almccoyjr

I use APC #19500SG-1G. It's a little pricey due to the gold plated usb connectors, but it's been rock solid. Just make sure you plug the pc/hub cable into a port on the mobo that's marked usb and not just into a "blank" spare usb port. Belkin has some nice ones as well and they seem to be every where. Another option is to get a hub that's power switchable internal/external and power it with a good adaptor. Power Stream is excellent. That way you can get whatever type of hub, 2-ort, 4-port, 7-port, that meets your needs and supply it cleanly. If you go that route, make sure you match the dc plug/post power requirements. 5yrs..WOW! Same gimbals? You obviously like your Cougar? Looking at upgrading with hall's? That's going to be my next major upgrade. I like the idea of being able to vary the stick's feel and stiffness electrically.

Yep...Common problem. Believe it or not...not all mobo usb ports are created equal. I had the same type of problem about 1-1/2 yrs ago when I changed form CH to Cougar. I found that there was just enough voltage leak (milliamps) that the Cougar went dead, even one time borking the flash. Nutty came to my rescue with the usb check/troubleshooting. I eliminated that problem 100% by going to a powered hub with a built in regulated power supply. I run my Cougar, digital camera, CH Throttle Quad and my dedicated scanner off of it and have had zero problems since. It's also easier to unplug anything topside instead from the back or from down in front of the case.

On the surface, I don't see why not. There wasn't any problems with authentication or the like. It doesn't look like using a different make/size hd will cause any problems either. Shoot, they did it! Just need to go back into archives to check how-to's. Need to see if sata, ide, eide or combo(?) was used. Need to look at and eliminate the variables. I didn't see what type of XP was used, only that XP was the stated OS. Are you running 32 or 64? I'm going to be reinstalling a copy of 64 I've had but took off my sys because of all the early problems. I've order 2gb x 4 ram so I can regain some of the performance I lost when I down-clocked and I've got an old 80gb hd that I used to use for iso b/u's. Just maybe.... Have you looked into the reg. batch file to close whatever services you don't need automatically? It's on blackviper.com's site with complete lists from mild to tweaked to bare bones. I use the tweaked my self, but used bare bones when I started running into VRD tests.

Wow...At least you've given some good, hard verifiable and testable reasons for the ram. I've never had the displeasure of that type of problem thank God. I've had ram issues before, but not one so far out in left field. I would have run the "standard" tests and would have been running down the road with the tire still flat. What do you think the root cause is? Speculation, even at this point, would be welcome. Consider class in session; time to take the thinking cap off and put the learning one on. Maybe we should have this moved over to BHaH General Help. It certainly qualifies.

I went to techspot to take a look see if anyone had put SF on front end of a 2nd hd. I had a couple of hits on 2nd hd, one that took me back into '04 archives and guess what, XP_1_hd and XP_1_2hd has been done. It has something to do with the way XP recovery works and a .ini line entry that's made to _hd when _2hd is recognized and it even setups up a dual boot entry screen at startup....THAT IS REALLY COOL. It looks like it's time to do some online education; and "they" did it back in 2004!

40 STICKS!!!!!!! Holey Moley! I want your mobo....hahahaha. I sure am glad someone else gets "confused" on the keyboard.

I went down that road with 98SE awhile ago. Both OS were working fine in safe mode after booting. When I updated drivers in 98SE_1, I was no longer able to access 98SE_2. Forums indicated a chipset "cross-talk" between the two partitons and the _2 was borked. I honestly don't know if that'll happen with XP x 2. I think it will. You may want to look into OS on primary partition, data/apps on 2nd, "games" on 3rd and then "relocate" swap file to geographical center of your hd. SF will still be there for OS/data-apps, but will be closer to the "games" partition for better read-write performance. Another option might be to see if SF can be located at the "front" of hd_2. That would really increase SF performance between ram, SF and hd_2. I've never thought about it like that. That's pushing the envelope. Thanks! I'm going to have to chew on that one.

What am I doing wrong? I can't get edits to stick, my spelling sucks.

I don't think there is a separate file(s); I works as an integrated application. What I've done is to make a folder CFS3_OR (original) and make a copy of current CFS3config and dump it into that folder. Then I make a 2nd folder CFS3_*** (whatever). I then make whatever changes to the config and then save/exit. When I want to use the other config, I cut/paste dance the exe in and out. I had 3 when I ran CFS3 proper. I have 4 now in OFF P3 that I swap in/out, mostly to fly trial and error in QC testing different settings. Next I'm going to try it with OFFManager and see what happens. That way I'd have complete scenarios to play with. It should work, at least is seems logical. By the way, I've ordered my 2 x 4 ram and will be switching to x64. Many forums and inquires show it to be very stable/mature, at least for the hardware I've got.

