New build for MS Flight Sim

[Greebo]

Well he plays it atm on, iirc, a single core CPU and an ATI 9600 card.

Whatever we put in is going to give him a huge boost, I would expect. Although he loves Flight Sim, £300 is still a lot of money to spend on a game

£130 for the 4850.
£60 for the ram (?)

That only leaves £100 for the CPU and mobo combined... OK that's not enough.

At a push he might go to £350, but I'm fairly certain he won't spend £400. Well, I think his other half would probably have something to say about it

Can someone do me a quick favour? It's been so long since I built a PC I've totally forgotten how you pair up RAM speeds with FSB speeds. I notice the Intels are coming in 800, 1066 and 1333 FSB variants now, and I must admit I'm confused.

Okay try this

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...3 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) - Retail

£117.49

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...x2GB) PC2-6400C5 800MHz DDR2 Dual Channel Kit

£44.64

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...&subcat=793&name=Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy%20Efficient%20SLACR%2095W%20Edition"%202.40GHz%20(1066FSB)%20-%20Retail

£117.49 ( I guess he will need the retail as he won't have a suitable cooler around?)

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard

£58.74
Or keep an eye on b stock for some bargains:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp... P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 (MB-100-GI)

£41.11

If you want it to come in budget then replace the q6600 with a E7200 which saves £32.90.


Total cost is £338.36

With b grade mobo it's £320.73

With b grade mobo and e7200 it's £287.83

This assumes you dont need to upgrade the psu as well.

 

[FoxEye]

Cheers for the spec

Would it be at all worth considering the 3850/70 as a way to save a bit of money?

Would I be correct to assume that the CPU is more important? Thus downgrading the graphics and putting the money saved towards a quad, might be a half-decent idea?

Or would I be nuts not to go for the 4850?

 

[asim18]

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Completely the opposite. Flight sim x is written for quads and performs much better on quads than duals so long as you install the latest patch which brought in many extra features to take advantage of quads.

Therefore for your budget, Q6600 all the way

WRONG WRONG WRONG.

FSX dosent even make use of even TWO cores, let alone FOUR cores. even with SP2!

Why dont you do some research before filling threads with bull****.

 

[FoxEye]

There seems to be a lot of contrary advice out there, but I plucked this quote from flightsim.com forums:

"...my buddy has the EXACT same system as me but he has a Q6600, at 3.63 ghz, and I have my E8400 at 4.5ghz, and if we but both of our CPUS to 3.0ghz, then he will get about 2frames/second more than me...."

http://forums.flightsim.com/vbfs/showpost.php?p=1209430&postcount=6

Doesn't really help me, however, since the E8400 and the Q6600 are the same price

 

[Greebo]

WRONG WRONG WRONG.

FSX dosent even make use of even TWO cores, let alone FOUR cores. even with SP2!

Why dont you do some research before filling threads with bull****.

Suggest you do your research and stop been so abusive.

http://forum.i3d.net/main/26986-sponsored-feature-microsoft-flight-simulator-x-soars.html

FSX uses all 4 cores - end of story.

Seung-Woo Kim, senior application engineer at Intel, was involved in the project from the earliest days. "There are essentially two ways to use multi-threading for the Flight Simulator. One is to increase the frame rate. Another is to increase the visual quality. Last year, the primary concern at Microsoft was both, but they were more concerned about the visual quality of the software. We decided to use multi-threading to increase the visual quality, instead of increase the frame rate." Essentially, by distributing the workload across multiple cores, Microsoft was able to substantially enhance the overall visual quality without loss of frame rate.
"We made extensive use of Intel® VTune Performance Analyzer and the Intel® Thread Profiler, ITT 3.0," Kim continued, "resulting in a substantial performance improvement in the flight simulator."
To enhance the visual quality of the simulation, a number of threading techniques were used. The first thread manages the game rendering and processes the artificial intelligence and physics algorithms. On a system platform with more than one core, multiple terrain tessellation simultaneously executes on the second, third, and fourth cores. Digital elevation model loader and texture composition tasks are encompassed in this processing as well.
The net results are a lower latency in texture calculation and a much clearer visual image displayed at varying elevation levels. Processing multiple tessellations concurrently ensures balanced usage of available cores and also contributes to significantly faster load times. As figure 3 shows, the level of detail when quad-core processing is involved provides a crisp, realistic image and a heightened user experience.
"Optimizations done in Flight Simulator* deliver the most realistic flight simulation experience possible when running on Intel® CoreTM2 Duo and CoreTM2 Quad processors. As a result of global scale multi-threading, terrain textures, shades, and shadows are processed in real time without the loss of frame rate-delivering a difference users can see when they move from single-core to dual-core to quad-core processors."

