I normally get about half of my income from my own store, and half from SimMarket, who pay me at the beginning of each month. I'd decided to put this payment towards a new computer, and I did have a nice system all picked out, but in the run-up to the election New Zealanders have actually stopped buying my scenery, so I've had to put off upgrading until sales pick up a bit.
In the meantime I was stuck with a very flakey computer, so I had a look at 'repairing' it. I have always suspected that the problem related to a loose AGP slot, as re-seating the graphics card sometimes helped. Because I reseat it just about every second day, the slot has got looser and looser, which would explain why it packs up more and more often.
So it would make sense to replace the motherboard, but being a bit obtuse I decided instead to try another graphics card. One requirement was more graphics memory than my current 5900 with 128MB, so I was looking at Nvidia 7600s and 7800s. The 7600s go for between $200 and $300 for 256MB, and the 7800 is very rare, but available for about $600. In the end I went to ATI, and decided on the X1650 Pro with 512MB RAM, simply because it was very cheap -- $120 incl -- but also because I figured that if I had to have another rubbish AGP card, it might as well have a good amount of RAM.
I actually went for this one, since this guy lives around the corner from me, and has very good prices. I thought that this was cheap enough to give it a go, and if it didn't help I'd put it on Trademe as near-new.
I really needed to extra video RAM because I was having problems with the airport I'm working on at the moment -- a nameless international airport
-- where the textures would go to mush when I looked at the main terminal. I wasn't expecting any increase in performance other than the ability to hold the textures sharp for longer.I was pretty surprised that the improvement was so great. Frame-rates are steadier, textures are much crisper, and I can now get anti- aliasing to work in FSX.
I'd definitely recommend that if you are stuck with an old AGP system and only 128MB of graphics memory, you look at getting a card with more memory. I know there's been some discussion about this here before, and I think I've even advised against doing this (as opposed to saving up for a PCI-e MB) but I've changed my mind...
PS. Actually, it didn't make any difference to my original problem, which surprised me greatly. If it was a flakey slot, I would have expected the result to be either better or worse, but not exactly the same, so I took the graphics card out and boxed it up ready for Trademe. Putting the old graphics card back in put be back where I was -- a computer which worked for about 20% of the day -- which frustrated me rather a lot. But it did get me looking a bit closer at what might be happening. Why would it sometimes not work until I reseated the graphics card, and sometimes it would then work fine for weeks? I looked closely at what happened when I reseated the card -- the motherboard flexed a little, so maybe it was something else. I did notice that it flexed under the MB power connector, so I unplugged that (very stiff) and plugged it back in. It has worked steadily since, so I may have fixed it. I've put the new graphics card back in, and I'm steadily reflying all my favourite areas with sharper textures, and really enjoying my re-invigorated FSX.
