Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler - New CPU, GPU, or HDD?

Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler | PC Support | New CPU, GPU, or HDD?

DVA7922
Senior Captain, MD-88
OLP

Joined on November 04 2009
50 State Club
Online Century Club
Triple Century Club
Globetrotter

"Student Pilot: "Um, Your controls.""
Dallas, GA USA

384 legs, 1,292.5 hours
128 legs, 221.9 hours online
382 legs, 1,281.7 hours ACARS
18 legs, 40.6 hours event

Posted onPost created on December 30 2011 10:05 ET by Charles Carter

I can afford to upgrade only one piece of equipment right now. Here are the specs on the relavent components:
i5 750 overclocked to 3.6 (very stable) - would upgrade to i7 2600k and overclock
nVIDIA GTS 250 1gb - would upgrade to the nVIDIA 500 family (560 most likely)
Basic 230gb Western Digital 5400rpm HDD - would upgrade to 10000rpm VelociRaptor 450gb HDD

The CPU upgrade is basically out of price range at the moment. Anybody got any insight as to whether upgrading the HDD or GPU will have a significant change on my performance? My understanding is that clock speed is the most important aspect of the CPU and I've got mine up to 3.6gHz, will going to the SandyBridge make a more substantial difference than the other components?

Thanks for the input!

Charles Carter

Senior Captain, MD-88

DVA1690
Senior Captain, MD-88
OLP

Joined on May 05 2004
50 State Club
Quatercentenary Club
Online Quadruple Century Club
Stage 1 Jet Double Century Club
DVA Twenty-Year Anniversary

"Life begins at Vr"
Longmont, CO USA

477 legs, 700.4 hours
468 legs, 686.6 hours online
254 legs, 389.4 hours ACARS
3 legs, 3.9 hours event

Posted onPost created on December 30 2011 10:30 ET by Trevor Bair

I would have to think that your hard drive is the bottleneck. Almost doubling your rpm (not to mention cache and transfer rate gains) with a Raptor drive and I think you would have to see some drastic improvement. The processor and the video card, while a couple of years old, still seem pretty decent to me (though, I have no experience with those particular models).

If it were me, I'd prioritize as:
1) Upgrade to a Raptor or a 7,200 rpm drive with a large cache (64mb) and 6 Gb/sec transfer rate. Not sure the price difference here, but that'd be my determining factor on which drive I'd go with... I think Vic DeSantis has a Raptor on his machine and could probably comment on the results he's seeing. I'm using this drive for FSX/FS9 only and have had really good results with it (coupled with a SSD for the OS only). I think it's only 3 or so milliseconds slower read than the Raptor and, at the time, was a lot cheaper (not so much now though). Is that worth it? Only you can decide... smile

2) Video card - lots of good choices on the market, 560 would be one of them.
3) Processor - the i7-2600k is awesome. People will also say that the i7-2500k is enough for FS and that you don't need the 2600k because FS can't use hyperthreading. But, really it's really a matter of personal preference. For me, I intend to use my PC for a while and for things other than FS, so more processing power (and, I suppose hyperthreading) justified the extra $90.

Good luck on your upgrade!

Trevor Bair

Senior Captain, MD-88

DVA1933
Senior Captain, B727-200

Joined on September 19 2004
Triple Century Club

Monterrey, NL Mexico

357 legs, 860.4 hours
72 legs, 132.3 hours online
255 legs, 668.3 hours ACARS
1 legs, 1.9 hours event

Posted onPost created on December 30 2011 10:31 ET by David Eugenio Gomez

I'm guessing upgrading the HDD would be a better idea. 5400 is really low for a high-end rig, IMO.

David Eugenio Gomez (DVA1933)

DVA7016
Senior Captain, B767-300

Joined on February 14 2009
B757 100 Club
Everett 250 Club
Triple Century Club
DVA Five-Year Anniversary

"I5 2500K - 560GTX - 8GB Ripjaw"
Essex GB

385 legs, 1,090.6 hours
384 legs, 1,089.6 hours ACARS
1,821 legs, 4,442.9 hours total

Posted onPost created on December 31 2011 06:28 ET by Alan Barber

I would go with a HDD too. If you are running W7 do a Windows experience test. This should confirm where the bottleneck will be.

