Need PC upgrade advice for FSX.

[Private Custard]

Right, here's the deal. I'm using a four year old Compaq with the following stats

I also have a GeForce 8600GT that I plugged in about a year ago to make my photo editing a bit easier.

I'd like to be able to run FSX smoothly at high (ultra high if possible) settings (as well as any other flight sims, I'm feeling like flying intead of killing stuff for a while), but I don't know if my processor can handle it, even if I choose to upgrade to 4gig of RAM and install a new graphics card. The real pain is that the tower itself won't accomodate the larger graphics cards, which is why I went for the 8600 instead of the 9500.

Any ideas, or should I just bite the bullet, buy a newer PC with a faster processor and more RAM and then just plug in my current graphics card?

In case you hadn't noticed, I'm a console gamer who knows basically sod all about current gaming PCs, but my 360 fried itself so I'm taking a different route!

 

[verindae]

Firstly the upper memory limit of a 32bit OS is more in the region of 2.5gig - 3.5gig depending on video memory, allocated hardware resources etc so blowing a chunk of money on ram is a bad idea, 3gig is about where you wanna stop cause you'll be running as if that last gig aint there otherwise.

The problem is you're in a compaq case which is generally designed for it's compact nature, not its upgrade options. A new case would be a start, then you can start upgrading piece by piece, a good question is have you got that Pentium D in an LGA775 socket? (I think they came in LGA775 format, not entirely sure on that one, someone feel free to correct me there) If you do then, depending on motherboard compatibility, you might get a core2duo in it, save replacing your motherboard. Otherwise It's a new board and chip at the same time there when the time comes around.

The 8600, though a little dated, isn't a bad piece of kit, but will need upgrading eventually which comes back to the needing a bigger case part. The good cards tend to be a lil big for a compaq case in my experience.

 

[Private Custard]

snip

Yep, case size was my major worry. Here's my tower

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00968895&tmp_track_link=ot_faqs/top_issues/en_uk/c00968895/loc:2&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=uk&product=3397702&lang=en

And my motherboard (don't know if you can make head or tail from it!)

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00910113&lc=en&cc=fi&dlc=fi&product=3397702&lang=fi#N1047

It says that my motherboard can only accept 2x 1gig of RAM. But I'm not sure if that's based on the Vista that was installed before I upgraded to Windows 7

From what I read, Windows 7 32bit can see 4gig of RAM, but only uses 3, which is pretty pathetic really. I'm thinking I may have to save up and sort myself out with a serious gaming platform, rather than trying to bake a cake with bad eggs!

 

[verindae]

snip

Yep, case size was my major worry. Here's my tower

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00968895&tmp_track_link=ot_faqs/top_issues/en_uk/c00968895/loc:2&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=uk&product=3397702〈=en

And my motherboard (don't know if you can make head or tail from it!)

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00910113&lc=en&cc=fi&dlc=fi&product=3397702〈=fi#N1047

It says that my motherboard can only accept 2x 1gig of RAM. But I'm not sure if that's based on the Vista that was installed before I upgraded to Windows 7

From what I read, Windows 7 32bit can see 4gig of RAM, but only uses 3, which is pretty pathetic really. I'm thinking I may have to save up and sort myself out with a serious gaming platform, rather than trying to bake a cake with bad eggs!

Yeah basically a 32bit OS can address up to 4gig worth of memory, that includes all hardware address allocations and video memory, so minus those from your 4gig and that's what you got left for RAM, usually equating to about 3gig.

Your motherboard there though looks like it can only support 1 gig per channel though so it doesn't look like an option anyway.

The socket is LGA775 and a quick look at the spec sheet there says core2duo up to E4300 (as a reference I'm currently running a core2duo E2180 @ 2.6ghz Overclock and it does me plenty) so that aint so bad. Just the form factor of your case is holding back your options for graphics cards really.

If you want more memory though you're gonna need a new motherboard and possibly look at a 64bit OS, though that last part aint really important as the cons of going 64bit currently tend to outweigh the pros in most cases.

EDIT: If you're looking for a serious gaming platform you definitely want to go with a new motherboard and chip combo, giving yourself room to expand in all areas really, those compaq boards aren't really designed to be upgraded.

 

[Private Custard]

EDIT: If you're looking for a serious gaming platform you definitely want to go with a new motherboard and chip combo, giving yourself room to expand in all areas really, those compaq boards aren't really designed to be upgraded.

Cool, I have a friend that's built PCs before, he's coming up to see me in a couple of weeks, I'll have a word with him about building a machine from scratch.

