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  • Please see the most recent updates in the "Where did the .com name go?" thread. Posts number 16 and 17.

    Post 16 Update

    Post 17 Warning

My new pc - and a new approach

P

paulb

Still here!
Yesterday my new pc arrived and I eagerly set up FSX. Its a lot better than my old pc, but I am not posting to brag about it. Also I am not going to rush in and quickly load every freeware and payware aircraft or scenery that I have.

I have decided to 'savour' FSX again - as one would a good wine! :rolleyes:

I am loading FEX, all of my OrbX NA scenery - and then very slowly loading any aircraft.

I want to really explore each aircraft that I load - to make sure that I really appreciate its qualities and all of the hard work and research that must have gone in to bringing it to FSX. Really, when I stand back and think about it, the FS experience that one can have in ones home is truly amazing nowadays.

So far I have loaded the Aerosoft Beaver, the Realair Spitfire and the Classics Hangar Fw190. I will load one or two more favourites and then stay at that for a while. I want to really explore how well they fly, properly understand all of the controls and find the best liveries for them. But I will keep the liveries to a minimum. Almost as though I have won the lottery and am creating a virtual aircraft collection.

A new approach for me!
 
Fantastic and Congrats! Please tell us what type system you got? And are you happy with the improvement in FSX?
THX
 
BOOM said:
Fantastic and Congrats! Please tell us what type system you got? And are you happy with the improvement in FSX?
THX
Click to expand...

I concur!! As a system and network admin I would love to read the specs of your new rig!!

But most importantly: enjoy your new toy and the new approach!!

Cheers,

Ian
 
Thanks! ;)

Yes, I am happy with it. Only had it yesterday, so I am still playing with the settings. I haven't changed fsx.cfg yet apart from changing the max texture size from 1024 to 2048. I have generally used the OrbX recommended settings for my machine. That translates into max/very high for scenery, water mid, no shadows. All traffic in the 18 to 24% range. So far I have only flown the three aircraft above from the Orcas add on scenery in NA PNW. I have set the FR at 26 and it is staying there 98% of the time.It is all pretty smooth.

Basic pc spec is i7 950, Gigabyte mobo, 6GB DDr3 1333 ram, NVidea GTX570 card, Creative 64GB SSD for the OS (W7 64 bit), 128GB SSD for FSX/Accel, two 1TB Hitachi HDs for the rest, DVD RW drive, Blueray/DVD drive, pc running at 1920 by 1200 16 bit on a 28" monitor.

As I said at the start, I am really trying to enjoy each aircraft that I load to the full before I rush and add more. Of course the OrbX scenery is excellent. Just like having a new version of FS.:jump:

It's very early days yet, but I already enjoying my new approach more!

Cheers

Paul
 
I'm doing the same thing here paulb, having just gotten a new system. My priorities are probably different though, I'm loading all the stuff I bought first, not the freeware!

Okay, I'm cheap, what can I say. :)

Still, nice to have a new system. Mine's roughly the same as yours (only 1 TB HD) although my video card is a Radeon HD 5700. Now that I have a system that will accommodate the graphics, I'm going to be looking at some of the ORBX products more closely.
 
TeaSea said:
I'm doing the same thing here paulb, having just gotten a new system. My priorities are probably different though, I'm loading all the stuff I bought first, not the freeware!

Okay, I'm cheap, what can I say. :)

Still, nice to have a new system. Mine's roughly the same as yours (only 1 TB HD) although my video card is a Radeon HD 5700. Now that I have a system that will accommodate the graphics, I'm going to be looking at some of the ORBX products more closely.
Click to expand...

I hope that you are enjoying your new system. If you want to try OrbX, then I would recommend NA PNW as a good starting point. IMHO its the most detailed of their NA scenery. Vashon (which is freeware) works well with it. You can then go on to buy other scenery areas or just add some of their excellent 'airports' to PNW.
 
I'm thinking similarly myself - need to upgrade the computer sometime soon and am thinking of putting in everything that will affect the world - scenery, weather, traffic etc. Then, just installing a couple of aircraft that I fly regularly - based on the last 3 months it'll be FSLabs Concorde and A2A Spitfire - plus whatever is in testing at the time. Don't know if it will have much of an effect on the sim, but it'll stop me shouting at the monitor when I'm trying to find a certain aircraft.
 
Paul,

I bought a new Dell XPS 8300 with the Sandy Bridge processor which includes the Cougar Point chip set about three weeks ago.

Intel has a "Stop ship" order out.

Best Buy told me in my local store they pulled over a hundred machines from several different vendors off sale.

Dell is saying they will replace motherboards in machines already in customer's hands. The problem is with the SATA ports. Here's what I understand for the specific model I have. There are four SATA ports on the motherboard. SATA0 and SATA1 are not affected - it's the other two with a problem. If your boot drive is on SATA0 or 1, there is no crisis. Those other two ports COULD have degraded performance issues over time. Eventually access to the devices on these ports could fail. They are saying 5% of the boards after three years.

Apparently this all started with a complaint from an owner that led to identifying the problem. All this just came up in the last two or three days. There is a post on CNet about it. There was nothing said about people that build their own machines so you may need to do some investigating.

See: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20030744-64.html?tag=cnetRiver

My bottom line feeling is I'll wait for the new MB. I've spent the last three weeks rebuilding my FSX set up. I don't want to do that again for a while. I'm hoping this is a lot like the Toyota recall stories a few months ago. We'll see.

Good luck.

