I have been messing about with my settings today and got her running stable at 3.8Ghz on two cores, no reason why it will not do the same on four cores but as I dont do much video encoding I will try this on two cores and switch to the 4 when I need it
AMD Phenom II X4 BE 965 @ 3.80GHz
nVidia GTX 560 TI 448 Cores
Idle hands Dave...the wifey is at work the dogs are asleep so I have had time to play...It runs great at the new settings ata fraction hotter. I will now go and try it all at default in two core ie: 3.1ghz X 2 Just as the God of AMD meant it to be
The main thing is running at standard settings for a while will give me some benchmarks to use as a base level.
Trouble is...I did a quick test in FS9 and with everything ma all weather max and heavy scenery it never dropped below 60FPS no matter what I set the chip to it just eats FS9 wether stock or clocked! Even Capt Sim 707 and 757 in VC mode ran at 60fps the 757 did drop to 40 fps a few times but even that was fluid as a fluid thing on national fluid day!
In short Dave I think if I had a shed load of money ( or your wife as she understands ) I doubt I would move too far from these chips for performance value..
AMD Phenom II X4 BE 965 @ 3.80GHz
nVidia GTX 560 TI 448 Cores
I gotta say mate that I'm pretty much of the same mind. I expected wild 100+fps figures (as sometimes recorded on the old XP3200 in good moments) but this doesn't happen. It sits happily between about 59&61fps wherever it goes with textures e t c on UltraHigh. Adding BEA into the equation at LHR can drag this down to the 40's but I now have an awful lot of Tridents and 1-11's back plus RP's Argosy (which keeps finding parking at Terminal 5! .. probably full of lost/recovered luggage) that were not there before.. this using UK2000 LHR Xtreme. My AI vehicles are on pep pills and need slowing down.. Same at Bristol Xtreme and Belfast Xtreme. Just flown into Glasgow (you guessed it.. Xtreme) and they were rather more sedate there.. probably due to excess tinnies at lunchtime
I think the important thing to look at is what OS you're using and raw clock speed. A 32-bit OS is only going to go so fast and is wasted on the fastest chips. A 64-bit OS will let you take far more ram but what use this is running a 32-bit program is debatable. Every little helps as the good folk at Tesco tell us At that point, I'm in no mans land as I'm still running XP Home. Guess I could add another drive (if I can squeeze it past the 8800GTX!) and try Win7 and in doing so (if I buy the 64-bit version.. not sure if they make a 32-bit but I wouldn't go there at this stage anyway) can add more ram so there are still places to go and people to meet should I win the lottery
yeah it gives you a good feeling of satisfaction when it works .im tempted to build a new one . but its like every thing , its the time and money , just got to get the lottery up eh . must get crackin with me woolsington scenery before i build a new rig
As you know, I'm even cheaper. Really pleased with myself for having bought a(nother) bargain Core2Duo motherboard off eBay to replace my ageing P4 478 kit. For the price of Tony's kit, I would expect a roomful of PCs. Recently gaming has taken a back seat to electronic archiving of slides/video/etc so speed is not too vital.
And if you ever go the Win 7 route, the box comes with 32-bit and 64-bit discs - you take your choice but not sure what happens if you change your mind later.
Hi Dave, re Win 7 as good as it is you will see a performance drop from XP but having said that XP can't last forever (except perhaps on the PCs of some of the members of this here forum ). As Ian said Win 7 comes with both 32 and 64 bit disks so the choice is up to you. In your case, coming from XP, there is no upgrade as such, you'll have to do a clean install on your boot drive. If you do change your mind later re Win 7 32 or 64 then you'll have to go back to XP and then reinstall Win 7 (in the past the XP executable being on the boot drive was sufficient to fool the upgrade mechanism).
Tks for that.. pretty much what I expected It's great reading that it boots up faster and closes down faster but the real test is what happens inbetween I was aware of there being no upgrade path from XP and should push come to shove at some point in the future.. it'll be on a new drive anyway. Can't see that happening just yet
I have been messing about with my settings today and got her running stable at 3.8Ghz on two cores, no reason why it will not do the same on four cores but as I dont do much video encoding I will try this on two cores and switch to the 4 when I need it 
) I doubt I would move too far from these chips for performance value.. 
yeah it gives you a good feeling of satisfaction when it works .im tempted to build a new one . but its like every thing , its the time and money , just got to get the lottery up eh . must get crackin with me woolsington scenery before i build a new rig
