Sprucing up ASUS Striker Extreme

[Bandit]

Hi All,

I want to spruce up my ASUS Striker Extreme PC to get better FSX perforamance and more eye candy. I currently have an Inno3D 880GTS card installed and a Q6600 CPU. I am looking to upgrade both. The chip will go to an E8500 but not sure what to do with the video card. The motherboard is rated as PCIe1.1 I was looking at a ATI4870 1Gb card but thats PCIe 2.0/ Whilst it would work on a PCIe 1.1 slot is their any point? Should I go for something different?

[randy]

That is a tough one. You don't say..or I did not see if you clock. I guess it depends on how long you want to own that system. You could go with an better VC with a gig of VRAM and use the Buffer Pool Tweak.....which most say it has really helped....and it does for me also in rural areas. My VC is only 512meg with an i7 920 and I should have bought a better card....I don't have much room to play with on the tweak of BP with only 512meg. I am not sure you will gain anything by going to the 8500 CPU....depends on if you over clock or not......but better minds than mine can advise you on that.

                                                                                                                      Regards 

[Bandit]

No its not clocked. the Q660 sitting at default 2.4GHz. It has 2Gb RAM

I am no too keen on splashing out on an i7 just yet - maybe in 6-9 months.

Any others with some pearls of wisdom.

[kiwikat]

A pcie 2.0 card will work on older pcie slots.

I've heard ati isn't the best for FSX though.  You may want to look at something like the GTX 260 core 216.  They are pretty cheap right now.  Might want to throw another gig of ram in there too.  If you can overclock your Q6600, do it.  Those things can easily run 3.0 GHz stable on air.

[Test Pilot]

Or try a simple 9600GT with 1gb of ram if you want to save a bit...