TheHeretic

Good enough and just as good don't mean the same thing. Resolved now, surely you jest. Where you around with a creative card when Vista was launched? I'll never buy another sound card from them again, unless I have to really. If you want audiophile pleasing sound you are going to have to go the external DAC route which needless to say isn't cheap.

Sound cards aren't that common anymore really. Creatives Vista blunder certainly didn't do the part any favours. Realtek is in just about every motherboard and is "good enough" for most people. I seriously doubt a sound card would do much of anything for your FPS, but it can be worth it if you have high end speakers.

AMD's cost/performance ratio has been consistently great this generation in terms of GPU's, with the Phenom II line they have bested Intel for people who really aren't comfortable paying high premiums for minimal results. i7 is king, but you pay for it, and the 955 BE is an incredible chip. The X2 550 competes with the 8500 and again, isn't as good, but its almost half the price for a marginal sacrifice in performance. Mid ranged CPU's are almost no contest with the 940 and 720 being significantly cheaper than intels offerings, which are mostly old quads anyway, though the 940 is discontinued oddly.

Firstly theres a question of whether someone who's plonked down an amount of money is the most objective reference point for something like this. People tend to see what they want to see, not that you are being dishonest. Technically speaking AFR is flawed. I'm not hearing any evidence to the contrary, just people throwing around Crysis benchmarks. The solution as of now is to buy one powerful GPU over two lesser ones. If the most powerful GPU isn't cutting it you are going to have to brand into a multi GPU setup obviously. You car analogy is wierd. You can "like" a car because of its aesthetics, handling and feel, at the end of the day a GPU is there to do a job that should be as transparent as possible. I've used both Crossfire and SLi. I have two 8800GT's and since then was given a 4870X2. And yes, I am a gamer, but a scrupulous one.

Just for the PC? $1200 Including monitor and speakers? $1600

If the price difference is small then for sure. In my opinion the Phenom II 550 is the better dual core, simply because its significantly cheaper. Its almost half price which is pretty amazing. It does perform slightly worse than Intels line though, so if you are looking for the best dual performance you are barking up the right three. If you a budget conscious its something to consider, and there are benchmarks to look at. Generally i'm pretty skeptical of fanless cards. Passive cooling is pretty hard to achieve. For example with that 4850 the core is slightly overclocked but the memory is slightly underclocked: perhaps to achieve desirable cooling results by running under spec. Its still going to be a good card though, the 4850 is great, much better than the 9600. I don't find the GPU to be loud enough to overcome other parts, so whats inaudible to me may not be to you. Yeah that tends to be the case. Cases without rubber holders for HDD's are worse as the entire case vibrates making ungodly noise. The P182 is a really good choice. You could go SSD I suppose. 4GB will probably help depending on what OS you are running, definitely for Vista or 7. As for RAM speed don't take mine or anyone elses word for it: there are dozens of benchmarks demonstrating what kinds of performance increases you will achieve. I think you'll find the money is, proverbially, going down the toilet.

Well there are already X2 type cards with two gpu's on a single frame. The 295GTX and 4870X2 for example, though you may be talking about something different. A GPU really is just a specialized CPU, so i'd imagine other calculations could go through them. Problem is GPU's already have a hard job and asking them to do even more is going to hurt the guy with a weak GPU. You can setup the second GPU in an SLi setup to do nothing but physics, but Phys X is Nvidia tech and I don't think all that many games justify doing so. Something of a straw man, no? It only solidifies my point: in fact achieving higher frame rates in an inproper manner pretty much is my point. We are talking about two different things here. An i7 has 4 cores and 8 threads, with most games using two threads, a few using four. No doubt multiple cores is the future, but multiple CPU's? Throwing in two, dual core CPU's into the same setup will give you 4 cores to work with for some games, but so few use them throwing in two i7's (and I don't know if theres a motherboard that supports this) gives you 16 threads. I think we'll be waiting a very long time to see any game utilize that sort of thing, and seems like a bit of a waste. You could do protein folding though! Help cure cancer! Might be worth it right there.

All you've done is move the goal posts. From defending RAM speed to defending RAM speed in certain applications. I conceded that posts ago ;)

Ok fine, DDR2 800 doesn't perform any worse than DDR2 1333 in any real sense in gaming. So I don't really see your point there as well.

We also have to keep in mind faster RAM tends to have slower timings. This is especially the case from DDR2 to DDR3. This is all besides the point because all the technical explanations aside the benchmarks do verify higher speed RAM, almost always used in ratios, does very little or frequently nothing at all.

