Going nuts over hardware, video cards and monitors for FSX... help!

Just bought a computer (Dell Precision T5500- Xeon Quad Core E5630 2.53GHz / 24GB Memory / Dual Quadro NVS295 256MB Video Cards) A Dell 24" Class Widescreen LED Monitor - 1920 x 1080, 16:9. Installed FSX and Acceleration Pack as well.

 

Here's my question... I would like to run 3 monitors so I upgraded my videro card with a DELL NVIDIA QUADRO FX 4800 GRAPHICS CARD 1.5GB and I ordered two more Dell 24" monitors.

 

Do I use the FX4800 video card for my center monitor and run the two side monitors off of the NVS295 card or visa versa? Also I'm wondering if I have enough processing power to run all this at all?

 

Also, would lowering the monitors resolution get me better performance or should I run at the monitors max resolution?

 

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

I'm not too familiar with what you got there but to me it seems to be pretty low end to run anything very well. The 2.53 gHz processor is slow for FSX and the 24 gig RAM is not going to help you out any as FSX can only use up to 4 gig anyway. I think you are gonna have a tough time running 3 monitors with any success but I may be wrong.

None of that computer equipment is for gaming, it is for a workstation. It is not going to run FSX very well at all.

Yeah, I figured that out over the last few days. I just upgraded to i7 4790K - NVIDIA GTX 970 - SSD 120GB - 1 TB 7200 DRIVE - 8GB COMPUTER. I set up 4 monitors. Center, right and left views and an old 19" one overhead for gps or radio stack views or whatever. Now waiting for computer to arrive and to try and configure the monitors to run with the video card and fsx. Thanks for the response though. It's always appreciated.

Well, that most certainly is a heap of improvement over the previous specs you posted!

Anyway, good hardware isn't enough as many have found out. The platform needs to be properly configured and the correct settings employed to allow FSX to run at it's best potential. FSX also needs to be correctly installed and set up. There are several guides out there to help you with that. Good luck and regards

There's a whole bunch of fsx tweaking guides/suggestions starting from overclocking the cpu to editing the cfg config file to configuring the video card settings to changing the fsx program settings and if you look at 5 different guides you can get 5 different ways to do it. They can't all be right. How does one go about selecting the right person's advice and not making a mess out of everything?

 

Also, my computer has two drives; An SSD drive and a regular 7200rpm drive. Where would be the best place to install FSX? On the SSD drive? Thanks.

Nick N's bible and Kosta's guide are good, however, the former is a very lengthy, detailed read. Kosta's guide is good if wanting a fairly quick, yet informative lesson on the basics. I'd consult them both. I would set up and instal FSX per those guides and then delve into overclocking, if still not satisfied with the performance. FSX is troublesome enough when it comes to stability without adding an unstable overclock to the mix. I actually reversed my overclock back to stock and disabled turbo mode to allow my CPU to run at a constant 3.9 GHZ. Regards