Need help choosing a PC

Kingser

Hey guys just another rookie ere:D,
Can any point out a pc that matches the requirements
to run FS X please!!??

highlydebased

lol..........to be vague

Intel E6600 at LEAST
2gb at least of RAM (probably more)
nvidia 8800gts at the very least

FSX is very heavy on graphics.........tbh FS9 might be a better option...?

Steyr

Neon-Circles wrote: »

lol..........to be vague

Intel E6600 at LEAST
2gb at least of RAM (probably more)
nvidia 8800gts at the very least

FSX is very heavy on graphics.........tbh FS9 might be a better option...?

Yep FS9/FS2004, join us and fly online with us!!:)

Kingser

k I'm go wit you's 2 on that one fs2004 pc world have a good tower on sale(is tower t right "slang") but give me a while before i can fly with u!!is the book useful?

Kingser

Has anyone any dealings with these guys from england i've heard they are the best for building computer systems for Flight Simulation. I've done me shopping around and these guys seems to have taken my eye so far as they specialise in building computer for Flight Simulation. I've e mailed them for a price list two days ago still no reply?? Are they good does anyone know!?
Here is there web site: http://www.alpinesystems.co.uk/

Any help would be great!!:D

pclancy

To be honest i'm not that blown away by the specs of those alpine machines...some better specced gaming PCs on dabs.com or komplett.ie, even in adverts.ie. They look like normal PC builders that have jumped on the FS thing, I wouldnt say theiir PCs are any better suited to FS then any Dell or HP gaming PC, never mind one you build yourself?

Kingser

No i don't build ..but i'm good with my hands so i wouldn say no if i had a good book to work me throu t build

S.I.R

FSX runs on my pc

intel P4 3.0 ghz basic.

256 hd card ( 40 euro )

120 gb hd

1 gig pci-1 ram....


no high specs needed, you dont need the graphics on high.... 30+ fps is playable.

pclancy

Also try Ankermann, very good prices and excellent machines.

http://www.ankermann-pc.com/en/

Highly recommend these guys...my last PC in Ireland I bought throuigh them and it blew me away. Really nicely built and they got me in a specific motherboard that i requested. Germans don't feck around at building things

Dogster

Part 1

Hi Kingser, it is very difficult to specify what should have in a computer for FSX without haveing some sort of budget to work to. But here are some guidelines on stuff which give you a faster running system for FSX without spending money on stuff that cost a shed load of money but only gives a marginal improvement in performance. I am going to take that you might build your own machine, as even if in the end you decide to go for a pre-built machine, thinking about what you would like for a build yourself machine is a good way of figureing what would be the essential things a pre-built machine should have.

FSX unlike many games is much dependent on the processor than the Graphics Card, so for that reason the first thing you start of with is the processor.

AMD Athlon 64 939 socket used to be the best processor, but AMD slipped behind when they introduced the 940 AM2 socket version of the Athlon 64 as it was little better than the 939 Socket Athlon 64.

Intel Conroe is the best processor for FSX, so if you are interested in FSX could for the Intel rather than AMD product.

I would go for a quad core conroe, and go for one which is an intergated quad core rather than the early version of Intel's quad which had effectively two dualcore side by side on the same piece of silicon. Most application software that operates in real time and have unstructured elements like games e.g. have real problems in utilizeing more than one core, but the advantage of getting a quad core is that hopefully the operating system e.g. will share out the workload of various software applications so that e.g. with a quad core, you might be able to download stuff from the net and play FSX with getting too much of a performance hit on the game, remember though that in the real World computers performance is not the possible highest performance figure as stated by a manufacturer for a component but a limitation imposed by is the slowest and weakest component in a particular scenario. So whilst FSX does have a capability to use more than one core, I actually go for a quad core because of the ability to run other stuff, whilst playing the FSX. Unless you want to swap, processor at a later date I would try to get for the best one could afford ie a Quad core with a high number cache, do not go for the absolute most expensive version though, usually the only difference between them and the mid range product is that the manufacturer has allready unlocked the full potential of the processor for you, if you are prepared to over-clock your processor you can do it, with a little effort and some knowledge and little risk of damageing the processor if you are not greedy in how much you try to over-clock it.

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer

Dogster

Part 2

Most Intel processors for consumers use the 775 socket, there are few that do not but only a few, so I am not going to discuss them here. So you will need a motherboard that supports the 775 socket. It is better to go for a board which supports the best processors in the Intel Conroe range, as if e.g. you might initaially go for a lower specification processor haveing a motherboard which supports high end products gives you greater flexability in terms of upgrading your processor at a later date. Go for a motherboard that support high end Intel 775 processors, but not the flagship boards they cost a lot more than the regular high specification board and do not give a lot more. There are several good makes of Motherboards, Asus has a good track record of producing high quality high specification boards but things change from time to time, so one company or another might have the best motherboard at a certain time, so read motherboard reviews on the internet. A site called Tom's hardware is one good place.


http://www.tomshardware.com/us/#redir

you can also find reviews for lots of other computer components on that site.