How can the CPU get data from the RAM faster? The entire point is it can't! If the RAM is faster than the CPU FSB wise the CPU cannot use that speed, period. Its like having one pipe that can handle one litre a second connected to another that can handle two litres a second: whats the end result here? Only a litre of water per second can pass through: no matter which way it goes! I don't actually use i7's so you are probably right!

I don't think its unfair to call Nvidia and ATi out on releasing technology that is so expensive, and has serious downsides. Of course SLi and Crossfire has advantages: it makes games that were once unplayable, playable! But AFRs disadvantages aren't well reported and the more promising tech, SFR (split frame rendering) has more technical problems but doesn't have as many inherent problems. Its also much harder to do right which is presumably why AFR is so popular. If people are plonking down twice the the cost, they aren't asking to for a whole new set of problems, just a performance boost. One better GPU will beat two lesser GPU's every time simply because it introduces less headaches and represents true framerates better. What good is gaining a frame rate boost of 15 in a game if so few of those frames are positioned properly. In games like Crysis, 30 FPS can look like 17 FPS this way: not something i'm fond of.

The i920 has a multiplier of 21 (or something like that), which is going to take the chip as far as it can possibly go without the FSB ever being a problem. You are right, its not truly unlocked as the unlocked models go up to 36 or something insane, but its enough to take an i920 to 4ghz which is as high as you'd ever take the thing on air and is pretty much insane overall. Yes, there are FSB ratios. They are also pretty much a complete waste. Outside of video editing or other RAM speed dependent tasks that extra ram speed does essentially nothing. Video games simply don't require the systems memory to be all that fast, with pretty much no exceptions. Benchmarking shows the difference between generic DDR2 and triple channel DDR3 is quite small in gaming. Your getting a few frames for second for a whole lot of money. Unless you intend on doing tasks that actually demand fast RAM: and they do exist, the only real reason to get faster RAM is to meet motherboard specs or give your CPU a higher FSB. In his case an E8500 has no chance of using 1066 clocked memory properly, and if hes on a budget that money can be better spent elsewhere. Heres a benchmark illustrating DDR3 vs DDR2. http://www.breakitdownblog.com/ddr2-800-vs-ddr3-1333-does-speed-matter/ The difference ranges from exactly 0% (memory's bottleneck not being met) to 1%. :D Why? Sata drives aren't fast enough to feed into the RAMs extra bandwidth. Basically.

Hey guys. I'm completely new to DCS, and along with the game I bought a Cyborg X joystick. Not the best stick in the world, but the price was right. Anyway, the default layout doesn't use very many buttons: there's a lot not being used right now. Considering the insane number of commands in the game can anyone list out the most basic functions you should always map to your stick? For reference, the stick has the following: Two throttles. One is the collective, the other at the moment does nothing. These can be connected together to form one larger throttle. A trigger. POV hat. 4 buttons on the sticks head. A scroll wheel near the top of the head. 4 buttons on the base. Easy to access. 2 buttons in front of the throttle, on the base plate itself. These face away from the user and should be rarely used/throttle related commands, or at least i'd assume! There's also a shift key that can be held to alternate commands. Thanks!

