My Upgrade + D Drive

[Sir Ash]

Hey guys,

Well, my computer's in the shop now for an upgrade, and repair for a problem where 3D games cause the computer to shut down after a few minutes (which should be repaired through the upgrade).

It's not a massive upgrade, but pretty good for me and FSX (I just want to achieve over 10fps but more would be great). What do you think?.....

RAM 2GB -> 4GB

ATi Radeon 2400 HD Pro -> Nvidia 9800GT

Also, in my last topic I did ask about installing FSX on the D Drive, and just one quick question, will it detect my saves and documents in the D Drive or the default C Drive for My Documents?

Thanks for your help.

[Dwho]

Seeing that your GPU has a PCI Express interface of 1.0 it would help to know whether ur motherboard has PCI Express 2.0 seeing how PCI-E 2.0 was released mid to late 07 its still possible that ur board could be PCI-E 1.0 only

to Find out if u dont know download CPU-Z and click Mainboard

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

As for RAM goes you can probably get RAM as fast as 1333Mhz (thats ur Front Side Bus Speed, Basically Imagine the RAM of your computer as one city, and the CPU as another. Between them is a freeway: the Front Side Bus. When youre doing something ur PC demandsthe Front Side Bus transfers data quickly to meet that demand, the actual speed is the limit of how fast something can be transferred ur your case 1333Mhz (thats the basic gist of it).(it also depends on how fast your motherboard memory speed is)

[Sir Ash]

Well, my computer's in the store now, but I assume I have a PCI-E 2.0 motherboard as I bought the computer in April last year (unless the computers already made in the normal electronic stores don't have that motherboard in it). Also, the upgrade is as affordable as we can have at the moment, in total (along with the new power supply unit), it costs about $350. But it's a pretty good value for this upgrade, and definitely worth it. I'm just asking you guys of what you think of it and how much would it improve performance. Anyway, thanks for the information.

[Maurice_King]

Also, in my last topic I did ask about installing FSX on the D Drive, and just one quick question, will it detect my saves and documents in the D Drive or the default C Drive for My Documents?

You may have issues with current saves BUT these are located in a folder hanging off your "My Documents" and if these are backed up can be reimported after a re-install, now irrespective of where your FSX is installed there will be default folders located under your "My Documents" and this is directly related to the settings for your My Documents setting in Windows (yes this can be moved to any drive) simply by editing the Windows environment settings.

Your User profile can be moved too so in the event of a major failure of the system you can be back and running in very little time.  A tip here is to NEVER have anything else installed on C:\ other than the OS and ALL other Programing and documents on other drives. When building a PC aim for a minimum of 2 Physical HDD's.

The reason for this is the drive that will invariably fail is generally the OS Drive or partition and there are many many settings help within windows that if preserved can be restored by GHOST , True Image or any other quality backup agents .

Hence my making the OS Drive a 60 Gb SSD for instance and a 250 Gb SSD for the Main Drive with a 1 Tb Regular HDD as system backup. In today's day and age there is no excuse for not having a decent amount of storage, HDD's are far more reliable now than they have ever been and are better than DVD's and CD's especially with the quality external SATA units now available for transport and backup. 

Your system should run FSX at better than 10FPS too with some tuning I expect 20 is achievable.

[Sir Ash]

Thanks for the info. Both C and D Drives are of 250GB which is pretty good. I don't really have much on the D Drive except for some photos and back-ups of some documents. As I said though, I hope to install FSX on the D Drive to free some space on the C Drive (which is my default drive). I'll see how it goes, but hopefully alright.

Also, with your last statement, I doubt it, it would have to take some pretty tough tuning, and i hardly know anything technically about hardware or so on. If it is simple game tuning though (but not changing the in-game settings), then that would be good, but I already have the recommended tweaks in fsx.cfg . I have purchased FSX GO though which should help me. If you have anything at all on that, PM me, all tips are much appreaciated.