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£400 budget. Q6600 or Q9300

ih8modem

ih8modem

ih8modem

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Joined
20 Dec 2004
Posts
623
With a budget of £400, which option should I go for : (Only use is for Flight Sim X, and I want to get best performance out of this budget).

Current specs
2GB OCZ gold 800MHz DDR2
Gigabyte P965-DS3 (the solid cap one, rev 1.0 - max 1066 FSB stock)
WD 250GB SATA-2 16MB HDD
BFG 8800GTX 768MB (bought on day of release so the first revision)
Antec P180B case with 600w power supply (Thermaltake)

Things to change
Intel E6700 CPU @ 2.66 (stock)

Option 1 - Q6600 + faster hard disk?
Thinking of getting a Samsung F1 320GB as they seem to get very favourable reviews (the single platter one). Combining this with a Q6600, maybe some more RAM ?

Option 2 - Q9300 + new mobo (possibly SLI?)
Stick with the current hardware, replace Mobo and CPU. Thinking a NForce 680 SLi board (ASUS ?) and Q9300.

Any other suggestions for speeding up FSX ? I run it on both XP and Vista (DX9/DX10)

Is there any merit in spending the cash on a GTX Ultra ?

Suggestions welcome....
 
no need to change the gfx - none what so ever.

Personally if it was me - get 2gb more ram and that's it. Overclock the cpu a little as well for a free increase in speed!

If you really want to spend more money then a Q6600 and more ram would be good. No need to change the hard drive as this will not show any real time increases in speed etc.
 
FSX

The thinking on the HDD is that FSX likes to page a hell of a lot. A faster disk like a Raptor or a F1 would help that. According to HDTUNE my current HDD is doing a seek time of 14ms, not 8.9 like it is specced at. I have two of them and they both test out at the same. (1 is 50% and the other is data only, at about 3%)

I think the RAM is a no-brainer really, I'll probably just get that anyway as it's not really a lot of cash at the moment.
 
If FSX is what you play, I honestly wouldn't bother with going SLI at all. With a graphics card like a 8800GTX unless you're playing the game at an exceptionally high resolution, it's all down to the CPU in this game. As far as the Quad Core situation goes, you'll find that FSX will use all four cores when loading scenery but certainly not on a regular basis.

From what I can tell, you're setup is near enough perfect for FSX except the CPU. 3.4-4.0GHz of Intel Core 2 is the sweetspot for good frames with this game generally. I'd sincerely suggest looking into overclocking as it should be a doddle to do so with your E6700.

If you play FSX primarily with Vista, you may find that it's pushing way over 2GB RAM usage in which case another 2GB PC2-6400 might be an idea.

There are also tweaks available. The flightsim forum I'm part of has a lot of content that'll help you. For example
http://www.flightsimworld.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=92583

Hope that helps.
 
I'm a huge FSX fan as well and my spec is similar to yours. I've had the same question for a while as to what to do.

From what I currently believe the best move for you would be to add the extra 2GB of RAM and that will help a lot with the paging (well if your running 64bit XP or Vista). From what I understand not all the 4GB can be used from 32bit.

The 8800GTX is a great card, so unless you want to blow the rest of your money on a GX2 I don't think your going to see much benefit there. But FSX eats GFX cards for breakfast so if you can get a GX2 I don't think it would be a bad move.

As for the processor, from the reading I've done the quads don't make a huge difference to FSX and you also will have to tweak a config file to make them work correctly. Best bet on the processor seems to be something like a 8400 hugley overclocked, but you'd get close to that if you overclocked your 6700.

Thats it from me. Post back what your decisions are and what increase you get in FSX as I'll be very interested in it from my own perpective.


Taff
 
The 8800GTX is a great card, so unless you want to blow the rest of your money on a GX2 I don't think your going to see much benefit there. But FSX eats GFX cards for breakfast so if you can get a GX2 I don't think it would be a bad move.
Click to expand...

Are you sure about that? Generally from what I've seen for most standard resolutions up to 1920x1200, it tends to be the CPU that's the major limiting factor. Hence, FSX doesn't scale too well in SLI in most situations and as a result a 9800GX2 wouldn't be utilised to it's full potential.
 
Decisions

Right here are my next few plans.

1 - I have overclocked the E6700 to 3.00 It seems to fine, temps are around 48-50 on stock cooling. Investing in a Arctic 7 now. I had a couple of resets when playing FSX at 3.2, but I have since bumped my memory voltage to 1.9v Running Pi on both cores now and seems to be 100% stable.
2 - Going to get a Q6600 and try it out. I dont need to get rid of the E6700 so I'll keep it as a backup for now.
3 - Going for 4 GB RAM, something with 4-4-4-XX timings (12 ? 15?)
4 - Speccing my 2nd pc up a bit. As nuts as it seems my 2nd PC has a E6750 with a 9600GT. I dont use it for FSX though, but I intend to run FSX on it just to see the difference. I'll also swop out my 8800GTX into this box in order to check things out properly. I may even O/C this one too. First I need to get me a new case as the Soprano does not allow GTX usage ...

