Drive setup for Flight Sim 2004

[chrismr]

The other half plays FS2004 religiously and has MANY add-ons which pretty much bring the rig to it's knees.

The system currently has an Asrock Dual Sata2, Athlon 64 3000 oced to 2.2GHz, 2GB DDR400, 256MB x800xl, and 2 x 80GB PATA drives which I think only have 2MB cache.

Despite the 2 Gigs memory, the machine still often runs out of memory at the larger airports - they are all set up to be pretty much like it would be at the airport.

But for now I am trying to decide on what to do for disks for the machine. the machine has a pci Sil3112A raid controller, but I have yet to add an SATA drive. I tried previously with a Hitachi 250GB SATA2 set to SATA1 using both the onboard and the Sill3112 card, but the machine simply did not like the drive - which worked perfectly in my pc.

There is a lot -and I mean A LOT - of disk access, which I think is causing a serious bottleneck in the pc, but I am just not sure what would be the best disk setup for it.

I am just not sure whether I should try for something like a single 200GB PATA drive with a 8/16MB cache, or maybe try for SATA drives again... normally I would avoid going for RAID, but I really think it might help in this scenario - but again that would be using SATA, and its a lot of money to fork out for 3 drives - 2 for raid and one for backup as I would not run raid without a backup of the entire disk array on a seperate drive.

Suggestions would be most helpful...

 

[myocardia]

MS's flight sims are horrendously cpu-bound. I know, I've bought every single version since FSW95, the version before FS98. She'd be alot better off with a faster cpu, or a higher overclock. But, you can also turn off a couple of things that are stressing the cpu, like "Ground scenery casts shadows", under Display>Scenery, and "Aircraft casts shadows", under Display>Aircraft. The last setting that cpu speed has a major impact on is Sight Distance and Cloud Draw Distance, under Display>Weather. As far as running out of RAM, there's pretty much only one setting in FS2004 that effects that much; it's "Global Max texture size", which is under Display>Hardware.

 

[chrismr]

Thanks for the reply.

I do realise it's incredibly CPU bound. Am currently trying to get an Athlon 4000 running on the PC, but i'ts giving me crap - running slow and crashing. Updated to the most recent BIOs yesterday but have yet to see if it has worked.

Also, I know that setting those options down will help a fair bit, but the stubborn ****** refuses to play without everything maxed. It annoys me to no end. So just trying to get it working as well as it will with max settings...

I am really just wondering if faster drives, or a raid setup will help at all, with things such as loading of textures?

 

[tcsenter]

Asrock Dual Sata2, Athlon 64 3000 oced to 2.2GHz, 2GB DDR400, 256MB x800xl, and 2 x 80GB PATA drives which I think only have 2MB cache.

Something seems wrong with your setup resulting in an underlying performance/utilization problem. That setup should rock FS2004 FTW. FS is cpu-heavy but not insanely so and we're talking FS 2004 here running on 2005/2006 hardware. Athlon XP was still contemporary in 2004.

 

[mercanucaribe]

Originally posted by: tcsenter

Asrock Dual Sata2, Athlon 64 3000 oced to 2.2GHz, 2GB DDR400, 256MB x800xl, and 2 x 80GB PATA drives which I think only have 2MB cache.

Something seems wrong with your setup resulting in an underlying performance/utilization problem. That setup should rock FS2004 FTW. FS is cpu-heavy but not insanely so and we're talking FS 2004 here running on 2005/2006 hardware. Athlon XP was still contemporary in 2004.

Maybe it's the video card. What resolution is it running at?

 

[chrismr]

tcsenter: trust me, this may be an old game, but it can be modded to the extent it would make most any machine struggle. Pity it does not support dual-core...

mercanucaribe: have also had a 512mb x1900xt in here for testing before, and really did not make much difference.

Anyway, have just gone with a Seagate 7200.10 160GB with 8MB cache for now. I think the drive that the flight sim stuff is currently loaded on is only a 5400rpm drive...

I just wish 1GB PC3200 modules were not so expensive these days. Could do with 2 of them for this machine to run 3GB. The high density Samsung modules are cheap enough, but I am sure I remember them not being compatible with the Asrock Dual Sata2 boards....

Quetion: if I had to matched 512MB modules and 2 matched 1024MB modules, would they still run in dual-channel mode?