ATI Radeon X850 pro agp

[jonnie1986]

hi all
ive just purchased one of these cards and just wondered does it have enough power t run FSX very well?
my computer also has:
3.2ghz pentium 4 800fsb
2gb ddr pc3200 ram
ATI RADEON X850 PRO 256MB AGP

[highlander]

It'll run FSX better than what my machine can. I get between 10 and 30 fps on an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (two cores, each at 2.2 GHz) with 1 GB PC6400
DDR2 RAM and an ATi Radeon X800 PRO 256 MB (PCI Express) card.

My tip? Try the demo! Download the demo from MS's website. Give it a shot.

[American Jet]

highlander wrote:
It'll run FSX better than what my machine can. I get between 10 and 30 fps on an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (two cores, each at 2.2 GHz) with 1
GB PC6400
DDR2 RAM and an ATi Radeon X800 PRO 256 MB (PCI Express) card.

My tip? Try the demo! Download the demo from MS's website. Give it a shot.

The demo is no longer available, you would have to buy the product itself. But yes your computer is the best one to run it. 2GB of RAM,
3.2processor and your graphic is like the best you can get.

[jonnie1986]

is the ati radeon X850 pro a good card then?
i know nothing about them, it was only graphics card my local computer shop had in stock.
i am goin to buy fsx tommorow will let you know the frame rates i get

[highlander]

Yes it is.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/detai...layLang=en

[jonnie1986]

hi all
how good a card is it? what are its overclocking potential?
i bought fsx delux today and i mustsay im little dissapointed at slow frames around 10 is maximum. with fs9 i get around 30!!

[olseric]

It'll run FSX better than what my machine can. I get between 10 and 30 fps on an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (two cores, each at 2.2 GHz)
with 1 GB PC6400 DDR2 RAM and an ATi Radeon X800 PRO 256 MB (PCI Express) card.

Are you kidding me? I have an Athlon 64 3700+, 2GB PC3200, X800PRO AGP and I'm doing about as good as you are. I think the key
though is my SATA RAID 0.

All I can say as a suggestion to people who want to build FSX systems is don't underestimate the value of the striped RAID. From what I
can tell, it makes a HUGE difference.

[Airliner]

Olseric, can you elaborate a bit more on the Raid 0? I'm currently running an old ATA133 - 7200 RPM HDD and was considering going
up to a pair of WD Raptors (10,000 RPMs). I took a flight in the CRJ7, KBOS-KCLE the other day, at night and in the rain and got
reasonable results (10-30 fps, depending on elevation - but remember, fps in FSX is NOT 1:1 comparable to FS9. Anything above 10 is
tolerable this time around). Just wondering if it'd be worth it. I'll likely go to a DX10 video card in about a year, after I go to Vista when I'm
convinced they have it running smooth and I might up the CPU to an FX-something (running AMD64 4000+ San Diego now).

I also wonder if it would be worth it to have a separate drive for windows and another for FS. Right now, I have a single 120GB drive
paritioned that way but, wouldn't two drives be better as the page file would have it's own drive head apart from the one seeking FS files?

Someone once said somewhere that if your HDD is your bottleneck, you've got serious hardware issues. Meaning, this would indicate
that your ram is waaaaay too low if it has to keep hitting the drive and the page file. I'm just curious if doing a hard drive upgrade would
make that big a difference.

I also have to keep in mind that I'll be hopping on Traffic X when it comes out so maybe I need every boost I can get. Thanks.

[highlander]

Your hard disk drive is ALWAYS your bottleneck when loading stored data - you'll NEVER get a hard drive to load data faster than the data bus can
handle it. Hard drives may be able to load 60 MB+ per second, but data transfer between the southbridge and the processor occurs at a rate of
gigabytes per second.

Having a faster drive controller (say, SATA2, or UltraWide SCSI-III) is great, but if you want noticeable and dramatic performance gains during data
transfer operations, you need to be prepared to fork out for a high-performance hard disk (preferably more than one drive).