Aswell as processor and a motherboard, you will need RAM memory sticks, I would go for DDR3 memory and a motherboard which supports it. DDR is obsolete and DDR2 whilst still capable of giveing DDR3 a run for its money has been replaced in the new build stakes by DDR3, and will probably find that most motherboards that support the newest and best Conroes will support DDR3 rather than DDR2. Windows 32 bit operating systems are limited to support of no more than 4 Gigabytes of RAM [ Windows XP 64 and Vista 64 will support huge figures for RAM, but this of no benefit to FSX, since FSX is a 32 bit software and whilst FSX can run under Windows 64 bit operating systems, as a 32 bit software it can not make use of their plus 4 Gigabytes RAM capabilities, so there is no advantage in getting a 64 bit operating system or more than 4 Gigabytes of RAM for FSX ] all that said, there are some nice price deals for 4 x 2 Gigabyte DDR3 RAM packs at the moment, so that it might be worth buying an 8 Gigabyte pack putting two of the four sticks in to the computer and keeping the other two as spares. Do not buy, RAM sticks of less than 1 Gigabyte capacity as your motherboard will only have four RAM sockets and you want to have the capability if you say start with 2 Gigabytes of memory of going up to 4 Gigabytes and it is not a good idea to try mixing different capacity or different manufacturers or even same manufactuters and same capacity but different model type RAM on your motherboard.

Best Regards
Adrian Wainer

Dogster

Part 3

Water cooling your processor, do not bother with it, for a first build a very bad idea all round. Depending on whether you want to overclock your processor or not, it might be worth fitting a custom air cooler to the processor. If you are not intending to overclock your processor it might well be worth using the air cooling unit that comes with the processor, if you intend to overclock your processor either from the get go or later inthe life time of your rig, it might be worth fitting a custom air cooler from the first build of the computer, do check if the manufacturer of the processor is supplying a high specification air cooler with his product as sometimes manufacturers provide better quality cooling units with their higher end procesor products.if do go for a custom air cooler, make sure it is suitable for the Intel processor you are using ie Conroe 775, sometimes manufacturers of custom air coolers will have a product which will fit several different processors and have various adapters, so if you get one of these, follow the instructions particularly carefully and don't use the bits for a processor for a different type or manufacturer to the one you have.

Dogster

Part 4

Some motherboard particularly the higher end of things can come with a mass of brass tubes and pipes with fins and stuff, components on a motherboard can get hot and it is certainly a good idea to cool them via such systems but some manufacturers of motherboards take things too far and as a result make it difficult to fit the stock air cooler and impossible to fit some of the quality custom air coolers, if you see the processor socket surrounded by cooling stuff be aware to this issue and check the internet reviews, most quality internet reviews of motherboards will warn you if a motherboard has this problem. A very nice feature that some motherboards may have is a backup Bios, the Bios chip is chip which has operating instructions for the motherboard on it, if it dies, your only option is to try and get hold of a new bios chip and fit it yourself or get the repair shop to fit one for you, since your computer will do nothing if your Bios chip dies or get corrupted, some motherboards carry a back up, if you are looking at two boards and one has a back-up bios and other does not and they are pretty much equal otherwise, go for the one with a back up bios, it is a very usefull security feature.

Disc Drives, at one time it might have worth going for a product known as Raptor but ordinary manufactuers drives are now so high performance, they can compete with Raptors on performance and do so at a fraction of the cost of Raptor drives and provideing much more gigabytes on the drive than a Raptor. Higher capacity drives tend to have better performance than lower capacity and you obviously have more space to work with, so I would take 300 Gigabytes as your starting point for drive size, you pay a premium for the very highest capacity drives, so stick to below circa 900 gigabytes. Disc drives are a largely mechanical device, so spindle speed can be important and being a largely mechanical device they need some way of offsetting the fact that because they are mechanical they can become a choke point in a fast electronic system, a partial solution to this problem is for them to maintain their own electronic memory called cache, which can reduce the number of mechanical read/write operations needed and thus speed up the capability of the drive, as a rough guide the more cache it has the more it can reduce its read write operations to a minimum and better its performance.

RAID 0 in the form where your data is striped over two disc drives though often included in high end pre-built machines, it is a bad idea, this system really only comes in to its own in a commercial server type application, so there is little performance benefit to the average home user and you have the big drawback that if one of your drives fail, you lose everything on both drives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_array_of_independent_disks

my opinion is that it is better for the home user to stay away from RAID, it just makes life more complicated and there are better ways of getting what the average home user might want than using one of the types of RAID.

Haveing your operating system on one disk drive and your FSX on another disc can have some speed advantages but the convenience of haveing everything on a single drive from the point of view of ease of creating backups favours me to the single drive solution.

