AGP or PCI Express

[Lister7]

Does anyone know which is better for FS 2004? AGP video cards or PCI Express video cards?

[cascadesss]

The fastest board out there right now is the Nvidia 7800GTX, and it's a PCIe board.

PCI Express has a much wider bandwidth than AGP. Although no current cards are using that much bandwidth at the moment, the whole industry is moving to PCIe.

Look at all of the new offerings from the motherboard companies. They support PCI Express.

Cheers!

[PHCO]

Sorry I have no answer, but another question. ;) Rick - I have seen your system specification. Very impressive! :) What experience do you have with Raid 0 in connection to FS9? Thanks ...

[dfish]

APG is slowley being fazed-out, so if you're considering new hardware go with PCI.

Dave F.

[cascadesss]

PHCO,

Very soon I plan to run a series of benchmarks to determine which setup is quickest with FS9

Setup1 - 1 Raptor - WinXP and FS9 on the same drive
Setup2 - 2 Raptors - WinXP on drive C and FS9 on Drive D
Setup3 - 2 Raptors - RAID 0 - WinXP and FS9 on the same drives

The system is running in RAID mode 0 with WinXP and FS9 on the same array. I 'believe' it loads faster and loads the scenery faster than a single drive. We will see if I am right after this weekend

Cheers!

[lnuss]

I presume you're getting new hardware, otherwise you use whatever your hardware supports. But PCIe is the future, and some of the top cards are only available now in PCIe.

[PHCO]

Oki doki. Thanks so far! :D

[ianq]

RAID 0, which is nothing more than striping (no actual redundancy), is the best performing of all the RAID setups, but isn't going to be much faster than running off a single drive if you are using IDE drives.

If you were running SCSI drives across intelligent controllers, you might buy some performance gain.

The important thing to note is that RAID 0 performance gains primarily occur on a "Write" operation, not a 'Read", unless you are running smart (meaning expensive) controllers that can handle separate reads to multiple drives. The other thing is that unless you really know how to tune the controller's access to the drives (this also involves understanding how your application manages the chunks of data it needs), you may actually end up getting worse performance than a single IDE drive.

The biggest problem with RAID 0 is that if you lose one of the drives, you lose access to all the drives in the array, and have to rebuild them all from backups. Again, there is no redundancy.

[ksteemke]

Go with PCI-E, you can't beat the performance!
Recently put together new system,Built primarily for Flight Simulators and my homebuilt cockpit. running 2 Raid 0 Arrays,one with Win Xp other with FS2004.Do you think I have "optimal settings"?If I can be of any help let me know.

A8N-SLI Deluxe
FX-55
Currently 1 BFG 6800 GT OC
(2) WD Raptor 10,000RPM 74 GB RAID 0 SATA
(2) WD Caviar 7,500RPM 200 GB RAID 0 SATA
(2) 512 MB PC3200 DR400
Cooldrive 6
Saitek X52
Enermax 565W Whisper II

Raid configured in 16k Stripes
Win XP on the Caviars,FS2004 on Raptors
CPU OC-2.78 ghz
VGA at 400mhz-1.05ghz
Image settings at High Performance
Peg Link Mode Auto

Also use Abacus FlightDeck 3,Chopper Havoc
USA Landscapes

Seems like I get a little better peformance than my three year old laptop(Toshiba s2435-S255 Nvidia 420 go).
I thought I'd see a huge leap in performance, is something not set correct?

Any help greatly appreciated,
Dave