RAID isn't specifically required; it's really designed for redundancy and data security (i.e. the loss of one drive doesn't always mean a complete
loss of data, due to "striping" or "mirroring"), rather than speed. But, if your motherboard has RAID-0 or RAID-1 capabilities, then using them is a
good plan. Hint - IDE-based RAID is worthless; the drive output and the bus speeds are too low. SATA2 is good for RAID, but if you've got the money
to spare, not much beats higher-end SCSI drive set-ups - possibly try a nice Fiberchannel disk array - uber-fast!

This goes beyond the scope of the average simmer, though; you'll get bigger returns on having faster CPU (with faster front-side bus, and a
motherboard and memory that both run with that high bus-speed), more memory (the lower CAS latency the better), and a faster graphics card (with more
and faster VRAM on-board). AGP is a dead format; PCI-Express is the way to go. For AMD processors, don't settle for anything other than a 64-bit
dual-core chip, using Socket AM2. Intel chips and socket form factors, I'm less savvy on these days, but the Core Duo and Quad Core chips are meant
to be the dogs' you-know-whats these days.

[Joeflyer]

highlander wrote:
Your hard disk drive is ALWAYS your bottleneck when loading stored data - you'll NEVER get a hard drive to load data faster than the data
bus can
handle it. Hard drives may be able to load 60 MB+ per second, but data transfer between the southbridge and the processor occurs at a
rate of
gigabytes per second.

Having a faster drive controller (say, SATA2, or UltraWide SCSI-III) is great, but if you want noticeable and dramatic performance gains
during data
transfer operations, you need to be prepared to fork out for a high-performance hard disk (preferably more than one drive).

RAID isn't specifically required; it's really designed for redundancy and data security (i.e. the loss of one drive doesn't always mean a
complete
loss of data, due to "striping" or "mirroring&quot, rather than speed. But, if your motherboard has RAID-0 or RAID-1
capabilities, then using them is a
good plan. Hint - IDE-based RAID is worthless; the drive output and the bus speeds are too low. SATA2 is good for RAID, but if you've
got the money
to spare, not much beats higher-end SCSI drive set-ups - possibly try a nice Fiberchannel disk array - uber-fast!

This goes beyond the scope of the average simmer, though; you'll get bigger returns on having faster CPU (with faster front-side bus,
and a
motherboard and memory that both run with that high bus-speed), more memory (the lower CAS latency the better), and a faster graphics
card (with more
and faster VRAM on-board). AGP is a dead format; PCI-Express is the way to go. For AMD processors, don't settle for anything other than
a 64-bit
dual-core chip, using Socket AM2. Intel chips and socket form factors, I'm less savvy on these days, but the Core Duo and Quad Core
chips are meant
to be the dogs' you-know-whats these days.

Very good information, highlander. I have been wondering about upgrading my pc and what specifically I shoudl upgrade to in order to
run FSX...when I decide to buy it

[Ceemosp]

Totally agreed on - for the "upper class" gamer a raid 0 on SATA2 is the way to go.

I found the NCQ capable drives from Seagate Baracuda a viable alternative to the raptors. Average data access on my system is below
5ms and that's raptor speed BUT without the heat and noise problems (raptors sound like fighter jets spooling up).
Ideal would be a combination of TWO raid0 - one for the system (pagefile, swapfile,etc) and the other for the FS9 files but.......

UW-SCSI or beyond in a raid is beyond the (financial) reach of most users.

I slightly disagree with Joeflyer's explanation of raids as they were developed for BOTH purposes from the beginning , hence raid 0 being
the faster and raid 1 the safer or combine them and you have raid 10 or...or... In the days when raids were developed the average HD size
was 10 MEGABYTE and I don't want to mention access times. For data intensive applications you needed faster transfer rates which were
not available even for Universities. Another thing was the reliability of the drives. MTBF of those drives were around 10% of today's values
with higher tolerance for damaged sectors than nowadays. By striping we gained the speed we needed and by mirroring the reliability. I
guess by now everyone knows that I'm an old fart

Carsten