System Hardware: PC | MOBO | RAM | CPU | HDD | SSD | PSU etc

Ok, I cannot find a decent article or any useful information on this topic. I have an Athlon X2 and GTX 550TI and I run Flight Sim 2004. I get great performance with this setup. However, I am considering a "silent" and power efficient PC and would like to make my computer as quiet as possible. Therefore I am considering an integrated graphics CPU and a silent PC case with as little fans as possible. I would like to know if anyone, anywhere, runs an AMD A8 series APU and uses the integrated graphics with Flight Sim 2004 or FSX. I cannot find any article or information! I am hoping (and assuming) that an AMD A8-3800 series APU (with integrated graphics) would …

Title says it all. I got some hardware issues at my end and just wondering if by any chance any of our resident AVSIM wizard in this forum might be from around Ottawa/Hull/Gatineau...Canada. My best geek friend (whom built my system) now lives in Vancouver and a long way from his usual help. I fried an HD last night, but my system is built with "ghost" hdd's to resolve that issue. But I don't have a clue how to do it. So I got a cold 24 of beer (of your choice) if anyone from around CYOW can make a house call!

Hi community, I am about to build a new system dedicated to FSX, and I need some advice as to whether what I have in mind will be any good. I am a little limited by budget (3 kids!) so I cannot really move too much in the hardware, but this is what I have in mind: Corsair Carbide Gaming Case Antec Truepower 750 watt PSU Intel Core i5 3550 Ivy Bridge CPU Asrock Z77 Pro 4 Motherboard 8Gb G-skill Ripjaws 1600Mhz RAM 1 x Silicon Power VELOX 120Gb SSD (O/S only) 1 x Silicon Power VELOX V60 240Gb SSD (For FSX) 1 x 500Gb Seagate Momentus XT 1 x Pioneer DVD Burner 1 x AFOX Geforce 550Ti with 3 Gb VRAM Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit So, will I get mo…

I have recently upgraded my rig(specs in my sig), so I did a clean FSX install, and tweaked the system according to Word Not Allowed's guide. I've so far loaded two addon's, the NGX and Flightbeam KSFOX, and I've been getting OOM's like crazy. I'm running 8GB of RAM, Windows 7 64-bit, and FSX Acceleration. I seem to be reading that my page file may have something to do with this, but honestly this is beyond my understanding at the moment. I have my page file set to System Managed on my 120GB OS SSD. Do I also need to set up a page file on the FSX drive? I feel like an obvious answer must be staring me in the face, but after a long day of overclocking and installing,…

Hello I have two 128g SSD. One is running now but 90% full. The other is sitting in a box Im looking for some advice on what my best option is. should I a. install the second SSD as drive D and download any further program mes to D however will this cause problems for FSX as most program's need to be in the root folder © b. re install all fsx to drive D c. Raid 0 the drives but I don't know much about it. Any suggestions greatly appreciated

I'm just remembering back to when I bought my first computer with my own money back around when FS9 came out, it was a trusty P4 2.8Ghz.with a Geforce MX440 Graphics card and maybe 1GB of RAM. Back then the onboard soundcards weren't great and shifting over to an Audigy 2 ZS PCI Card gave me a nice little boost in FPS. I know that the onboard cards have evolved a lot since then and are much better quality, but as far as FPS go in FSX, would adding a soundcard give me the nice little bump I saw back then, or are the onboard cards pretty decent these days? Are most people using an Onboard Card or a dedicated Sound Card?

I've heard there clouds in particular stress the GPU, but tell me more of what you know. If I am at the same resolution (1920x1200) and go from a GTX280 to the latest nV card or a 570, will this mean more dense clouds will have less of a negative impact on frame rate? If so, by how much? I'm on an old Penryn quad, however the question is for a total system upgrade, so would be going w/ an i7-2700 or i7-3770 . . . or Haswell ;o) Right now very dense clouds in ASX really do stress performance. I have clouds in FSX set at max miles and density.