My test scenario

Heathrow, all settings maxed, including all dynamic scenery and water. Extra 300S flying all over like a madman (if I did this in real life I would be shot down in seconds for sure, if a 747 didn't take me out first!)

Stock - FR from 4fps to 7fps (target unlimited)
3.00 - FR from 11fps to 14 fps (target unlimited)
3.20 - FR from 13fps to 16 fps (target unlimited)

From the above, the general consensus of the game being severely CPU limited seems to be spot on. I was watching my G15 performance monitor and my cores were both at 100% all the time. RAM usage seemed to stay around 50-70%

The above is all in XP. I need to go pick up some stuff for the wife now, I will mess with Vista when I get back.
 
Something's not quite right as those framerates are quite off the mark for a system like yours. For a start, I'd recommend capping your framerates at 25-33. This will stop any large variations in frames and stop any stuttering that you might be experiencing.

Turn down some of the settings and turn down your AA/AF. Also, take a look at the tweak guide I posted above ^^
 
Mul said:
Something's not quite right as those framerates are quite off the mark for a system like yours. For a start, I'd recommend capping your framerates at 25-33. This will stop any large variations in frames and stop any stuttering that you might be experiencing.

Turn down some of the settings and turn down your AA/AF. Also, take a look at the tweak guide I posted above ^^
Click to expand...

I can make FSX run decently by tweaking and turning down settings. My point was to try and get it to run with everything absolutely maxed out. At those settings achieving even 4fps is pretty good.

O/Cing the CPU made a big difference at those settings.

Will see what effect the new CPU and the extra RAM has, as well as the other PC. I picked up a new 900 case while I was out. Of course I did not factor in that I actually need another copy of FSX ! (Although I read somewhere that you can install a single copy on two of your machines, but not sure on the accuracy of that statement.)
 
In that case, unless the game uses multicore processors extremely well, you should absolutely not get a Q6600. Much rather get a Wolfdale,cheaper and will clock to insane speeds, with better IPC + more cache. And then get yourself another 2 gigs of RAM and clock that too. Do not change your GFX.

And do not go buy something stupid as an impulse purchase, try to find the bottleneck, it seems that the CPU is that bottleneck. Try overclocking it more, it should go to at least 3.4ghz.
 
Talrinys said:
In that case, unless the game uses multicore processors extremely well, you should absolutely not get a Q6600. Much rather get a Wolfdale,cheaper and will clock to insane speeds, with better IPC + more cache. And then get yourself another 2 gigs of RAM and clock that too. Do not change your GFX.

And do not go buy something stupid as an impulse purchase, try to find the bottleneck, it seems that the CPU is that bottleneck. Try overclocking it more, it should go to at least 3.4ghz.
Click to expand...

Then I need a new board too, the DS3 rev 1.0 only does 1066 FSB without overclocking, and will barely run 1333 when paired with a E6750. I don't even know if it supports the 45nm CPU's

At the moment I am trying to keep it running at 3.2. It definitely made an improvement.

Just to add to the fun I have purchased the accelaration pack and installed that with the DX10 preview.
 
update

Right so I tried a few things.

First off, my overclocks were failing all the time, and I could not figure out why. I eventually was getting some strange error messages and BSODs in both XP and Vista. I eventually traced the problem to a faulty stick of RAM.

I have since invested in 4 GB of Corsair X2 6400 RAM, and the system is now stable.

Whilst I was out getting the RAM, I spotted a Q6600 for the same price (well a few p more) as OCUK were selling them for, so I grabbed one of them too - along with a Freezer 7 Pro.

Did it make a difference? Yes.

I was running the Q6600 at 2.67 for a long time last night, and with all settings of FSX on Ultra High (just selected UH on all tabs - no individual adjustments), I am getting frame rates of 19-25. This is now acceptable, and much better than the max of 14 I was getting before.

Now I can begin the tweaking process as I am happy with the baseline at last. I am also pushing my CPU along at 2.93 now, and it seems to be taking it just fine, temps are all below 52 on all 4 cores at 100% load.

Must say it makes me feel warm and fuzzy when I watch my G15 perf monitor report 100% usage on all 4 cores :)
 
Should be able to do 3Ghz with the Q6600 @ 333x9, my old DS3 Rev 1.0 did that all day long.
 
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