Sorry, I'd have replied earlier but I was flying from Valley AB in Wales to Manchester airport. Caught a wicked bit of turbulence on the approach and ended up crashing my Hawk!!

 

[Signa]

Hate to break it to you, but I think you are going to need to build a new PC to get the most bang for your buck. What you have now isn't bad, but you are kinda stuck where you are if you want to salvage most of your current PC. You probably could work out something with getting a larger case and then moving everything into it, but your mobo is a little dated if you can't have more than 2GB ram. After you decide to replace that, then you may as well as start from scratch.

 

[verindae]

EDIT: If you're looking for a serious gaming platform you definitely want to go with a new motherboard and chip combo, giving yourself room to expand in all areas really, those compaq boards aren't really designed to be upgraded.

Cool, I have a friend that's built PCs before, he's coming up to see me in a couple of weeks, I'll have a word with him about building a machine from scratch.

Sorry, I'd have replied earlier but I was flying from Valley AB in Wales to Manchester airport. Caught a wicked bit of turbulence on the approach and ended up crashing my Hawk!!

lol no worries, glad I could be of help.

Building from scratch is easy enough. Shop around a bit, online retailers are your best bet usually because the parts tend to be cheaper.

Oh and don't scrimp on the PSU, cheaping out there is usually a bad idea

 

[Private Custard]

Hate to break it to you, but I think you are going to need to build a new PC to get the most bang for your buck. What you have now isn't bad, but you are kinda stuck where you are if you want to salvage most of your current PC. You probably could work out something with getting a larger case and then moving everything into it, but your mobo is a little dated if you can't have more than 2GB ram. After you decide to replace that, then you may as well as start from scratch.

I'll use my existing hard drives for now, a 160gb main and a 640gb secondary that I'll run all of my games from. I'll probably junk the rest though, maybe put my 2gb of RAM into my mums PC or something!

Building from scratch is easy enough. Shop around a bit, online retailers are your best bet usually because the parts tend to be cheaper.

Oh and don't scrimp on the PSU, cheaping out there is usually a bad idea

I think my current PSU is 600w as I had to upgrade it when I added the second internal HDD and the graphics card. Hopefully it'll be enough, but I may well upgrade it even more if I'll be looking at a graphics card the size of a dinner plate!

 

[verindae]

I think my current PSU is 600w as I had to upgrade it when I added the second internal HDD and the graphics card. Hopefully it'll be enough, but I may well upgrade it even more if I'll be looking at a graphics card the size of a dinner plate!

Hmm, depends on the card you go for, 750watt and upwards is usually a safe bet for the more powerful stuff.
Also make sure your PSU has all the connectors required for new gear such as sata power (probably a given), 6 pin for graphics cards, enough 4 pin molex for the rest

 

[Private Custard]

I think my current PSU is 600w as I had to upgrade it when I added the second internal HDD and the graphics card. Hopefully it'll be enough, but I may well upgrade it even more if I'll be looking at a graphics card the size of a dinner plate!

Hmm, depends on the card you go for, 750watt and upwards is usually a safe bet for the more powerful stuff.
Also make sure your PSU has all the connectors required for new gear such as sata power (probably a given), 6 pin for graphics cards, enough 4 pin molex for the rest

Cool, will do. Cheers for the help

 

[viranimus]

I would say that as for the VC.. you can get low profile 9500s and i think 9600s to eek out a little more ooomph.

The best suggestion someone else made is to move it to a larger case to accomodate more. As for the processor, its alright, but for a socket 775, there are some fairly decent processors out there on the dual/quad core side.

 

[Signa]

Hate to break it to you, but I think you are going to need to build a new PC to get the most bang for your buck. What you have now isn't bad, but you are kinda stuck where you are if you want to salvage most of your current PC. You probably could work out something with getting a larger case and then moving everything into it, but your mobo is a little dated if you can't have more than 2GB ram. After you decide to replace that, then you may as well as start from scratch.

I'll use my existing hard drives for now, a 160gb main and a 640gb secondary that I'll run all of my games from. I'll probably junk the rest though, maybe put my 2gb of RAM into my mums PC or something!

Cool. I was starting to say in my other post that you can keep things like your HDDs and disk drives, but it didn't seem to mesh well with the rest of the post so I cut it. But yeah, RAM probably won't be able to be reused, so putting it in your mom's machine might be good. Sounds like you've got a nice power supply too, so I'd see about keeping that if possible. Alternately, if you think you could find the use for it, you could slap a really cheap HDD in your current PC and use it as a secondary for whenever you need a second computer active. I started running game servers on my old PC so that my new one could be free from that kind of burden. It's ended up helping when I have guests over since it will still run (poorly) games like Left 4 Dead and Borderlands. Just a thought, since a lot of the PC will still be usable, but not active.

