Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler | PC Support |
Suggestions for $500 System Upgrade? |
DVA851
Senior Captain, B777-200
Joined on September 22 2002
Online Quadruple Century Club
Million Mile Club
Flying Colonel
50 State Club
Globetrotter
Imlay City, MI USA
1,758 legs, 3,929.8 hours
487 legs,
1,005.8 hours online 1,314 legs,
2,966.8 hours ACARS
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Posted onPost created on
December 02 2008 13:03 ET by Brian Kolbuch
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Hey All,
I'm considering upgrading my computer within the next few weeks, $500 is my budget, plus minus $100 max, my main concern is whether or not i'll actually notice a significant difference in speed or not, based on what i've come up with.
Currently, my system is the following:
AMD X2 6000+
ATI Radeon X1800XT 512mb PCIE 1.0x16
2GB DDR2 PC6400 Ram
Biostar Tforce 550 Nforce 550 AM2 ATX Mobo
320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM SATA 3GB
Windows XP Home SP3
The other specs are virtually irrelavent. Nonetheless, what i'm considering upgrading is 1. Processor, 2. Motherboard (have to), 3. Video Card. Once again though, i've gone through the benchmarks on tomshardware looking at the cards and checking out what I can expect performance wise, and it looks like it should be a significant increase (probably 1.5-2x the speed I have now) but i'm still not sure if its a decent sized "jump" in performance (ie: gaining 10fps for $500 is worthless really, but 30-40+ FPS is another story).
What i'm looking at right now is the following:
1. Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale LGA775
2. ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB GDDR5 256bit PCIE 2.0x16
3. ASRock P43Twins1600 LGA 775 Intel P43 Mobo (dont care for ASRock, but this mobo is cheap [$80], and offers DDR3 & DDR2 compability (with 6 memory slots)
Total Price = $495 all inclusive. It fits right into my budget, but again, i'm just not sure if i'll notice a significant increase in FS2004 over what I have now. Does anyone know if the above specs would be significant enough for a noticeable performance increase? Or does anyone have a similar computer?
Also, regarding the RAM, would DDR2 PC6400 (800mhz) run in that ASRock mobo, which says it supports DDR2 1066mhz (i'm running 800mhz - i'm assuming it should be backwards compatabile to an 800mhz set of RAM?). Would this be a significant limitation on my computer?
Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated - thanks!
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DVA5908
Captain, B757-200
Joined on May 10 2008
50 State Club
White Knuckles Club
Everett 250 Club
US Capital Club
Quatercentenary Club
DVA Fifteen-Year Anniversary
Honolulu, HI
459 legs, 1,172.6 hours
458 legs,
1,171.8 hours ACARS
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Posted onPost created on
December 02 2008 22:16 ET by Robert South
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Brian,
If you will be upgrading the video card, I would definitely make sure your power supply has enough juice. I have a pretty powerful PSU that can handle my new 9600 with ease but while i was looking into upgrading to a 260 I noticed that my "powerful" psu didnt have nearly enough juice to meet the minimums (more specifically the 12v rails).
Robert SouthCaptain, B757-200
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DVA3749
Senior Captain, B737-800
Joined on November 24 2006
Three Million Mile Club
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Panda Club
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Online Fifteen Century
"Delta Chop" Milwaukee, WI USA
1,598 legs, 7,139.2 hours
1,527 legs,
6,895.2 hours online 1,348 legs,
6,154.1 hours ACARS 5 legs,
10.4 hours event
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Posted onPost created on
December 03 2008 05:26 ET by Ryan Schmidt
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Brian post this over here, see if my gang can be of assistance. http://www.firingsquad.com/ They are true gurus and will be of a lot of help.
Ryan SchmidtSenior Captain, B737-800
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DVA3561
Captain, B777-200
Joined on September 16 2006
Online Century Club
DVA Fifteen-Year Anniversary
B737 100 Club
Triple Century Club
"The Sky Is The Limit" St George, UT USA
348 legs, 954.2 hours
185 legs,
498.8 hours online 336 legs,
885.1 hours ACARS 2 legs,
4.7 hours event
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Posted onPost created on
December 03 2008 19:47 ET by Josh Schall
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Everything sounds great however your are missing the final component that everyone forgets about.. The hardrive... Yes I know... ha ha but you need to see how fast you hdd is.. reason is because most people think there graphics cards do all the work but in reality the hard drive does just as much... it is feeding the graphics card all that imformation. most of the time people with powerfull graphics cards will have fsx go slower than those that just have an all right card. See if you can upgrade to a 10,000 rpm sata drive.. it will do you a ton of good...
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DVA3680
First Officer, B767-300
OLP
Joined on November 01 2006
Stock Car Racing Club
Century Club
Berthoud, CO
114 legs, 232.4 hours
97 legs,
212.8 hours online 106 legs,
215.1 hours ACARS 2 legs,
3.7 hours event
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Posted onPost created on
December 04 2008 00:48 ET by Kevin Williams
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Brian, I have almost the exact system that you are thinking about getting.
I bought the ASRock Motherboard that you have listed, please don't get it. You hit the FSB wall around 420 MHz (around 3.7 GHz). So either get the Twins2000 or a different motherboard such as ASUS, MSI, and Gigabyte will all do just fine. Just look in their manuals and make sure they can get up around 450+ FSB. I currently have a gigabyte motherboard and am running at 4.0 GHz with only a very little voltage bump. This is the motherboard I have: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128345
If you can, get a motherboard that can use DDR3. Get 4GB DDR3 1600 cas latency of 7 ($150). If not, get 4GB DDR2 1066 latency of 5 (should be somewhere around $60 - that's what I have). Go 4GB as FSX will eat 2GB easy. Yes you can use DDR2 800 ram just fine.
I also have a 4870 graphic card. Works wonders and I get higher frame rates than with the 8800 Ultra I had... but... there's way more scenery blurries than with the nvidia cards. If that bothers you or you plan on doing videos then grab a nVidia one. I decided to keep the ATI and turn up my scenery sliders (they are all are maxed)
You'll also need a CPU cooler such as the Ultra 120. I'd also grab an extra case fan if you don't have one already.
Like Josh said, another hard drive would be nice, but I doubt that it'll fit in your $500 budget as they run around $200 for those bad boys. I would try to get another hard drive just for fsx, a SATA II 7200 rpm one, and it doesn't have to be that big such as a 80 GB. I'm running on a small 120GB just fsx, and it's only using 25.4 GB.
And like Robert said, make sure your PSU has enough power. 500+ Watts will do for that 4870 (get a SLI PSU as the 4870 uses 2 PCI-E power cord... things)
Hopefully you'll be under your $500 budget there, but it'll sure run a lot nicer.
Hope that helps
-Kevin
Kevin WilliamsFirst Officer, B767-300
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