Wels 2 Posted July 29, 2009 Hello, i have asked this before, but it is only that i recently have some money to spend for this unimportant stuff like sims . I have a P5K mainboard with a (not yet overclocked) Intel core2 duo 8400e chip at 3 GHz, 2 x 1 Gb Kingston HyperX DDR2 Ram in dual channel, FSB is at 1366. The bottleneck is the graphic card or so i think, it is an older PCIe Nvidia Gforce 8400 GS with 512 Mb. OFF does not really run good, i have framerates of below 20 over aerodromes, settings are: Overall graphic detail: 4 Aircraft detail: 5 Terrain detail: 3 Scenery detail: 3 Effects quality: 5 Cloud quality: 1 OS is XP SP3 - don't know whether i should get Vista and get more than 2 Gb Ram ? As far as i know XP only uses 2 of it (?) So which Graphic card would you buy, or propose - i am also thinking of buying FSX or RoF sooner or later. I would like to know which is the absolutely best one, and which you would get in terms of "best bang for buck". Thanks and greetings, Catfish Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Cameljockey 3 Posted July 29, 2009 Your graphics card is definitely your weak link. I'm running 4Gb of DDR2 800 and XP recognizes 3.25Gb, but memory is not your problem, that 8400GS is. I'm running an 8800GTX right now and have been doing some reading about the 200 Series Nvidia cards. I'd say right now the best bang for the buck would be the GTX 260. Here in the States a GTX 260 can be had at Newegg.com for around $150 US. I'm seriously looking at the 280 myself. CJ Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wels 2 Posted July 29, 2009 Hello, thanks for your advice ! The 260 and 280 GTX are unfortunately very expensive in the EU, but i will have a closer look tomorrow .. Thanks and greetings, Catfish Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wels 2 Posted July 29, 2009 Hello UncleAl, good avice as always (well mostly lol ) "The Availability Of Any Part Will Be Inversely Proportional To It's Need" How comes you know my car so well ? Thanks and greetings, Catfish Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Hellshade 110 Posted July 29, 2009 Hello,thanks for your advice ! The 260 and 280 GTX are unfortunately very expensive in the EU, but i will have a closer look tomorrow .. Thanks and greetings, Catfish I have the GTX280, however unless you are running above 1680 x 1050, the GTX260 does nearly as good of a job by all accounts. So unless you have a very large monitor, the 260 is your best buy. The 8800 series is also still a great card and can be had fairly cheap these days I believe. Hellshade Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
BirdDogICT 3 Posted July 29, 2009 So which Graphic card would you buy, or propose - i am also thinking of buying FSX or RoF sooner or later. I would like to know which is the absolutely best one, and which you would get in terms of "best bang for buck".Catfish The general consensus from the devs and other users has been that BHaH works better with nVidia cards, especially ones with 1 Mb of memory. However, I'm running about the same specs as yours, although with an overclocked socket 939 machine with an ATI 4870. I had to do a lot of graphics tweaking to get a decent framerate wihtout stutters when I installed BHaH back in January running Catalyst 9.1. But I installed the latest Catalyst 9.7 drivers today and am getting a very decent framerate without having to apply any tweaks at all. A 4870 sells for about $150 now, half as much as I paid for it 7 months ago. Any PCIE-2 graphics cards should be backward compatible with your motherboard, although you will lose some bandwidth. Gotta love those ASUS motherboards...I've built 6 PCs with ASUS boards over the past 8 years and all of them are still running great. Cheers Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
CaptSopwith 26 Posted July 30, 2009 (edited) Wels, I'm running an 8800GT card, which I know is slightly more powerful but... Have you looked at Homeboy's settings for improving your OFF performance? I was getting decent FPS, with some stutter and running at a lower resolution until I went through and followed his instructions (though he'll be the first to credit Rabu for coming up with the settings in the firs place ). Here's the link to the thread. Try Homeboy's suggestions. In the end, my slider settings remained the same, but my resolution went way up, and my FPS jumped from 15-25 to 30-65 with an increase in detail and graphical eye-candy. Just a thought, and a cheap alternative at that! PS: In terms of Homeboy's resolution, you'll likely want to adjust accordingly. Example, I'm not running at his resolution, rather I backed it off to my native desktop setting of 1680x1050. Hope this helps! Edited July 30, 2009 by _CaptSopwith Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Bletchley 8 Posted July 30, 2009 If you come across the GTS250, this is essentially the same as the 9800GTX+ I think (and it comes in either 512 or 1 GB version), and it might be cheaper (or at least more available) here in the EU than the older 9800 0r 8800 GTX cards. It is considerably cheaper than the GTX260, with only slightly inferior performance I believe, takes up less space and easy on the PSU :) http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=17411 Bletchley Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wels 2 Posted July 30, 2009 Hello all, thanks a lot, first about the proposals and about the link to Homeboy's instruction - don't know how i managed to not read this yet - i know he did an excellent list of the OFF planes with data for comparison. After reading about the power consumption of those ceards i guess i will need a bigger power supply lol Thanks again and greetings, Catfish Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