 

[Private Custard]

snippety

snip

Just to let you both know, I've been doing some research this evening, trying to get to grips with current tech in processors, graphics cards, motherboards and RAM......and I've reached a conclusion.

What I really want in my PC.

Windows 7 (64bit)
AMD Phenom II X4 945 3GHz (although a 965 or one of their 6 cores would be nice!)
4 gig of RAM, absolute minimum (I'm after 8)
GTX460
750w PSU

To buy a case (£40), processor (£150-200), HDD (£60), PSU (£40), motherboard (£90-200), graphics card (£160), DDR3 RAM (£90 for 4 gig or £200 for 8gig)and all cabling required to wire it, as well as a new DVD drive (I'm offloading my entire current PC to my Mum), would cost me pretty much the same as this (one of many I'm having trouble deciding on!)

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/GL-WIN-7-PC-AMD-945-500GB-4GB-DDR3-GAMING-GTX-460-/380252267774?pt=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs

And someone else builds it for me and it arrives with free postage on my doorstep a few days later. It just seems to be the best method for me.

I'm getting there though, and at this point, I have no idea how people can manage to spend over 2 grand on gaming machines. It just seems mental!

 

[Wolfram23]

^ not bad, tho you could easily use a solid 550W PSU for that unless you want to SLI down the road (but then you have to make certain the mobo you buy supports SLI and not just CF).

As for spending 2 grand... it wasn't that hard for me lol. Didn't spend it all at first, but added another GPU, a sound card, speakers...

i5 750 (OCed now to 3.75ghz with turbo hitting 4.3ghz on single core)
Zalman CNPS10X Extreme heat sink
Asus P7P55D Pro mobo
8GB Patriot Viper II Sector 5 RAM at 1426mhz CL7
Two Sapphire 5850 (reference model - OCed to 875/1205 for normal use) in crossfire, with aftermarket Scythe Setsugen coolers
Corsair 750TX PSU
Antec 902 case (plus a couple extra case fans)
Two 500gb Seagate 7200.12 HDDs in RAID 0
DVD-RW drive
AuzenTech Bravura 7.1 sound card
Windows 7 64bit
Logitech X540 5.1 speakers (plus older Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers, for a total 7.2 set up lol)
Samsung 2494SW monitor
Logitech wireless keyboard and wireless laser mouse combo

That added up to around $2300 (CND) roughly by this point... And I'm looking at getting an extra pair of monitors for Eyefinity ><
The great part is, tho, I can easily upgrade in like... 4 years when I need to.


Anyway, an AMD Phenom II X4 set up is pretty good. Last night I was pricing out a couple AMD systems for my girlfriend, one an X4 the other X6 and they were about $850 and $900 respectively but that's no monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers...

 

[Private Custard]

^ not bad, tho you could easily use a solid 550W PSU for that unless you want to SLI down the road (but then you have to make certain the mobo you buy supports SLI and not just CF).

As for spending 2 grand... it wasn't that hard for me lol. Didn't spend it all at first, but added another GPU, a sound card, speakers...

i5 750 (OCed now to 3.75ghz with turbo hitting 4.3ghz on single core)
Zalman CNPS10X Extreme heat sink
Asus P7P55D Pro mobo
8GB Patriot Viper II Sector 5 RAM at 1426mhz CL7
Two Sapphire 5850 (reference model - OCed to 875/1205 for normal use) in crossfire, with aftermarket Scythe Setsugen coolers
Corsair 750TX PSU
Antec 902 case (plus a couple extra case fans)
Two 500gb Seagate 7200.12 HDDs in RAID 0
DVD-RW drive
AuzenTech Bravura 7.1 sound card
Windows 7 64bit
Logitech X540 5.1 speakers (plus older Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers, for a total 7.2 set up lol)
Samsung 2494SW monitor
Logitech wireless keyboard and wireless laser mouse combo

That added up to around $2300 (CND) roughly by this point... And I'm looking at getting an extra pair of monitors for Eyefinity ><
The great part is, tho, I can easily upgrade in like... 4 years when I need to.


Anyway, an AMD Phenom II X4 set up is pretty good. Last night I was pricing out a couple AMD systems for my girlfriend, one an X4 the other X6 and they were about $850 and $900 respectively but that's no monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers...