Excellent advice. Before I made the decision to go 64 and 2 x 4, I went back to EVGA to go over 680i ram compatiblity at 1066. I then sought advice from the Corsair Tech Guru regarding running ram locked @ 1066, no fsb bump and X6800 multiplyer with with cpu voltage only. He said I shouldn't experience any problems "out of the ordinary" i.e., test first then play. So it'll be a long weekend with memtest, orthos then prime with swapping ram in and out. A couple of days on the front end=trouble free years on the backend. And if something does go bump down the road, I'll have my notes from ground zero. This is turning into a really good "what if" troubleshooting discussion. By the way Over50, I went over my reg b/u's looking at install-reinstall of 182.06 using DC Pro and then Driver Sweeper. Holy Moley! I could not believe the lines of crap DCP didn't even "see"! 182.06 is running just fine and no foreign gibberish.

That was my first question. I wanted to see if he had run 3.0 unpatched and from cd2 without any problems so as to start on a level playing field and if had installed CFS3 previously on another computer. I would think (seems logical to me) that if the cd were corrupt, the problem would be within the same area of execution, giving apprx. repeatable problems time wise. The only problems that seem to follow are mouse/pointer anomaly and ctd/hard lockup and those "seem" to arbitrary time wise. What led me to believe that there's a heat issue with card(s) is that the mouse/pointer corruption "pops up" at different intervals. But is not the gpu(s); I believe it's a miniscule (sp?) heat spot somewhere on a vram chip, maybe even a pin to board connection. The mouse in game is completely static and always there where as the rest of the CFS3 is fluid/dynamic with files swapping all the time. The mouse doesn't go anywhere and gets a video "band" box drawn to it. Banding is "typically" driver/file/dx problem(s) or a video heat issue. Phantomjoker's earlier posts led me down the driver/file/dx road because he indicated that the mouse/box band problem was initially there and then crash would follow at some point. Later post had mouse/box band "developing" during game play and when cards would be pushing to render. The other games/apps may not thrash the card(s) like CFS3; really good flight sims beat the h*ll out of cpu/gpu's. By the way, I've ordered 2gb x 4 @1066 and am going to reinstall XPP64 and re-clock back up to 3.45 so I don't have to play around with fsb, just voltage.

Ok...I'd like to be able to look out over the EIII's wings and watch them warp as I commence a roll. And I'd like to be able to "communicate" with AI pilot to persuade him to "join" me and fly back to my Aerodrome when his guns jam or when rear gunner is killed. Deny this confirmation HQ! I have CCR ready for P4 beacuse P3 is really something else. By the way, what "warp" factor due you devs use to get back to your home planet(s)?

Fighter Duel......Holy Moley!. I flew, very briefly, under my first and only moniker, "plugged nickel", between 14.0 to V.90 "high speed modem" days. "High speed modem" was my first real introduction to the term oxymoron. I never went back on-line in mp areans; stayed with lan with small group of friends for awhile until we drifted. I didn't think anything could be better than RB3D, especially after RELOAD offered TIR and fuel/air mixture. Boy was I ever wrong.

Mine was Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer followed by "his" Air Combat. After that, way to many. I still play Air Combat at times.

Actually, I think the developers are really a group of alien gamers from a galaxy far, far away who, by chance, happened to intercept an old WWI black and white tv transmission and said "Wow, that's cool. Let's go there and show them how we play".

Ok. If you want to continue trying to troubleshoot, let me know. I'll do the reconstruct on the posts. I'll put down in 1, 2, 3+ fashion what I do to troubleshoot vid problem and you can compare to what you've done so far. I'll also include what programs (they're standard) I use to stress card and monitor temp, fan speed etc. I'll also include what your "general' bios voltage readings should be around including rail for a single card. I'll try and assist on the SLI. I may need to know a couple more things about your setup if I can't find answers in the previous posts. It will be time consuming and require step by step note taking. If you don't want to go any farther and rather wait on new vid, I understand. It may be time to let go of that bone; it's been just about chewed to death.

Ah ha....You ran for 24 minutes without issues and THEN(?) the mouse/fps corruption. Going back over your other posts lead me to believe that this corruption was there all along. 49C is running very cool for SLI, if the temp feedback is somewhat close to being accurate. 55-60C is typical for a "stressed" 7800GT with good airflow around the cards and in/out the case. 65-75C start watching because your card(s) are stressed and now it becomes additive to case heat. 80C should be absolute max for test purposes only; 90C and you've got yourself a hibachi. You may indeed by having a temp issue after all. I've never run SLI so this is a stretch. You may be having a localizied heating problem with the vram on one of the boards that your temp monitoring is not picking up. This now makes more sense than driver/code/dx problem(s). I'm going to go back over previous posts and see if I can come up with a reconstruct. Never leave a wingman in trouble.

