Setting up FS9 with a high end PC

[MJDykas]

I know this has been beat to death in the past, not only here but just about every flightsim forum in creation. I just rebuilt my PC with a new MOBO 16BG of memory, I7 haswell CPU and a XFX 3Gb video card along with several SSD drives. I would like to know what some of you other guy's are using for your config set up. Does this sim have a point to where everything can be maxed out and a higher end PC would cut it like a hot knife through butter. This is for FS9, FSX is a whole different scenario, no need to know about that. I'm running both, I would just like to hear about what you have yours set at with a faster high machine. after reading countless posts and tweaks,I just feel I'm missing doing something that would make it run even better than it does now. This is just out of curiosity, the only problem I have with mine is that is loaded with like years and years worth of files and add ons.

[Firebird]

In truth a newer PC will perform better than an older one, however it may just be more efficiently rather than faster. It is fine having a fast processor, SSDs, fast memory and a fast graphics card but sometimes the top speed of each component can't be realised if the system bus can't supply the data fast enough. To be fair here again the newer the motherboard the chances are that it will be better than one a couple of years old.

For FS9 the biggest limiting factor is that it is compiled for a single processor, so you are limited in what you can do cpu wise. You can get creative and designate one core purely for FS9.exe and everything else uses the rest but that is about the best you can do.

One thing that I think helps FS9 is having the scenery on a different physical drive to the rest of FS9, rather than a different partition on the same drive. This way you have two drives reading data for the game rather than one. Again though, unless your system bus can handle the output your gain there can be limited.