Alan Barber

Senior Captain, B767-300

DVA1416
Captain, B747-400

Joined on December 06 2003
50 State Club
Globetrotter
Quad-Jet Quartermaster
Everett 500 Club
Million Mile Club
Yellow Bird Club
Millennium Club
DVA Twenty-Year Anniversary

"Keep the blue side up!"
Rotterdam, Zuid-Holland Netherlands

1,021 legs, 2,992.7 hours
43 legs, 103.4 hours online
944 legs, 2,706.1 hours ACARS

Posted onPost created on December 31 2011 07:40 ET by Luc Maaskant

Charles,

Apart from the marginal performance increase of changing your CPU, you can't replace your CPU without changing the motherboard. You have the first generation Core cpu, which runs on Socket 1156, and the newer Sandy Bridge (coming april Ivy Bridge) run on Socket 1155. The extreme sandy bridge cpu's run on Socket 2011.

Even if you had the budget, I'd say wait until early April, when the new Ivy Bridge cpu's are introduced.

For now I would advise you to invest in something you can use later on in a new system. I'd say buy a SSD (SATA3), 120GB for about 130EUR (don't know what current USD prices are but I think they are fairly same priced). SATA3 is backwards compatible with SATA2, so you don't have to worry about that. Depending on how many add-ons you run you could also choose a 64GB model, which is about 70 to 80EUR.

Luc

Luc Maaskant

Captain, B747-400

Posted onPost created on December 31 2011 08:56 ET by Charles Carter

Luc, that's exactly the reason I am avoiding the CPU upgrade. I've got a whole system picked out, and when I get a new CPU I will have to get a new motherboard which ups the cost. On top of that there's no reason to just scrap my current PC because it's still a great machine for a lot of things. So I'd end doing a completely fresh build. That's why I wanted to see what opinions were on the other components. My experience index ranges from 7.0 to 7.6 on everything except the HDD. My CPU is 7.5, RAM 7.6, GPU is 7.0 and the HDD comes in at 5.5. I found out it's actually a 7200rpm drive, but it's also part of Western Digitals cheaper lines. I've been eyeing my HDD because it's starting to get to capacity. I have a LOT of addons, and my downloads folder alone is 49Gb. There are some Angle of Attack videos that I'm mostly done with that I could probable get rid of. Overall I'm using 195BG of 232GB available on my HDD (37Gb free), so I'm starting to get to that point where the effiency of the drive starts going down even more simply because of the percentage that's being used.

I really appreciate the opinions! I wasn't aware that there was another CPU coming out. Of course, I might end up getting the Sandy after Ivy comes out depending on how the prices change. :-D I've seen some really good results from the 2600k processors.

Charles Carter

Senior Captain, MD-88

Posted onPost created on January 01 2012 08:13 ET by Luc Maaskant

Hi Charles,

By pointing out the storage capacity problem, I think you already made a choice on what to upgrade next smile

I don't find the HDD benchmark within the Windows Experience Index that reliable. It basically measures disk bandwith in MB/s. I've got a RAID0 setup with two 1TB 7200rpm drives and I only get 5.5. When I run a utility like HDTach I get 200MB+ read and write speeds, which is pretty decent. To optimize performance, I defragment my computer regularly with O&O Defrag in a special mode, which puts the Windows directory on the disk first and therefore fastest part of the hard disk.

If I understand your post correctly you're saying that you have a reasonably small amount of files that you want to run on a high performance disk, and a lot of files that don't require such high performance.

I'd say, go for a 64 or 128GB SSD and buy a 1 or 2TB 5400rpm storage disk for downloads, videos, music and low performance applications. SSD's have no performance degradation so a file on the end of the disk runs as smooth as a file at the start, so you don't have to expect performance problems when stacking it up. Both disks will save you some power consumption and therefore heat. I've recently worked with some SSD's, and they are just in a whole other league, even compared to a Velociraptor.

Of course, you could also choose to wait until the HDD market comes to rest and save a few bucks, and use your current disk as secondary storage disk. The SSD pricing remains unaffected by the Thai floods btw.

Or.. Just buy a new GPU ;-)

Luc

Luc Maaskant

Captain, B747-400

DVA5255
First Officer, A330-300

Joined on November 17 2007

Western United States

31 legs, 54.8 hours
15 legs, 18.7 hours ACARS

Posted onPost created on January 03 2012 20:49 ET by Louis Vanbelkum

That gpu has to be slowing you down, go with a 560 Ti or something. Even if you got that i72600k when the new processors come out so its cheaper i can't see a huge performance gap due to your card already bottle necking.

DVA10291
First Officer, B737-800

Joined on October 04 2011

Sunderland UK

4 legs, 6.9 hours
4 legs, 6.9 hours ACARS

Posted onPost created on January 08 2012 14:46 ET by Conor Sutton

I can't say the GT200 series of graphics chips handled FSX well at all, because I could barely get 30 FPS with my 285, and I was lucky to get an average of that.

Conor Sutton

First Officer, B737-800

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