Military AI Works

I have some "home time" for a few days so I got a new computer system yesterday.

Motherboard: ASUSTek P5K SE

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6750@2.66GHZ
Frequency: 2666 MHz
L1 cache: 65 KB
L2 cache: 4,096KB
Socket: LGA775
Memory: 2,048 MB DDR2

500 watt Duel Core Power Supply

NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT w/ 512MB memory
SyncMaster CX205B(Digital) Flat Screen Monitor

160Gb Maxtor SATA HDD
250 GB Maxtor External HDD
500 GB Maxtor One Touch External HDD
80 GB Western Digital External HDD

12 USB ports (Like that with everything going USB)

8:1 Sound System

DVD Recorder/Player
CD/CDR-W Burner

Been reloading all my flight sim etc. Plan on using the 160 GB drive as Op System, 250 GB as Backup, 500 GB for Flight Sim and 80 GB as page file drive.

Just replaced a 3 GHz 2 GB system. Will have to see if I improved performance....

Congrats on your new system.

One thing I noticed, even with FS9, 3GB RAM worked better for me than 2GB.... and XP can take advantage of 3GB.

Enjoy the fun of the newness!

Flyboy,

Congrats on getting a new machine. I won't comment on specs of PC's as its not my place, but one thing I would suggest, if you have a lot of large scenery in place, UT, FS Global etc, it might be worth considering a raid0 system for your FS partition. So instead of 1x 500GB HD get 2x 250GB.

I know that you have what you have, but if you feel the need to upgrade it might be worth an investment.

The advantage of this is that although your 2 physical HDs will still be seen as 1 virtual disk your scenery will be spread out across them both. This means that it will load up to twice as fast. On slower systems quite often the processor couldn't handle the data coming that quickly so the benefit was negligible, but the newer process can actually be waiting for the data to be read in.

You should find that FS9 will load faster and have less stuttering/fps impact when you move from area to area.

Just one note here, guys.

I did tested RAID0 config a few months ago and yes, it's twice fast but ...
it finished its career afted a first HDD error popped out. I could not get rid of this.

So I switched my two 300HDD to the classic SATA config and now I can make a backup of a system partition to the second drive.
It would not be possible with RAID0 ...

I can confirm that what Rip says is correct, as the two drives work as a virtual single drive, if one goes then you lose the data on both. The same as if you had a problem with one larger single drive.

As always you should keep the partition backed up.

I have used raid0 for several years in two machines and have had no problems and, yes defrag software does work on raid0.

What you can do with two drives is set up raid1, which is a mirroring system. If you lose one drive the other still works.
It is not faster, and it will not have a copy of stuff that you deleted by mistake, as the mirroring takes place almost instantaneously.

The new system is handling FS9 and FSX quite well, both with my heavy traffic and scenery loads.

If you like to multi-tasks many programs running at once, this system is the one for you.

Can not really tell much different form 3GHz system to this one. It seems like the data thru-put is faster on this one.