I am still loving the new machine I built but I am having two issues that I am looking for help on....I have not called in to Asus yet but may after the US holiday here. Issue #1 is I really want in the hot weather to put the system to sleep and then awaken it when I want to fly, work, photoshop whatever. I am finding that when I initially would put the system to sleep it would sleep.....blue LED slowly flashing....now if I put it to sleep it sleeps for 5 or 10 seconds and then comes back to life and stays running....not sure why....I imagine a USB device is waking it....may be my Gen1 Drobo? Issue #2 is when I fully shut down the system, and then return to use it and p…

As Ivy Bridge should be arriving in a few weeks, I'm considering upgrading my cooling to achieve the maximum overclock possible. Does anybody know, or have an opinion on, whether a Corsair H100 will provide a significant practical advantage over an H70? I'm not particularly inclined to install a custom cooling loop at this point. Thanks, Andrew

...and stuff. Right. So, my system was what you see in my sig. A Phenom II X6 at 3.5GHz (stock was 2.8) - this OC has been stable in heavy use for about a month now. Also one 5770, etc. So, I bought and installed a second 5770 today - Crossfired it in, and booted up. My motherboard pitched a fit, saying: "Overclocking Error" and something about the settings. Hit "Ignore and start anyway" and the system boots. The Crossfire works, I boot up FSX, and am getting ridiculously higher frames than on one card (good old Crossfire). Out of interest, I then go back to Windows and casually look at the CPU; and it's been punted back to 2.8GHz. Why would there be any reason f…

In addition to large spinner storage drives I run 2 matching G.Skill 120g SSDs. One has the OS and the other FSX with installed sceneries. Despite not loading most of my FSX addons, I only have 22g of the 120 left. Here is the question: In the SSD drive properties there is the "Compress this drive to save disk space" option. What will that do insofar as the speed of running FSX, or any other function? Is it a good idea or a bad one? Kind regards,

From Wikipedia's article, an Expected Feature of Haswell is "Fully integrated voltage regulator, thereby moving another component from the motherboard onto the CPU." Any implications you can draw from this?

Hello, I have a problem that when I'm running some games like NFS SHIFT 2, GTA IV, MW2 and the simulator my computer just de energizing and starts up again. I have changed my CPU Cooling from stock to the Corsair's H40 water cooling and still not working. I think it's PSU problem.. I7 2600K 3.4GHz. Nvidia GTX 580 3Gb. ASUS P8P67 Motherboard. 750 Watt Energmax NAXN PSU. Corsair H40. Another problem that I have, I can't install the MSFX's Service Pack 2. It says: "Microsoft flight simulator x service pack 2 requires the english version of flight simulator x" Thanks, Thomas.

I started getting bsd'd yesterday then lost everything. System won't POST or boot and the MB DRAM fault led stays on. I tested the memory in a different system and it is ok. ASUS product support says the CPU's memory controller probably fried. I OC'd the system to 4.8GHz with BCLK at 100MHz and the MULT set to 48. Voltage was set to 1.425vdc. The chip core temps never went over 80C during 24Hr stress testing. Memory clock and voltage were 1600MHz at 1.65vdc, per XMP spec. I was lucky enough to buy Intel's OC protection so the i7 2600K is covered. I'm wondering if the OC had anything to do with the chip failure or if anyone else had a similar experience.

Hello Guys, I sort of went off the idea of upgrading as I had a very busy period of coursework and now I have the time to re-look into it. The PC I currently have is probably 4 years old(since I purchased it) but the technology is probably from 2007/early 2008. It's had many fantastic hours of use, I've successfully managed to run FS2004 and a heavily tweaked version of FSX dooable for the last year, but it's getting on now and clearly I need to get an upgraded computer. Windows Vista, Nvidia 9600GT, 2.4GHZ Quad Core Q6600, 4GB DDR3 RAM and two 500GB HDDs. My FSX It ran FS2004 pretty neatly, and ran FSX to a standard that it was playab…

Check it out: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ivy-bridge-overclocking-core-i7-3770k,3198.html Cheers jja

