Upgrade for FSX

[mattcw]

Hi
Just looking for a bit of advice on doing my 1st upgrade for FSX really.

Currently running fsx just about with an athlon XP +3000 with 1GB PC2700 ram and ATI radeon X1300 graphics card.

I am looking to spend about £150 or $300 and just want to upgrade the motherboard, processor and ram. I have been looking at an AMD 64BIT 5200 X2 dual core processor with 2GB DDR2 ram, ALiveNF7G-HDready mobo. I may also get a SATA drive to replace my current IDE. The motherboard I am looking at has onboard NVIDIA® GeForce 7050 256MB graphics but I think I am right that I can get a AGP to PCIe converter so I can use my current graphics card ?

Basically I am not a complete frame rate junkie 20-30FPS would do me in somewhere like frankfurt/ cologne. What sort of performance would I get from the above upgrade and having always used AMD processors what would be the equivalent Intel rig ?

Many thanks
Matt

[TurboVolvo]

I can tell you that once you start, you can't stop. The upgrades just keep on happenin'
I would certainly go the Intel way. You want to go with at least a Core 2 Duo E6550 for the CPU and as much ram as possible (3.6gb max on a 32bit)
The SATA hard drive will certainly help you in terms of load times.
However, do not count much on the on-board graphics processor. Upgrade the video card to at least an Nvidia 8800 series.

But of course now you're into $700-800 easy...

[mattcw]

Thanks for the advice Turbovolvo

[noell]

I agree with "Turbovolvo" as regards the processor and Video card. However, my experience has been that FS9 and FSX (or any other application I use for that matter) show absolutely no performance improvement with more than 2GB of RAM when run on a 32-bit operating system. Actually, in most cases, going above 2GB to something like 3 GB rules out being able to operate your RAM in dual channel mode which is the preferred mode for best performance. That's because operation in dual channel mode usually requires 2 or 4 identically sized modules. So, IMO, it only makes sense to go to more than 2GB if you have a 64-bit version of Windows XP or Windows Vista. That way, if you go to 4GB using 2 or 4 identically sized modules, you obtain dual channel performance plus the 64-bit OS will be able to address the full 4GB which a 32-bit OS cannot do.


....Noell

[mattcw]

Thanks,

One more question I am on a tight budget so I am looking at an 8500GT graphics card to replace my ati AGP X1300 how would the 8500GT compare to the X1300 ?

Matt

[adamjosiah]

I like FS2004 for the hardware reason... My old AMD Athlon, DDR 333 and Radeon 9000 series are outdated for alot of things, but I can still run FS2004 smooth on medium settings. However FSX... from what I hear will require a whole new computer... and bills, food and baby stuff comes first (welcome to real life eh)

[noell]

The 8500 would be a better performer than the X1300. That said, don't expect a very big improvement in performance as your processor will still be the limiting factor in running FSX. BTW, the 8600GT is better than the 8500.
If it fits your budget, Newegg shows one at about $109.99:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814125083

If you want to see how the various video cards stack up in FSX, check out the Tom's Hardware VGA charts as it has an FSX benchmark:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html


....Noell

[mattcw]

Thanks again for all the advice