Dogster

A system not usually used in a home computer scenario is something called mobile racks. these are units which will fit in a computer in any space which could take an optical drive, if you have a case that would take several of these e.g. Coolermaster stacker case, you can fit many of these in your computer, this will give you the possability of haveing several drives in your computer each with a different operating system e,g, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux and makeing it as simple as changing between operating systems as turning a key which comes with these racks which connects/disconnects the rack from the computer so e.g. if you were using Windows xp and wanted to swap to vista, allow you would need do would be to shut down your computer, turn the key on the XP rack to open ie disconnect, turn the key on the Vista rack to closed ie connect and power up the computer. Of course it is possible to keep multiple operating systems on a single drive but given the relatively low cost of disc drives today there are good arguments to keeping your operating systems on seperate drives in terms of security of your system. The great advantage when using different operating systems of keeping them completly different drives and haveing them boot independent rather than haveing boot off a single drive. Is that if one of the operating systems crashes, it will have zero effect on the other operating systems and you can continue as normal using your other drives and respecive operating systems , whilst you get around to restoring/repairing the failed drive. Another big advantage of this system is that you can create full mirror image copies of your drives by say in the 3 drive scenaro by swaping out one of the operating system drives and replacing it with a for copying drive, since the disc drive in a mobile rack sits in a insert which just slides out of the rack once the key is set to unlock all you to do then is replace the system drive with the for copy drive and do a mirror image with a programme like Norton ghost. [ If you have even more racks you can reserve one of the rack places for copying purposes and leave your system drives place ] If your disc drive fails in the future provided your copy is up to date, just pop it in and continue as if nothing had happened. obviously for a three operating systems scenario you would need 3 drives for the three operating systems and three 3 drives to make copies to. Lots of people have different way of keeping back-ups and different methods suit different people and often what is ideal for one person would just no good for another person, but I think this is one of the most secure and best systems of doing backup around, Also it is nice to have a case which can house lots of racks but even if your case would only take two racks, you can still have all the benefits of a rack system even with many seperate operating systems seperate disc drives and copies, merely by swapping the inserts in and out as required.

An example of mobile rack

http://www.raidsonic.de/en/pages/products/mobile-racks.php?we_objectID=4451

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer

Mc-BigE

wow, that was some reply ^^^^

all good advice,

I have a intel quad core Q6600 2.4GHz
6 GB of Ram
2 SLI graphics Cards Point of View GeForce 8800GTS 512MB
(if you have more then one monitor, better to go with one bigger graphics card 1GB)

and Vista 64 bit.

this should get you around mid 20FPS at nearly max settings.

bottom line more ram, 8GBS would be v nice, 1 GB nvidia type Graphics card and quad core processor.

you'd get the above (without monitors) for about 1000euro.

heres a good one:
http://www.komplett.ie/k/config.aspx?ConfigSystemId=10058

Dogster

Hi Mc-BigE how do you take advantage of the plus 4 Gigabytes, have you some 64 bit application software that you use with it?

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer
AKA The Dogster

AMD Athlon 64 4800 Dual Core San Diego 1+1 Megabyte cache
Asus A8N SLI Deluxe
Gainward 7600GT Golden Sample factory overclocked passive cooling
4 Gigabytes RAM
4 Hitachi 330 Gigabyte drives
1 DVD drive
1 Floppy drive
View Sonic 19 Inch CRT
Cyborg Evo Force Joystick
Coolermaster Stacker Case
Microsoft Mouse optical tracking, wire connected

highlydebased

Dogster wrote: »

Hi Mc-BigE how do you take advantage of the plus 4 Gigabytes, have you some 64 bit application software that you use with it?

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer
AKA The Dogster

You need a 64bit OS, otherwise most 32bit software works fine.



I was wondering had this forum been turned into Building and Upgrading...:rolleyes:

Dogster

Hi Neon circles did not realize, the boards had a specific place for building and upgradeing sorry about that, with regard to the plus 4 Gigabytes issue, what I was trying to get is how is Mc-BigE getting an advantage from haveing more than 4 Gigabytes as whilst with 32 bit software, generally it will run fine with a Windows 64 bit operating system [ 64 bit Vista and XP ] but you can not get any advantage from haveing more than 4 Gigabytes unless you are running 64 bit application software.

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer

Mc-BigE

Dogster wrote: »

Hi Neon circles did not realize, the boards had a specific place for building and upgradeing sorry about that, with regard to the plus 4 Gigabytes issue, what I was trying to get is how is Mc-BigE getting an advantage from haveing more than 4 Gigabytes as whilst with 32 bit software, generally it will run fine with a Windows 64 bit operating system [ 64 bit Vista and XP ] but you can not get any advantage from haveing more than 4 Gigabytes unless you are running 64 bit application software.

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer

i have 64 bit vista, has far as i know, you need to have that to get more than 4 GBs , as someone else said.
OP. it might be a good idea to rename topic to "Need help choosing a pc for FSX":)

Dogster

Hi Mc-BigE

to have an advantage of using more than 4 Gigabytes

You Must have

1 A 64 bit processor

2 A 64 Bit operating System

3 More than 4 Gigabytes of RAM Installed

4 You also must also have 64 bit application programmes

I know you have 1 thru 3 inclusive, but do you have number 4 and if so which?

Best Regards
Adrian Wainer