New computer for the game.

Bathrone · 01-31-08, 10:47 PM

I would avoid the G31 and get a P35 chipset motherboard assuming you wont be running multiple graphics cards. Its a better chipset with better configurability.

FSX is notorious for demanding high power. Especially with FSAA and AF running on the graphics at higher resolutions you'll need all the power you can get.

The thing about computers is alot of people think they are experts, but really its the minority a few people know the x86 architecture and computing science in real detail. There is two points that are plain wrong in this thread:

1. You dont need 64bit OS for 4GB of RAM. Well actually you do. The 32 bit MS XP kernel cannot access more than 2gig of allocated memory to a single process and as well, it cannot address the whole 4GB memory space. 4GB reqyuires a 64bit operating system to properly take advantage of that amount of RAM.

2. Vista x64 is to be avoided. The driver support for XP 64 is bad. Vista x64 has excellent driver support. Whats more, the windows driver model for Vista has changed from XP and XP 64 was always a fringe product to begin within - these factors will only widen the gap between Vista x64 and XP 64 when it comes to IHVs coming out with driver releases. Many IHVs are no longer supporting XP 64bit drivers at all.

Most of what you see about Vista "negatives" is from people who do not have a rational qualified argument. It's partly MS's fault by breeding a generation of users with poor security habits from not running least priveledged user accounts all the time and then blaming UAC for changing their bad habits. They'd die if they tried to deal with BSD, Linux and Solaris let me tell you. There is no perfect operating system but for the desktop role that Vista is designed for, there is many, many reasons why it's better than XP.

I would highly recommend going for quad core. While some games you use will be single threaded, the middleware layers such as DX10 and the sound layer are multi-threaded. The whole operating system consists of multi threaded processes and for this reason even single threaded games will benefit from being run on a multi core CPU. The price of the Q6600 is sufficiently low not to make it a big leap and the great benefit about this chip is that it overclocks very well on relatively simple air cooling such as thermalright ultra 120 extreme and a scythe 120mm fan. It also helps prevents stuttering where the game process is interrupted by another process on the kernel in a single cpu situation.

01-31-08, 10:47 PM	#27
Bathrone Ensign Join Date: Jan 2007 Posts: 234 Downloads: 82 Uploads: 0	I would avoid the G31 and get a P35 chipset motherboard assuming you wont be running multiple graphics cards. Its a better chipset with better configurability. FSX is notorious for demanding high power. Especially with FSAA and AF running on the graphics at higher resolutions you'll need all the power you can get. The thing about computers is alot of people think they are experts, but really its the minority a few people know the x86 architecture and computing science in real detail. There is two points that are plain wrong in this thread: 1. You dont need 64bit OS for 4GB of RAM. Well actually you do. The 32 bit MS XP kernel cannot access more than 2gig of allocated memory to a single process and as well, it cannot address the whole 4GB memory space. 4GB reqyuires a 64bit operating system to properly take advantage of that amount of RAM. 2. Vista x64 is to be avoided. The driver support for XP 64 is bad. Vista x64 has excellent driver support. Whats more, the windows driver model for Vista has changed from XP and XP 64 was always a fringe product to begin within - these factors will only widen the gap between Vista x64 and XP 64 when it comes to IHVs coming out with driver releases. Many IHVs are no longer supporting XP 64bit drivers at all. Most of what you see about Vista "negatives" is from people who do not have a rational qualified argument. It's partly MS's fault by breeding a generation of users with poor security habits from not running least priveledged user accounts all the time and then blaming UAC for changing their bad habits. They'd die if they tried to deal with BSD, Linux and Solaris let me tell you. There is no perfect operating system but for the desktop role that Vista is designed for, there is many, many reasons why it's better than XP. I would highly recommend going for quad core. While some games you use will be single threaded, the middleware layers such as DX10 and the sound layer are multi-threaded. The whole operating system consists of multi threaded processes and for this reason even single threaded games will benefit from being run on a multi core CPU. The price of the Q6600 is sufficiently low not to make it a big leap and the great benefit about this chip is that it overclocks very well on relatively simple air cooling such as thermalright ultra 120 extreme and a scythe 120mm fan. It also helps prevents stuttering where the game process is interrupted by another process on the kernel in a single cpu situation.