear a good reason for staying on XP vs 7. And as I said, theres no ay that using something like this is a) legal, nor b) going to gve you anywhere near the full performance potential of your hardware in a game that uses it...

for some people, a couple hundred bucks just to go to a fancier os isnt justified. hence my dad and my second pc being on xp.

it probably (almost certainly infact) wont give you the full perf potential of the hardware but as this is a second pc not used for gaming unless one of my friends needs it there isnt really a disadvantage to it for me.

pilot.masman wrote:

QUOTE (pilot.masman @ May 22 2010, 09:55 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

for some people, a couple hundred bucks just to go to a fancier os isnt justified. hence my dad and my second pc being on xp.

Sure - but you were talking about playing Just Cause 2 on it...

That game won't run on some crappy old internet only PC....so if you've spent the $$ to get the hardware to play the game, why not spend to upgrade the OS too, so you can properly take advantage of that hardware?

markll wrote:

QUOTE (markll @ May 22 2010, 09:50 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Sure - but you were talking about playing Just Cause 2 on it...

That game won't run on some crappy old internet only PC....so if you've spent the $$ to get the hardware to play the game, why not spend to upgrade the OS too, so you can properly take advantage of that hardware?

because i spent all the cash i wanted too on the hardware for it. only using xp because it was free from the case it is in. a $900 gaming machine for friends is better than having to get a $1100 gaming machine for friends...