Where best to spend my fifty squid?

[Pielander]

I have a dilemma (albeit a pleasant one) over how best to spend £50 on upgrading my computer. I want to make it into a FS2K machine, and I'm not sure how best to improve its performance. I need to make a decision fast.

I have already ordered a PIII 850 and 256 MB RAM to upgrade my system, and I am in three minds whether to:

1. Change the as yet undispatched PIII 850 to 1 GHz for £50 (Is it worth it?)

2. Just spend the extra money on doubling the memory for £50 (Bargain!)

3. Buy another hard drive and upgrade my system to Win98 SE from Win95 (Long story, but trust me - it makes sense to me) For.... wait for it.... £50.

I budgeted for £200, which has gone on the processor and memory, and I can stretch to another £50 if it's worth it - otherwise I might just have an extra 45 minutes flying the real thing. :)

Cheers

Pie

[Mac the Knife]

1) No - you'll notice little difference
2) No - ditto
If you want speed for stuff like FS, get the best video card you can afford - the Matrox G450 DualHead is an excellent general purpose card that does games pretty well and once you've used a dual monitor system you'll never go back to one only.
3) Yes - worthwhile upgrade to SE, but avoid ME (Millennium)

[FlyingGiraffe]

Totally agree, a PIII-850 is plenty for FS2K... it's the graphics card that'll be the bottleneck.

If you're lucky you may be able to pick up an old(ish) GeForce I for about 50 quid... possible even a low-spec GeForce II from somewhere like scan.co.uk. If not, the G450 suggested by Mac should do the job.

[Evo7]

Dont buy a Matrox if you're ever planning on running X-plane or anything else that needs good Open-GL drivers. I did, sadly, and while the card is fine for Direct3D, Open-GL is awful. There are so many problems with X-plane that it is unflyable - the instruments do not work, for a start - and I've ditched it and gone back to FS98. NVidea (sp?) are supposed to be good but I've never tried one, so caveat emptor.

Off topic, but anyone know how FS2K would run on a Celery 400, 256Mb with a G400Max??

[Pielander]

Thanks for all the replies thus far.

The situation is that my computer is a little outdated, and does not have an AGP slot, so I am pretty much stuck with my 16MB Voodoo3, which does its job, it has to be said, but there's no way it can compare with contemporary stuff.

I'm intrigued by the memory thing though. A lot of people seem to be recommending "at least 256MB RAM, if not 512", and since the stuff is dirt cheap, I could consider expanding at a later date, but has anybody actually experienced any memory limitations on 256MB (excessive HDD accessing)? I know that on 64MB, my Celeron 400 will not run FS2000 even on pure instrument flight. The HDD goes mental, then the thing slowly grinds to a halt.

[Evo7]

I'd have thought that 256Mb was plenty, but you can never have too much memory.

Completely off topic now, but it's amazing how much memory Windoze software tries to grab. The Cray T3E I use at work only has 64Mb per processor and does a hell of a lot more than run a flight simulator.... :)

[Pielander]

Evo7:

Is this a case "Mine's bigger than yours; yah boo etc..."? Ok! Ok! Fair enough - You win!

Is this some sort of CFD project you're working on, or are you a weatherman or something? Presumably your processors are slower than mine too :), and presumably the 64MB is an optimised quantity (a compromise, of course) for the processor?

Please do tell!

Pie

[Evo7]

Pielander

http://www.physics.lsa.umich.edu/hubble-volume/ if you're really interested. I fly to get away from this stuff ;)

The T3E uses 64Mb DEC Alpha EV5.6's running at 450MHz. Probably equivalent to your machine in terms of floating point speed, but the Cray has got 368 of them (although we're only allowed to use 216 at a time) :)

[OzPax1]

Evo7 What do you think of the Meiko Parallel Systems? My Uncle was the MD of the company until it was sold to 3Com about three years ago. I used to work at their Bristol HQ as a go'fer during my college Holidays. Much of what they did/do went straight over my head though!!

Their Web site is offline but I found this page which really just about covers everything! www.npac.syr.edu/nse/hpccsurvey/orgs/meiko/meiko.html (http://www.npac.syr.edu/nse/hpccsurvey/orgs/meiko/meiko.html)

OzPax1 http://www.pprune.org/ubb/NonCGI/cool.gif


[This message has been edited by OzPax1 (edited 02 July 2001).]

[Evo7]

OzPax1

Looks interesting, and if CERN and Lawrence Livermore are buying it can't be bad.

No good for us, though, but for technical reasons. The architecture seems to be based on message-passing, like the Beowolf clusters, which is fine for lots of things
but N-body problems just don't scale the right way. You end up spending all your time message passing and no time processing. Cray's just have the right brute-force approach :)

[ACARS]

I'm running a PIII 800, 256Mram, 16MB vodoo. FS2K runs great. They are also saying FS2002 will run with 30-40fps with this too.

[Pielander]

Thanks for all the advice chaps. I'm going with what I said originally, and I'll let you all know how it performs. I'm just this minute about to start mutillating my computer, so wish me luck.

I may be some time

Pie

[Pielander]

I'm back, and I'm impressed! :)