BergKatse

I finally managed to get decent frame rates (30-40fps) by turning off autogen scenery. To make up for the loss of generic buildings I was able to turn up the scenery complexity high, the mesh resolution to 1m (although I still got decent fps at higher settings), level radius large, mesh complexity 50, water effects high, anisotripic filtering. Now it makes it look nice enough that is was worthwhile buying the upgrade. Funniest thing is the fps on the TV ad for FSX suck too!

Hey All I have a RAID0 array that I boot XP from (2x74GB Raptors) on the NVIDIA RAID controller. However after installing lots of games (flight sim mostly) I don't have much space left so I'd like to either extend the existing RAID0 (which I doubt is possible) or is it possible to stick 2 more Raptor disks on the NVIDIA RAID controller and have it recognise it as a separate disk? I just want to make sure the latter is an option before I start playing with it. I'm just worried if I add more RAID enabled disks to the Nvidia controller the BIOS/windows will get confused and trash my boot disk. The Silicon image RAID controller is much slower so not ideal. In addition I'd like to make my computer a dual boot Windows/Linux. I've done this on older computers which have non-RAID boot disks but is it possible to create separate linux/win32 partitions on a bootable RAID or is that just silly? As always thanks for any information.

I've been trying the full version out over the last few days, trying to find the "sweet spot" of graphics settings. However the settings I can get and have the game running smoothly make it look worse than FS2004 (which I can have everything set to the max even with better topology resolution than X (FS Global Textures - Special Ed) and some photorealistic scenery (Mega Scenery). I guess all the little extras like fancy trees and motor traffic (even though the traffic appears to be moving wheel axils) really grind my comp to a stop. At least now the water looks OK, in the demo the water looked awful. I haven't played with SLI settings yet, I wonder if SLI anti-aliasing would help. I'm loathed to uninstall FS9 (22GB on my HDD). I'll keep FSX on (15GB), its a good opportunity to finally start doing some overclocking........or I can swap it for an FX-62 before they run out of 939 chips.

Just got Flight Sim X at my local Best Buy, don't know if it's a screw up and they put it on the shelves too early or Best Buy has a special deal but it appears to be available a week earlier than advertised (10/17/06 official date). A reviewer on line said he could crank everything to max with an FX-60 and an ATI GPU so I'm wondering what I'll be able to squeeze out of the game with my X2 4400+ and SLI linked overclocked 7800 GTs. If the demo was anything to go by, not very much! (the demo was supposed to be buggy though). It may be finally time to start overclocking the CPU. I've always worried I'm going to blow the system up (then what was the point of getting an expert mobo) Any other flight sim geeks out there?

Any forceware driver above v90 seems to render a lot of my old games (like Half Life) and weird Japanese train simulators I like (like BE4 which use .net framework) useless. Don't they test their friggen drivers, I never had these kinds of problems when I used ATI. I guess the next rig will be an Athlon-ATI thingy.

I for some reason have this temporary blindness when it comes to dealing with Nvidia drivers and instructions. When I launch say "Half Life 2" does the driver automatically select the game profile from the list and apply it or do I have to physically select the game profile myself and hit "apply" for it to work? In most cases you only want the SLI rendering set by the driver and the aliasing etc set by the game right? I'm stuck with Forceware 84.something as installing anything above v90.xx means a lot of my games (weird things like Japanese train simulators written in .net) fail to load properly as does the original half life etc. I'm sure I didn't have these problems with ATI!

Don't buy Norton "Save & Restore" it's buggy, it installs a whole bunch of Norton crap so it . you don't have more of their software installed and you can't shut it down from the icon in the desktop tray, you have to go into the control panel to windows scheduler and switch it off from there. Talk about inconvenient. Personally I always like to use a new boot disk as an excuse for a fresh install of windows

I use Knoppix on my computer at work and love it but it has the habit of disabling my marvel yukon ethernet port....disabling as in switching it off for good unless I clear the CMOS a few times. Anyone else had a similar problem with Knoppix. Puts me off using Linux on my rig :-(

This is just a little annoying but I'd like to know what's going on. If I reboot the computer and forget to unplug/switch off an external USB harddrive or flash memory card, instead of the LANPARTY splash screen I get "Boot priority changed, press F1 to confirm". If I press F1 the computer boots as normal (although it hangs a little longer than it should to find the RAID) and evetything is fine. I don't mind the fact that the computer appears to be able to boot of a USB device if there was an OS (I might put SUSI on a SD card see if it works) but I'd like to switch off this behaviour for now. The boot priority is FDD, DVD, then HDD in the BIOS. Anybody else noticed this?

I'm thinking about getting one of these cards. In the BIOS do you have to switch the PCI-E lanes back to 16-x-x- etc or does it have to be 8-x-x-8 like it is for a standard SLI configuration?

A few weeks after I built my rig I heard about the "HOTFIX" but after I installed it caused weird things like bringing up "My Computer" would take 5 minutes to populate and windows seemed a little choppy, so I quickly did a system restore to get rid of the hotfix (perhaps I didn't let the system bed in and rebuild the kernal). I was under the impression the HOTFIX just stopped the CPU from ramping up and down randomly in Cool n Quiet mode. Does it really make an improvment in gaming performance?

Just downloaded Microsoft's flight sim X demo and even with the settings set to "low" it runs really choppy getting about 15-20fps max. I know I don't have a FX-62/Core 2 Duo Extreme chip but with my rig I'd assume I'd least be able to set the levels past "low". Anybody else tried the demo on their rig? Also the water effects look really sucky too. Is this another SLI overhead screws you thing? Using Forceware 84.21 as the latest driver screws up so many games. Doesn't anyone at Nvidea (or Logitech) test their drivers?!

After having my rig nice and stable for the last 6 months (although SONY drivers like to trash my windows) I want to start overclocking, nothing too fancy I just want to take my X2 4400+ upto the same clock speed as the 4800+ (aparently the 4400 is just a factory underclocked 4800 anyways) then push it higher (seen some people put it as high as 2.7GHz air cooled). I'm a big flight/train sim nerd so everything is pretty bogged down by the CPU so probably no point OCing the memory of GPUs. My sig file appears to have been deleted, anyhoo DFI LANparty expert mobo (11/02 BIOS) Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (No HOTFIX) 2x74GB Raptor RAID0 2xXFX 7800GT SLI 2x1GB Geil dual channel PC3200 Gigabyte Aurora Chaiss MADDOG internal/external DVD-RAM XION v2 600W SLI ready PSU

I didn't even get as far as installing MBM5, it gave me all these scary options basically telling me the computer may not boot properly if the wrong option was selected. I wonder if you could get the G15 to interface with smart guardian.

Arrrrgghhhh the MBM2G15.exe link seems to be broken. Anybody know where I can get a working copy, love to get this for my G15. http://home.arcor.de/magicradio/g15/MBM2G15/V1.5/MBM2G15.exe PM member LithoTech, He is our resident expert.