Hey guys, so i am running fs9 and fsx on then same solid state hdd, its a muskin 120gb (its brand new) anyway i also have a western digital for other games, The problem seems to be only with fs2004, and allthough sometimes fsx crashes, (problem has occured and trying to fix it) never a blue screen of death, however with fs9 about 10-40 mins into a flight, or sometimes just from taxing, i am faced with a blue screen of death. I have been playing world of subways and ts2012 on full gfx with no problems, and apart from the odd not responding error, fsx plays fine too, its only fs2004 giving me b.S.O.D. I simply do not know what the problem is. My cpu is overcloke…

OK I just built my PC and I connected everything (Properly I thought) and switched it on to see the POST. Instead I noticed that the chassis fans were not running..But the CPU cooler was running.. By the time I realized what was going on, I saw smoke and smelt a pungent odor. I turned the power off. Then I realized what I had done wrong. The power to the mother board has two main power connection. One is in the front of the motherboard, the 24 (The long) power connector and then at the back there is a 8 pin power connector. My PC Power and Cooling PSU has tonnes of rails where mostly they are 6+2 Pin connectors like the one you use for your Video card. I…

Hi, I just came back from a short vacation to Washington DC. (awesome) I arrived home to find that my RMA Asus P8P67 Deluxe board was waiting for me. The only issue that I am having with this replacement board is that it will not post unless that the 2 sticks of RAM run in single channel. I have 2x4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3@2000 9-10-9-27-2T I have tried many configurations to no avail. Anyone have any ideas?

I am building my second setup for my fs9. My first system runs fs9 with all sliders fully right but now it is conditioned for fsx only. How about this (note that this setup is less than $500 AMD Dualcore X2 250 3.0 GHZ Geforce 9800GT 1 GB G-Skill 4GB MSI (forgot the type) SATA 500GB How does it run fs9 with massive ground/scenery/airports add ons? The OS is Windows 7-64. I fly mainly Airsimmer which is quite fps demanding. Cheers

Hello everyone, I really missed playing MS FS after abandoning PCs many years ago so I thought I'd try to get it up on my Mac and had limited success that I thought I'd shared. I first brought it up on my iMac (5 year old machine; 1 3.3 Ghz Dual Core; Bootcamp with Win 7, did the tweaks mentioned in several places to the OS) and installed FSX with RC and UT2. I got decent graphics performance, with 20FPS until I loaded UT2 and then the AI traffic seemed to really kill things. So I thought (from what I'd read everywhere) that AI cost lots of CPU so I'll install it on my Mac Pro (3 Year old machine; 2 2.66Ghz Quad Core with 16GB of RAM). Turns out, with AI tra…

Hi, It's all in the topic title really,I just need some advice for my first overclock on the 2600K. Normally I like to build my own PC's, but I picked up an Alienware Aurora R3 for next to nothing (was too hard for me to refuse!) and have added my own upgrades/components to make it what it is in my sig. The Alienware came overclocked to 4.1Ghz but I wanted to go higher, so knowing what these chips can do I did some research and set off on my first overclock. Only thing I discovered was that the options actually open to me to change in the BIOS on the alienware are fairly limited, but I did find another thread elsewhere where someone had overclocked one of thes…

Intel will need to change their TIM if they want to fix the heat problem.... http://www.legitrevi...article/1924/1/

I am fortunate to have a dedicated FSX rig with my OS and FSX on two separate SSDs. Win7 sits on a 65gb drive with usually about 8gbs of free space always available. FSX is on a 250gb drive and has currently about 60 gb free. My question is, do SSDs have to maintain 30% free space to maintain efficiency, like a standard Sata HD, or can I fill more or less the entire SSD without any loss of performance? Advice and help always appreciated fellas, cheers.

So i use fsx with three monitors. My main monitor is ( I thought ! ) the highest quality moniter i own.I run it at 1200x1920 The problem is that the main monitor gives me the blurries the others do not. Now you may say, just change them around. I could do that quite easily but i would like to understand why this would be problem with one monitor and not the others ? The only thing i could think of is fresh rate . Note all monitor use a dvi nvidia cards are gtx 580 Thanks peter