Building a FS PC

[ekezz]

This is some advice I gave o a builder planning on building a new computer for his sim brearing in mind that FSx is coming down the road. He planned on using a Athlon 64 x2 dual core CPU, a geforce 6800gt pci or maybe the 7600 series. And the Matrox triple head adaptor and three 19" or 20" LCD monitors for the outside display.

Yes, I agree, you should run the instruments on a second PC if possible. Also check the Matrox site for video boards that are capable of succesfully showing the 3840x1024 resolution. There are some issues with ATI boards and somewhere I read that the nVidia 6600 series are not capable of running the full resolution. btw great choice to go with the triplehead!

In a recent test in a Dutch magazine Hardware Info on CPU/GPU combinations I read that you should balance spendings on CPU and GPU (eg spend approx the same amount of money on both) It makes no sense to burn a lot of money on the fastest processor if you buy a mid-range GPU (video) The framerates will not improve significantly because in this case the GPU is the limiting factor. Some examples of balanced combinations: AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 with 7900 GTX (for topscores) or AMD Athlon 64 3000+ with 7600GT (both midrange)

And for internal memory I would suggest 2048MB

Also spend some money on fast hard drives if you plan to use high definition add-on scenery. Best is to have the scenery folder on a separate disk. Use at least SATA2 disks and if possible RAID 0 for performance increase.

RAID-0: This technique has striping but no redundancy of data. It offers the best performance but no fault-tolerance. Source http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid5_gci214332,00.html

If you plan to add additional hardware for switches etc (Flight Deck Technology or Phidgets) plug in additional USB brackets.

Hope this helps. Have fun!

[Rodney]

Also spend some money on fast hard drives if you plan to use high definition add-on scenery. Best is to have the scenery folder on a separate disk. Use at least SATA2 disks and if possible RAID 0 for performance increase.
ekezz,
Are you talking about the entire scenery folder, only add-on scenery?

While RAID 0 is good, allot of the newer mb are coming out with a SATA RAID chip. If it supports RAID 10, then fault tolerance can be obtained too. Raid 10 is a mirrored stripe set. Having not tried that and benchmarking it, I'm not sure about performance with FS9.

This could be a very informative thread.

[ekezz]

Come to think of it, I mean the entire scenery folder. This is I/O intensive and should ideally be separate from the other FS folders. I guess the most benefit would come for users with add-on scenery with large MB's.

And yes, if the mobo supports RAID with both performance and fault tolerance then it would be a great setup. But I think that more disks are required in that case. 3 or 5 disks. (apart from the disk for MSFS)

Interesting indeed.