[Adrian Wainer]

I have FS X running on my new computer now

AMD Athlon 64 4800 dualcore 939 Socket
1 Gigabyte RAM DDR
1 6600GT Graphics Card
Windows XP 64 Professional
Thermaltake fan for CPU
http://www.thermaltake.com/product/Cooler/Retail/CL-P0114-01/cl-p0114-01.asp

http://www.thermaltake.com/product/Cooler/cooler_index.asp

around 16 FPS but can be as low as 5 FPS at Seattle Airport, I tried overclocking the processor and brought it up to 2800 megahertz from the stock 2400 of the 4800 939 but it did not make much difference to frame rates, though it seemed to load somewhat quicker, so I reset the chip back to the standard non overclocked values. It looks to me as if this programme's performance once you have a fairly decent but far from the top of the range processor for example AMD Athlon 64 3200 754 with 1.5 Gigabyte RAM and 6800GS 512 Megabyte GPU Windows XP Home which I have in my older machine and I am also running FS X on, is determined by the GPU ie Graphics card, in that the 4800 is only running at just over fifty percent capacity in even the most difficult visuals. With this in mind, I would go for SLI or Crossfire with best graphics cards you can afford as suits your choice and a base model dual core processor eg lowend of the Conroe and AMD Athlon 64 ranges.

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer

[DReaper]

As far as I know FSX is more dependant on CPU than graphics card. 

[Aristoteles]

I´d say that is the combination of everything which will make it. What´s the point of having two high-end GPUs if your processor is not up to it? Autogen, traffic, mesh and many other tasks are processor dependant to a high extent. Not that a good graphic card wouldn´t improve your performance, but FSX is asking for everything you can give it in all your rig components. Having crossfire or SLI won´t do any harm, sure, but if you ask them to do what your processor can´t take, you´d better keep on dreaming.

[DReaper]

The FSX test teport posted las week ( http://www.3dflightsim.com/FSX1a.htm ) shows that SLI can be a downstep in performance and AFAIK FSX doesn't make use of dual core/64 bits until Vista cames out.

Anyway using dual core for drawing deers is not my bet.

[Adrian Wainer]

I´d say that is the combination of everything which will make it. What´s the point of having two high-end GPUs if your processor is not up to it? Autogen, traffic, mesh and many other tasks are processor dependant to a high extent. Not that a good graphic card wouldn´t improve your performance, but FSX is asking for everything you can give it in all your rig components. Having crossfire or SLI won´t do any harm, sure, but if you ask them to do what your processor can´t take, you´d better keep on dreaming.

I agree with You! but what I am saying is that I have doubts once gets in to Athlon 64 dualcore and Conroe dualcore processors that the processor is the limiting factor.

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer

[Adrian Wainer]

The FSX test teport posted las week ( http://www.3dflightsim.com/FSX1a.htm ) shows that SLI can be a downstep in performance and AFAIK FSX doesn't make use of dual core/64 bits until Vista cames out.

Anyway using dual core for drawing deers is not my bet.

Well the AMD Athlon dualcore 4800 was showing about fifty percent use in one core and about five to ten percent use in the other core and I know it will not properly make use of dualcore untill vista but if you are buying a machine now, it is a good idea to go for dualcore as you will be able to utilize it with Vista. As for SLI I can not give you a defenite answer on that, in that I have a pair of Gainward 7600GTs on order and I will have to take out the single 6600GT and replace it with two 7600GT Gainwards to see how SLI performs when I collect the 7600GTs. What I would say though, is that flightsim are using 6800 Cards in SLI and nowhere have I seen 6800 recomended as a card for PCI Express systems and SLI only comes in PCI Express format, that said  I use a 6800GS in my 754 Socket Athlon machine and I am very happy with it but it has 512 megabytes DDR3 memory [ I think the high onboard memory makes a diferance ] but the reason I chose a 6800GS was that it was the best card at the time available for AGP without going in to bigmoney 7 series cards which had availability problems anway as I was upgrading from a five series card and all the higherend cards were being offered in PCI Express though Gainward has since put on the market a class AGP card

http://www.cpu3d.com/video_cards/gainward_geforce_7600gt_-_256mb.html

nb the latest version of the card above features a passive heat sink

http://www.gainward.net/products/product.php?products_id=48

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer

[Aristoteles]

Nice combo Adrian. Would you mind reporting the performance improval once you got them installed? (Nvidia7600s I mean). Regards.

[Adrian Wainer]

Nice combo Adrian. Would you mind reporting the performance improval once you got them installed? (Nvidia7600s I mean). Regards.

Will do.

Best and Warm Regards
Adrian