For those who want EXCELLENT FPS in FSX

[AndrewJamez]

QUOTE (Kelvinr @ Jun 15 2011,7:36 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I run the gtx 570 so with your (new) 2600k and gtx 560 you should see a marked improvement. I do agree with your statement about the SSD, the loading times of the textures have improved upon re-taking some flights.



there will be a guaranteed improvement with 2600k. i'm a hard person to convince without seeing for myself, I have, and I believe.

I agree, there is somthing about the new i5's and i7's, the K series will happily run 4.2 -4.5 ghz on air v's my i7 870 is just stable at 3.8 which is what the 2600K will run at with turboboost 2 and NO overclocking. I've just bought the corsair Hydro 60 water cooler. Lovely new sealed units. They are a no brainer.

Remember the price of DDR3 when it came out? Horendous! and it stayed that way for ages. A new Ivy bridge with quad channel ram will be way out of my price leauge. .You will be looking at 3K at least doing it your self let alone paying someone. And most games still dont utilise PCI xpress2 yet and now they are doing PCI-xpress 3??

If you have the cash then it will be all good

[AndrewJamez]

Hey does any one definately know weather FSX uses Hyperthreading?? I keep reading that overclockers always dissable it to attain higher clock speeds which is effectivly turing there new 2600K into a 2500K. If FSX does not use HT then better to save $100 on the cpu and put it towards more ram or the next model up video card

[Airtrainer]

All interesting reading. I've seen a youtube video recently that talks about using a SSD as a cache to help increase the speed of data accessed from the HDD. It was a certain type of motherboard (Gigabyte X68 chipset) that 'hid' the SSD from you and you installed everything onto a normal SATA HDD and then it would use the SSD as a cache to store the most frequently used files. Sort of like extra RAM, I wonder what effect that would have with FSX.

[Ian Warren]

QUOTE

Hey does any one definately know weather FSX uses Hyperthreading?? I keep reading that overclockers always dissable it to attain higher clock speeds which is effectivly turing there new 2600K into a 2500K. If FSX does not use HT then better to save $100 on the cpu and put it towards more ram or the next model up video card[/quote]

Yeah, I had a bit of a play around with this... Did not notice any significant improvement but it does run slightly smoother so I just leave it

[Kelvinr]

QUOTE (Airtrainer @ Jun 16 2011,1:06 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

All interesting reading. I've seen a youtube video recently that talks about using a SSD as a cache to help increase the speed of data accessed from the HDD. It was a certain type of motherboard (Gigabyte X68 chipset) that 'hid' the SSD from you and you installed everything onto a normal SATA HDD and then it would use the SSD as a cache to store the most frequently used files. Sort of like extra RAM, I wonder what effect that would have with FSX.

One issue with using SSD this way is that it's performance will decrease over time. With TRIM support on the SSD this may indeed save it from dying an early death.

[AndrewJamez]

Was running the Task manager last night to see wich cores were been used as I have hyper threading enabled. I ran the demanding Orbx PNW scenery and with the affinity mask set to 14 only cores 2,3,4 were been used. Core 1 and the 4 virtual cores (hyper threading) were doing nothing. I changed the affinity mask to 15 which commands FSX to use all 4 cores and when restarting fsx and task manager, you guessed it, cores 1,2,3,4 were all going for it. What i noticed was an improvement in ground texture loading times.

I also came across a new thread in the avsim forums which suggests that an affinity mask of 255 is supposed to utilise all 8 cores. 4 actual and 4 virtual. I will be testing this out tonight and report back.

[Ian Warren]

QUOTE

Was running the Task manager last night to see wich cores were been used as I have hyper threading enabled. I ran the demanding Orbx PNW scenery and with the affinity mask set to 14 only cores 2,3,4 were been used. Core 1 and the 4 virtual cores (hyper threading) were doing nothing. I changed the affinity mask to 15 which commands FSX to use all 4 cores and when restarting fsx and task manager, you guessed it, cores 1,2,3,4 were all going for it. What i noticed was an improvement in ground texture loading times.

I also came across a new thread in the avsim forums which suggests that an affinity mask of 255 is supposed to utilise all 8 cores. 4 actual and 4 virtual. I will be testing this out tonight and report back.[/quote]

Yes, my i7 does use all cores and threads aswell, my affinity is set to 85 which seems to work

[AndrewJamez]

Ran the same flight last night with affinity mask set at 255 and as was suggested on the avsim forum, all cores including the 4 virtual cores were running at beteween 40-60% So weather this means more efficient processing in reguard to FSX or not? I dont know. It seem like there was a little less micro stutter but that could just be a placebo effect. The biggest benefit came from changing the Affinity mask value from 14 to 15. It was very clear that FSX was running better with less stutters. 14 was the vale that Bojote's online cfg tweaking tool set the mask value to. Clearly not right for my system. Her in lies the problem then in that every ones pc is that much different to the next guy's that not all tweaks have the same effect. Some will increase performance for 1 poerson and decrease performance for the next.

[AndrewJamez]

I will say now that trying to force Hyperthreading in FSX ( if thats what its actually doing??) definately makes the cpu run hotter. I did a flight down to the new Turangi airfeild and the temps were into the 70's and i have never had that happen before. Not even in the summer. I think I will turn HT off for now.

[Ian Warren]

Now with all these high end I7 s , many must have the same units , why we don't see quality screens

[AndrewJamez]

Saving them up till the endo the month Ian, the competion is fierce this month.

[Dontcopy]

QUOTE

I will say now that trying to force Hyperthreading in FSX ( if thats what its actually doing??) definately makes the cpu run hotter. I did a flight down to the new Turangi airfeild and the temps were into the 70's and i have never had that happen before. Not even in the summer. I think I will turn HT off for now.[[/quote]

Yup, that is to expected, and is the reason I use an aftermarket cooler + a well cooled case.

Temps dont reach over 48 degrees now

[AndrewJamez]

Already done that, Am running a giant Scyth Mugen Tower air cooler because the cpu is well clocked. The problem is that it takes up so much space that I think it restricts movement of air inside the case. Also it weighs nearly a kilo so it puts unwanted stress on the motherboard. These reasons alone have made me buy the corsair Hydro 60 water cooler going on my new upgrade.

[happytraveller]

I have upgraded to a completely new system, and have not looked back since. I can only say good things about the i7 2500K chip, which seems fantastic for the money. Smooth as and no problems overclocking it. The best thing is that I have given up looking at frame rates, tweaks and spending hours trying to get smooth performance. I can now FLY again, which is what FSX should be for. Now that FSX works without hours of tweaks and testing, I have so much more time!!

So I highly recommend the i7 2500K chip. The SSD (running both the OS and FSX) and 8GB of RAM also help, but the chip (air cooled) is great. I just wish that it had been available before.

smooth landings.