Possible new PC ?

[altransam]

Hello All !

I need opinions on two differents questions, here is the first:

My FSX dedicated drive is approx 480gb full out of a 1tb WD 32mb drive; most space is from Megascenery Earth, MegaCities, ORBX etc.. if i buy an SSD and place just FSX folders in and leave Megasceneries files on the WD, will i slow FSX down when it tries to access those data ?

Second question:

I realized yesterday that with all the different parts i tried when i built the PC in my sig, i only need a case, mobo and proc and maybe an SSD to built another complete rig and gives this one to my son; would i see a gain in FSX with those new MB/processor from the I7 920 @ 4.0 i already have and if so, which combo you recommend ?

thanks in advance

Alain from Montreal

I7-920@4.0, Asus Rampage II Gene, Corsair H70 Water Cool, 6g Corsair XMP 1600 7-8-7, nVidia EVGA 480 GTX, W7 Premium 64, 640gb WD main drive, 1TB WD FSX drive, 320gb Hitachi B/up drive, CM690 nVidia Edition case w/Cooler Master Gold 1000 watts psu, 8x 120mm fans

[AndyE1976]

Based on your current system specs I'd try overclocking a little further, adding another 6gb RAM and possibly re-jigging the disks to something like an SSD for W7 and FSX and a RAID 0 Raptor array for the scenery.

By putting FSX on an SSD it will be faster to load and the UI will work quicker (selecting scenery, planes etc), but obviously if the scenery is still on the same drives it is now then loading scenery won't get any quicker.

I have an i7-960@4.0 with 12gb RAM and a GTX580 and I'm getting excellent framerates in all ORBX stuff, even up to 100fps in places. My weakness is my disks. From what I've seen, for speed a PCI-E SSD is top, but expensive, a RAID 0 array using velociraptors of 600gb each would give 1.2tb and sufficient transfer rate on a SATAIII interface. That's probably going to be the setup I go for eventually.

[Matthew Kane]

I have experimented in having FSX on one drive and scenery on another using a freeware scenery pack (not ORBX). It does work great.

I have 2 SATA 32mb Cache drives so having FSX on one and Scenery on the other means the heads in the drives are working simultaneously eliminating that loadup bottleneck.

Currently I just opt for having Windows7 on my main drive and FSX on my second drive with all addon's and ORBX, etc. This way Windows and user files has a dedicated drive head working and FSX gets a dedicated drive head working simultaneously.

I just find it a lot easier having FSX all in one dedicated drive, it rarely defrags itself as their is not a lot of file changes going on.