How is buffering going to help the inherent problems with AFR? Rendering frames asynchronously is always going to run into the problem of cards producing frames at different rates: unless you can teach a GPU to predict the future. The GPU's have to deliver each frame within equal intervals. A game running at 60FPS must deliver each frame at an interval of 16ms. Multiple GPU's have a difficult time trying to deliver their frames at the correct intervals (well, the second GPU is the culprit), hence some frames come out too quickly or not quickly enough. When two frames are too close together, the gap between them creates stuttering in the image: what you'd see if a game was running at 15FPS. The more out of whack the frames are, the worse the image quality. Fraps will still deliver a higher frame rate result: but the non-homogenous delivery of the frames lowers the effective frame rate. Worse case scenario is the frames wind up being delivered 1ms apart with a large gap in the middle until the next frame comes along and you end up with a game running at 60FPS looking like it runs at 30FPS: hence the flaw in the tech. To illustrate, imagine delivering 10 frames in 100ms. Each frame should come out at an interval of 10ms. 10ms, 20ms, 30ms, 40ms etc What creates a smooth image is a lack of gaps between frames: not the number of frames. Now imagine delivering 20 frames in 100ms, at intervals of 10ms, 11ms, 20ms, 21ms, etc. The gap between each frame is now 9ms. Your frame rate is doubled, but the quality of the image is essentially identical (or worse, depending on the user). You should be getting each frame at 5ms, but because GPU A doesn't know when GPU B will finish its frame, the drivers attempt to estimate. Trouble is without premonition there's simply no way of knowing, no matter how well the drivers themselves are written. Every game is very different with many different variables: without knowing what lies ahead an algorithm telling GPU B how long it should wait is almost impossible. The GPU's are trying to deliver the best frame rate possible, but spitting them out too quickly together creates huge frame gaps. How long should GPU B wait after GPU A has delivered its frame? This is an inherent problem with AFR: being unable to deliver frames at the correct intervals. This is the worst case scenario, but even with smaller deviations its possible to make 60FPS look like 45FPS. On top of this the higher fluctuation between the delivery of frames is noticeable to a sharp eye. Having frames being close together and then far apart, even if the gaps between them are smaller overall than on a single GPU setup, degrades the image quality. This doesn't affect all users but its very noticeable for me and its one more reason why I dislike SLi and Crossfire. It also has a negative effect on input lag, as does triple buffering: as you seem to be suggesting. People buy $8000 PC's because they have money to burn and enjoy big numbers. Benchmarks do not translate directly in game performance, you don't get micro stuttering when all you are looking at are numbers, but you will get them in game. The degree of their severity will differ from unnoticeable to cutting your frame rate in half, but why take the leap when there are single GPU options anyway?

How exactly do you intend to get a game utilizing two processors at the same time? By recoding the game? SLi, and Crossfire for that matter, is poor technology. I have no idea what compels people to buy into it. Firstly, the gains added by the second GPU are horrendously inefficient, running anywhere from 0% (totally incompatible) to 40% (best case scenario most of the time). More than that because the GPU's render frames independently, micro stuttering is introduced. When one GPU renders a frame faster than the other, they go out of sync, and the display stutters. This absolutely destroys effective frame rates and can make a game supposedly running at 40FPS look as poor as a game running at 20FPS. As it is now they are both fundamentally broken. Amazingly, one GPU running at a lower frame rate can look better than two GPUs at a higher frame rate. The i7 920 is the way to go. It has an unlocked multiplier making it a beastly overclocker. DDR3 1600 is fast, but as the latest processors for both AMD and Intel are low FSB high multiplier based all that speed winds up in a high ratio, which is very inefficient. Higher speed RAM tends to have higher timings as well, so be careful about what you are putting into your system.

That RAM is too expensive. The need for fast ram is vastly overstated and most people waste their money thinking it will harbour results: when it won't. RAM is the least understood PC component and its position in the market is based on people being oblivious to RAM speed actually works. DDR memory runs at half its listed speed, for 1066 RAM runs at 533mhz. Meanwhile that CPU is quad pumped, so its true speed is 333. When your RAMs FSB is running faster than your CPU that extra speed is pretty much going to waste. Because you are overclocking you will obviously be pushing that FSB higher. The CPU is running at 333 with a 9.5 multiplier, to get it to use all your RAMs speed you'll be overclocking at 533x9.5 which is 5ghz. If you can achieve that let me know, otherwise just get DDR2 800 and save your money. Any old RAM will do, designer ram is pointless. An E8500 is mostly a waste of money as well, having the same base spec's as an E8400 minus a hit in clock speed, if you are overclocking anyway you'll push both chips to their limits, which is well beyond what this game will actually need. That GPU doesn't have the bandwidth to use 1gb of RAM, it simply isn't powerful enough and the perfomance gains will be null. Get yourself an ATi 4850 or 4770, which are both cheap and pretty powerful to be boot. They are quiet cards and should be inaudible. Thats the bear minimum in todays market really, a 9600GT was meek when it came out and outdated by todays standards. It could probably handle DCS but why buy outdated technology? Thats a no-name PSU and is dangerous to use, get a Corsair or Seasonic instead. Poor quality PSU's can blow and ruin everything they are connected to. Thermaltake cases are generally of a poor quality, the Coolermaster 690 is the best case within your price range, the Antec 300 being slightly below that. And a thermalright 120 extreme is a high performance heatsink. Strap a 120mm fan on it and you are good to go. Upgrading that is again, a waste. The Xigmatek 1283 (which is what I use) may actually perform worse. Faster hard drives decrease load times, but rarely help frame rates. A 10k RPM is very loud, which defeats the purpose of your build. SSD's are quiet as they have no moving parts, but vary widely in performance depending on the manufacturer. For the most part they are too expensive for what you get. Good luck!