Need larger Processor for FSX running XP Home 32 Bit.

[Beechbum1]

Running XP Home 32 Bit, ASUS M3N78 PRO Mother Board with CPU socket AM2/AM2+, AMD 9500 Phenom Quad core 2.2 GHz processor, Nvidia Ge Force GTX 260 OC 896 MB GDDR3 graphic card, 3 1/4 GB RAM ( Max for XP 32 bit ) SP3 and DirectX 9c.

I can hardly run FSX on default settings ( Scenery tears it up ), I've Frames Per second set for 25 and most of the time it keeps up with the 25 FPS until a large airport or a large city then it's 10 down to a 6. I've been running "Airlines at 49% and GA's at 100% ( have about 248 WOAI pkgs. installed world wide so far ) I would like to build up airlines up to 100% and up the scenery some but My processor is running out of gas and huffs and puffs sometimes.

I do not want Vista nor Win7 as XP ( if it's built up right on your computer ) will get the job done on 99% of Sims/Games out today and at DirectX 9c. DirectX 10 and 11 are not meant for FSX. Also XP doesn't give as much static as Vista or Win7.

According to the specs on the FSX Gold Edition box Just require a single 2.0GHz or higher processor. Does this mean I've three cores NOT working?

Somewhere I've read that there is a fix to make all the cores of the processor work and handling scenery well. Is this true? and if so where do I look ?

Thanks in advance.

[loki]

According to the specs on the FSX Gold Edition box Just require a single 2.0GHz or higher processor. Does this mean I've three cores NOT working?

At it's basic level, FSX is still largely a single threaded game from the era of single core processors. When they started development on FSX, Intel was still talking about 5-10GHz single core processors, so that's what they designed for. Far too late into the development process, the computing world made a rather fast shift to multi-core CPUs, which single threaded programs like FSX can't take advantage of.

FSX SP1 does add limited support for multiple CPU cores, but only for loading scenery really. The core sim engine, ATC, AI, weather etc. are all limited to one thread on one core. If you have Acceleration installed as part of the Gold Edition, you already have SP1 installed. At this point the sim will make use of the other 3 cores when it can. There are some tweaks to adjust how many cores the sim will use, which some do find helpful, but there isn't anything you can do about the internal design of the sim itself.

The requirements on the box are very misleading and quite optimistic. To run the sim on the highest settings over a large detailed city in a detailed third party aircraft, you need to be looking into a CPU overclocked to 4GHz or more.

Probably the cheapest option for you would be to check the supported CPU list for your motherboard and see what the fastest supported CPU is. I believe you should be able to run most of the Phenom II series from AMD. From there you can look into overclocking.

A more expensive option, but the one that will give the biggest performance boost, would be to upgrade your motherboard and CPU to an Intel Core i5 or i7 system, and overlcock that.

[Beechbum1]

Loki, very much and I'm going Processor shopping right now. I'll get one with the most Horse Power I can find that will fit.

I've gone around the FSX runway a few times but this time I'm going to land. ( I hope )

[loki]

Looking at the CPU list for your motherboard here:

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD...3N78_PRO/#CPUS

The fastest CPU is a Phenom II 965:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103727

I know that you said you didn't want to move to Windows 7, but the 64 bit version would give the sim access to more memory which would also help somewhat. While the increased security does take a bit of learning, it is a better system for modern hardware.

[Beechbum1]

Sorry but the XP stays. I've just ordered from Tiger Direct the AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition. It's 3.40 GHz should be a lot better than my 2.2GHz.

I do thank you for the good info.

[wainer]

Very interesting! I have almost the same speccs and exactly the same problem. The only difference is that i have asus M4N78 motherboard and the regular AMD Phenom X4 9650, which is at 2.4 ghz only. It sucks really to run FSX that slow, cause my computer is good enough for everything else I do. I'm really looking forward to hearing about your results. Maybe upgrading to that processor would be a cheap way to increase performance. Although I'm pretty sure FSX runs better with intel. Sucks that i bought AMD/ATI based computer before I got interested in flightsim