New(2nd hand) PC - how will this go with FSX?

[LonelyplanetXO]

Hey all, my not-very trusty gaming machine gave up last night - GTX260 burned out due to no cooling fans in the case. Can't afford a new gaming pc so went to the shop today for a new card and a case... That's the best part of $NZ800, doh!
Turns out the shop owner has a second hand machine (was his wife's) he wants to quit. Big pro cooled case, i960, 4gb DDR2 ram, SLI gtx 8800 ultra cards, windows 7 - all water cooled for $NZ1000. No brainer really as building that today in NZ would be over $NZ2500.
So my current machine, a quad core 2.6 with 4GB of DDR (1) &XP Ram sucked at FSX. How will the new one go?

LPXO

[icarus]

the second machine with a better 6gb ram ddr3 should be ok, and tweaks, if you use the right tweak it changes your life on fsx, having also much free space where installed fsx help a lot

[Daube]

The i7 960 is a good CPU, I have it and with its native speed (3,2 GHz) it gives very good results in FSX :)
And it will be even better once I overclock it... but I don't feel the need right now.
The 8800 Ultra card is good-enough for FSX. The SLI is quite useless for FSX (unless playing in very high resolution), but it might be good for other games.
And I agree with the above comments concerning the RAM. DDR2 is not that nice. The i7 960 is triple channel, so 3 sticks of 2 Gb of fast RAM would be nicer :)

[stansdds]

Yep, DDR2 RAM will be a bottleneck, upgrading to some fast DDR3 will help speed up that computer. 8800 Ultra's were good cards, but FSX really doesn't make use of more than one card. SLI (or Crossfire) might be of benefit if you use a really high resolution monitor or multiple monitors.

[ianhind]

Since DDR3 RAM will not fit in the same slots as DDR2 RAM, the suggestions to use DDR3 imply a change of motherboard - more expense?

[Daube]

Hmm... can you really put an i7 on a motherboard that accepts only DDR2 RAM ?
I thought that in order to be able to accept a recent cpu like an i7 960, the motherboard had to be recent as well.
Would that mean that not all recent motherboards have DDR3 slots ?

[ianhind]

Good point Daube - I now agree it seems likely that if it has an i7-960, then it will be DDR3 RAM. But original post said DDR2 - perhaps a little more investigation as to what the new (2nd hand) PC actually contains is in order. Output from CPU-Z (http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html) would be useful.

[Butcherbird17]

Maybe the newer chipset motherboards are ddr3 only, but 1st gen I7 boards come in ddr2 and 3 flavors. When you pick up the pc just check and see if its using all the dimm slots. From the sound of it he is only using 2 slots (2x2 gb) so you could always add more memory. And you could still upgrade the vid cards down the line.

Joe

[kilo delta]

Some boards come with slots for both DDR2 and DDR3. Even if he can't move to DDR3 he could always fit the fastest DDR2 memory that his motherboard allows and he'll still have a very decent sim pc.