Glenn
 
paulb said:
Thanks! ;)

Yes, I am happy with it. Only had it yesterday, so I am still playing with the settings. I haven't changed fsx.cfg yet apart from changing the max texture size from 1024 to 2048. I have generally used the OrbX recommended settings for my machine. That translates into max/very high for scenery, water mid, no shadows. All traffic in the 18 to 24% range. So far I have only flown the three aircraft above from the Orcas add on scenery in NA PNW. I have set the FR at 26 and it is staying there 98% of the time.It is all pretty smooth.

Basic pc spec is i7 950, Gigabyte mobo, 6GB DDr3 1333 ram, NVidea GTX570 card, Creative 64GB SSD for the OS (W7 64 bit), 128GB SSD for FSX/Accel, two 1TB Hitachi HDs for the rest, DVD RW drive, Blueray/DVD drive, pc running at 1920 by 1200 16 bit on a 28" monitor.

As I said at the start, I am really trying to enjoy each aircraft that I load to the full before I rush and add more. Of course the OrbX scenery is excellent. Just like having a new version of FS.:jump:

It's very early days yet, but I already enjoying my new approach more!

Cheers

Paul
Click to expand...

That's almost exactly the system I built recently! I got the i7 to OC stably to 4.0GHz, and FSX seems to like that a lot. So far, no complaints.
 
glennc said:
Paul,

I bought a new Dell XPS 8300 with the Sandy Bridge processor which includes the Cougar Point chip set about three weeks ago.

Intel has a "Stop ship" order out.

Best Buy told me in my local store they pulled over a hundred machines from several different vendors off sale.

Dell is saying they will replace motherboards in machines already in customer's hands. The problem is with the SATA ports. Here's what I understand for the specific model I have. There are four SATA ports on the motherboard. SATA0 and SATA1 are not affected - it's the other two with a problem. If your boot drive is on SATA0 or 1, there is no crisis. Those other two ports COULD have degraded performance issues over time. Eventually access to the devices on these ports could fail. They are saying 5% of the boards after three years.

Apparently this all started with a complaint from an owner that led to identifying the problem. All this just came up in the last two or three days. There is a post on CNet about it. There was nothing said about people that build their own machines so you may need to do some investigating.

See: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20030744-64.html?tag=cnetRiver

My bottom line feeling is I'll wait for the new MB. I've spent the last three weeks rebuilding my FSX set up. I don't want to do that again for a while. I'm hoping this is a lot like the Toyota recall stories a few months ago. We'll see.

Good luck.

Glenn
Click to expand...

Hi Glenn

I was looking to buy either the 950 or the SB. 24hours before I ordered, the news about the SB was released. So, rather than wait, I opted for the 950. I hope that all goes well with your new purchase.

Cheers

Paul
 
spotlope said:
That's almost exactly the system I built recently! I got the i7 to OC stably to 4.0GHz, and FSX seems to like that a lot. So far, no complaints.
Click to expand...

Hi Bill

Don't you just love the loading times with the SSDs when using OrbX scenery? I will look at overclocking in time. At the moment I am just trying to tweak everything at the standard speed.

Cheers

Paul
 
delta558 said:
I'm thinking similarly myself - need to upgrade the computer sometime soon and am thinking of putting in everything that will affect the world - scenery, weather, traffic etc. Then, just installing a couple of aircraft that I fly regularly - based on the last 3 months it'll be FSLabs Concorde and A2A Spitfire - plus whatever is in testing at the time. Don't know if it will have much of an effect on the sim, but it'll stop me shouting at the monitor when I'm trying to find a certain aircraft.
Click to expand...

I know what you mean! My latest solution is to simply delete many of the liveries. It's very nice to have a choice of 20+ liveries for a particular aircraft, but I have found that - in reality - I will pick a couple that I like and only ever fly those. So, I decided to delete the rest. It really makes finding the aircraft a lot easier! Plus, I can always add other liveries later if I want a change.

It was the slow loading times - in particular - that tipped me over the edge into buying a new pc. Plus, I couldn't run complex scenery and a complex payware aircraft well together. I always used to have many aircraft loaded. But, this time around I decided to focus on the environment - ie the sky, sea and scenery. So I have loaded the best that I have. With the aircraft, I am finding that having only a few loaded is already encouraging me to explore those aircraft to a new level.
Cheers

Paul
 
Congrats on your new rig. I'm in the final stages of completing mine. Best wishes and hope you get everything out of FSX your looking for.
 
Shylock said:
Congrats on your new rig. I'm in the final stages of completing mine. Best wishes and hope you get everything out of FSX your looking for.
Click to expand...

Many thanks for you good wishes :). I hope that everything goes well with your new rig.

I am still tweaking mine! Trying to find the best settings................

Cheers

Paul
 
Paul,

Even with the "problem", I'm very happy with it. It handles FSX very well and that's what I bought it for. I checked my config. Boot drive is on SATA0, DVD is on SATA1 so there is no real issue. I did install a second HD on SATA2, it May have a problem someday. But the whole reason for that drive was to relieve some overcrowding on the disk on the old machine. I can easily move everything on it to the new drive which is 1.5TB.

No buyer's remorse here.

Glenn
 
glennc said:
Paul,

Even with the "problem", I'm very happy with it. It handles FSX very well and that's what I bought it for. I checked my config. Boot drive is on SATA0, DVD is on SATA1 so there is no real issue. I did install a second HD on SATA2, it May have a problem someday. But the whole reason for that drive was to relieve some overcrowding on the disk on the old machine. I can easily move everything on it to the new drive which is 1.5TB.

No buyer's remorse here.

Glenn
Click to expand...

Hi Glenn,

Good to hear that it is working well for you. All of this 'technical' stuff is a 'means to an end' IMHO. Getting good peformance in FSX is what it is all about!

Cheers

Paul
 
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