And:

A single processor is not fast enough to update this structure and burn in those textures in real time and allow a high slider setting at the same time. As the airplane flies over, you cannot catch up to the contour location of the airplane.
Before multi-threading, FSX used a technique called fibers on single-core machines to handle sub-tasks (including texture processing) during available intervals, as dictated by the frame rate and rendering requirements. The level of detail generally had to be reduced by means of the slider settings because the background processes could not be allowed to interfere with the graphics rendering. For example, with a target frame rate of 33 frames per second, each frame runs for 30 milliseconds. Critical jobs, such as rendering, might require about 20 milliseconds. This leaves about 10 milliseconds before the 30 milliseconds allotted to the frame elapses. Those remaining milliseconds are all that are available for performing background processes, such as the texture loader and the composition, as well as burning all the required shadows.
Multiple cores make it possible to break down individual tasks and perform them concurrently. With the multi-threaded version of Flight Simulator X, those background tasks are running in the separate cores now. No matter how much time it takes to render the scene- the main task-the other cores are still processing the background and texture composition. Consequently, the texture is always updated in intricate detail.
"The latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator* X Service Pack 2 (SP2) is a great match for the extreme multi-core processing delivered by the new 45nm Intel® CoreTM2 Extreme processors. Flight Simulator X SP2 greatly increases multicore utilization and will scale as more threads are available leading to reduced load times as well as frame rate improvements and great visual complexity during flight. The Flight Simulator team at Microsoft is pleased to work with Intel to provide our end users with a great gaming experience."

So basically you may not get faster framerates with a quad but you will get a visually better experience and the best quality textures.

Hence people will always be able to claim that their 4Ghz E8600 has higher framrates than another persons 3.5Ghz q6600 but that is not the full picture. The guy with the quad may well be looking at a graphically superior FSX to the guy with the E8600.

These are guys who programmed FSX and the technical people from Intel on multi threading.

I would rather beleive them over you bearing in mind you have not posted one shread of evidence to support your rash statement whereas I have proved mine

 

[TechMeh]

WRONG WRONG WRONG.

FSX dosent even make use of even TWO cores, let alone FOUR cores. even with SP2!

Why dont you do some research before filling threads with bull****.

LOL!!, Why dont you do some research yourself plonker.


Did some tests with my Q9450, Disabling the other 3 cores, then 2 cores, and yes there is a diffrence in quality, peformance there is a slight boost. So quad core all the way.

when it comes to intensive physics, Quad all the way.

 

[asim18]

FSX uses all 4 cores - end of story.

Have you even got fsx installed?

Cores 1,2 & 3 are only used about 20% while loading, thats it.

In various flight situations, Core 0 is always above 95% usage, and cores 1,2 & 3 are always under 3% usage.


Anyway, excuse my aggression greebo.

 

[TechMeh]

Have you even got fsx installed?

Cores 1,2 & 3 are only used about 20% while loading, thats it.

In various flight situations, Core 0 is always above 95% usage, and cores 1,2 & 3 are always under 3% usage.


Anyway, excuse my aggression greebo.

Hmmm, well something must be wrong with your setup then, seeing as FSX uses all my cores to around 90%

 

[FoxEye]

Ok, he tells me now to lower the cost to £250. I told him it's not possible.

I guess if it comes to it I can downgrade the 4850 to a 3850, perhaps.

I'm hoping he'll change his mind, because £250 isn't going to buy him a whole lot

 

[Greebo]

Ok, he tells me now to lower the cost to £250. I told him it's not possible.

I guess if it comes to it I can downgrade the 4850 to a 3850, perhaps.

I'm hoping he'll change his mind, because £250 isn't going to buy him a whole lot

You will miss the power of the 4850 and will be a step backwards IMO.

If downgrading the graphics at least pursuade him to get the 8800GT

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showp...T 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail

Saves £41

I suppose with just a e7200 and the 8800GT it will be within £250 budget.

It would be a shame not to spend the extra £70 for the quad core and 4850 IMO though.

 

[TechMeh]

To be honest, if the budget has gone down to 250, Leave it a while so that he can get some more money, or just wait until the prices come down

 

[parxuk]

Asim

I would think it is you that hasnt got FSX installed (or you are trolling).

FSX since SP1 does utilise all 4 cores on my Q6600. Not neccessarily 100% on all 4 cores all the time, but as you tend to fly in more densly populated areas, so the utilisation of the 4 processors tends to go up. This is true, and helps a lot if you have someting like Horizons Generation X photographic scenery.

Do you not have FSX installed?? Do you not have SP1 or 2 installed?? Do you know how to monitor your computers performance?? Do you know what you are talking about??

 

[Cupra]

if its for osx the best card he can buy is an 8800ultra for some reson that gives the best fps or it did last time i looked

 

[x1m]

To be fair, I managed to run fsx on an xp1800+ and fx5200. It might not look the prettiest, but it is by no means unplayable and I managed to do most of what I wanted (it did struggle slightly with the red bull stuff though - stick to the more gentle stuff).

What does he use fsx for?

 

[Tuvoc]

Is the multi-core patch included in the demo download, does anyone know ?
I was an FS fan years ago, this thread has just got me interested again. The demo would be the first step..