Please, if any devs can help or shed some light, I've got a question. I know CPU frequency is important as is amount of ram. I'm running 2gig on a 680i board with a X6800 @ 3.6 on air since 12/06. I change my TIM every 6 months and do other various chores to keep her up. I'd like to turn down the oc (she is getting on in years) but don't want to sacrifice to many fps. Would a Virtual Ram Drive of 2-4gig in place of the swap file be of any performance benefit? Right now, I have my swap file locked at 2048. If you could take what was written to the VRD and dump it into a file to be saved and reused by OFF3 again, would that aid in performance? Would this be something worth while to try or just a dead end? Thanks

{ www.BLACKVIPER.com....not blackbird. I was talking to my dad in JAX about the SR71 in the air museum in Dayton when I was posting. To late to be multitasking. Goodnite.

I agree completely; ram is critical. I would think that the DDR2's timing would also be important, but keeping ram locked to bus,having a higher bus speed and ram frequency to match it now seems the way to go. Timing issues don't seem to "hit" performance where higher bus/ram frequency is in play. I've got XPP64, but didn't go down that road because of all the "early" driver and compatibility issues. I'm going to be revisiting various sites to see where it's at today. I stayed away from Vista. I'll wait to see what happens with W7. At least with X64, all 8gb are available for board/OS, etc. I've noticed several mentions of End-It-All. Its an excellent program. Something I haven't seen much talk about are stopping services. I've used www.blackbird.com to modify ALL services in XPP32 SP3. I've been using that site since W2K Pro. When I was doing my QC VRD runs, I was using the "tweaked" values I normally run. After I saw what was happening in QC2, I went with the "bare bones" guide to see if I could get any more fps, but the timing wasn't there. the blackbird guide also supports XPP64 and Vista 32/64 as well.

What I was hoping was that the VRD write-to files I saved to folder after QC 1:1 would be additive to the write-to files that that would be generated in QC2 1:2. When I exited OFF, I dumped the write-to files that were generated back into VRD and as expected, the next QC 1:1 was very good. When running QC2 1:2, the initial response was also very good but went south rapidly when more hd files were needed due to the change in the parameters of the sim. QC3 1:4 was bad immediately because the parameters of the sim were much more drastic and ram was going to VRD first to prefetch and then to hd for what was needed. QC4 grounded the sim. More real ram would allow a much larger VRD to be created, but the dynamics of a campaign would overwhelm the VRD. Now, I use VRD to run a software image where a cd is required. It's several hundred times faster than my CD/DVD drive. I was hoping to extend that capability by being able to "reuse" the write-to files that were generated and "redumping" them in an additive fashion. MS stated that the reason it was better to lock the swap file was to help eliminate them being scattered through out the swap file's disk area in a fragmented fashion. This makes sense: if the file is locked in/out in one physical location and not scattered here and there in a swap file that modulates in size the better the prefetch would be between ram and swap before having to go to hd. What I haven't tried is the impact of different locked swap file sizes on OFF. It seems logical that between proc freqency (a given), the number of background services and not just apps that are running (a given), ram (a given) and swap file size (?), there is a real "sweet spot" that would give more consistent in sim fps.

Your bios should be showing 4096. { The OS/board will allocate 350-500mb for primary functions. With SLI-vid 256mbx2=512. The OS will now address 3gb of ram after the 512mb allocation. The other 500mb is various other functions, bus address, chipsets, additional pci-e address/sli, nics, sound, etc., so you end up with 2.5gb the OS has to address. Your swap file being set to dynamic may or may not be an issue. I remember MS said to lock the file at 1046 or something. I run my swap at 2048 locked. This shouldn't be causing CFS3 to ctd. Much earlier in this post, I asked if you were able to run CFS3 on another machine without issues, or, on your current computer, if you were ever able to run CFS3 w/o any patches and using cd2 to start. That's absolutely square one, ground zero, because all of your other programs are running fine without any issues what so ever and you don't seem to be having temp issues. Added { Corrected math that followed { My apologies. Tried to edit, but it didn't stick.

It looks like your "guess" (haha) was right on the mark. Thanks. It was a good learning experience. 1st run in QC 1:1...bad. 2nd run 1:2... a little worse. 3rd run 1:4... really bad 4th run 1:4 w/dynamic weather...not flyable. Trying VRD even with more ram will not get any better either. It's a dead end.