From what I've learned so far tonight, that's a pretty fucking awesome setup you have there!

And yep, I'm strongly considering the X6, but it's rated at 2.8GHz compared to the 3Ghz of the 4-core. I guess it's all about keeping the processor working less, so it ends up producing more. It's all very confusing!

As long as it can run MS Flight Simulator X on high, I'll be happy!

 

[Signa]

OH hell yeah it looks like you've got quite a deal there. Hopefully they aren't skimping on some quality parts. I'm always afraid of any pre-built for that reason. Some are fine, but I know a friend who built his PC with el-cheapo parts and it was a nightmare for him. He ended up being more happy with a Dell. I have to ask though, why did he build one if all his friends couldn't help him get the right quality parts?

I guess what I'm saying is knowing exactly what you put in your machine helps if anything goes wrong, because you know where to look first to fix the issues. Looking at the page, the only thing of question is the RAM and *maybe* the HDD, should they be of poor quality. Asus makes kick-ass stuff, so I wouldn't worry about the MoBo acting retarded on you. I think that's what caused the issues with the PC that friend of mine built. He chose one of the worst companies (or so I was told) for his MoBo.

 

[Private Custard]

OH hell yeah it looks like you've got quite a deal there. Hopefully they aren't skimping on some quality parts. I'm always afraid of any pre-built for that reason. Some are fine, but I know a friend who built his PC with el-cheapo parts and it was a nightmare for him. He ended up being more happy with a Dell. I have to ask though, why did he build one if all his friends couldn't help him get the right quality parts?

I guess what I'm saying is knowing exactly what you put in your machine helps if anything goes wrong, because you know where to look first to fix the issues. Looking at the page, the only thing of question is the RAM and *maybe* the HDD, should they be of poor quality. Asus makes kick-ass stuff, so I wouldn't worry about the MoBo acting retarded on you. I think that's what caused the issues with the PC that friend of mine built. He chose one of the worst companies (or so I was told) for his MoBo.

It seems like the parts are all pretty decent. The trader has a huge positive feedback rating, and I'll be covered if anything goes wrong inside a year. I have, however, changed my machine of choice....

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/AMD-6-CORE-1055T-DDR3-WIN-7-PC-1-5TB-4GB-GTX-460-GAL-/200499356736?pt=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs

Why have a quad when you can have a 6-core!! A 6-core 2.8 should be more than enough, right?

 

[Signa]

damn, that might be nicer than my pc. I've got an i7 920, which equates to 8 threads, but only 4 cores. I also have 6GB DDR3 triple channel ram and 2.5TB of HDD space. I spent just under $1k on it last year. I also got to reduce costs by cannibalizing my old 8800GT and I'm still running that now.

One question since I see you getting power hungry, do you see yourself doing many processor intensive things? I do a lot of video conversion and file decompressing, which Intel processors excel at. In games though, they aren't anything special. That's why I usually recommend AMD CPUs for gamers because they perform just as well at games as the Intels, but they cost half the price. They just don't do the pure number crunching as well as the Intels, and since I do a lot of that, I went Intel. At least that's how all the charts read a year ago when I made my PC.

 

[Private Custard]

One question since I see you getting power hungry, do you see yourself doing many processor intensive things? I do a lot of video conversion and file decompressing, which Intel processors excel at. In games though, they aren't anything special. That's why I usually recommend AMD CPUs for gamers because they perform just as well at games as the Intels, but they cost half the price. They just don't do the pure number crunching as well as the Intels, and since I do a lot of that, I went Intel. At least that's how all the charts read a year ago when I made my PC.

I'm mainly upgrading for the games (flight sims mostly) and am hoping that I'll be able to run them on at least 'high' settings.

I do some video editing sometimes, but not very often, just some on-board footage of the bike. And Lightroom tends to be pretty heavy on the processor, but my current dual core 3GHz pentium and 2Gb of DDR2 RAM are only just below the comfort level. A 6 core processor and 4Gb of DDR3, coupled with the GTX460 should be about twice as much as I'll need.

I'm buying this PC to be my DVD player, editing suite, web surfer and gaming machine.....and it will hopefully kick arse!

 

[lacktheknack]

Buy a bigger chassis, port all your computer's innards over, and get more RAM with a 200 series graphics card.

Most work, but cheapest option. It will probably cost you $100 for the chassis (wildly guessing here), $75 for the RAM (if you go to the right place) and $150 for the graphics card.

Good luck.

EDIT: Checked the specs you gave... never mind. Bullet biting time.