i7 poor performance :(

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texastomek

n00b
Joined
Dec 15, 2008
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I just put together a new system with the following components:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136260
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116488
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827151173
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227368
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131346
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130398
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115202
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817171023
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129043

Summary:

i7 920 CPU
P6T x58 Mobo
1600mhz 3gig RAM
Nvidia GTX 260 core 216
Velociraptor 300gig HDD
Antec 1200 Case
650Watt PSU

I have never put a system together, so I had a friend help me out and we whipped it out in a couple of hours. I started running some benchmarks on it, and I'm a bit disappointed with the results.

3DMark Vantage gives me an overall performance score of around P11000-12000.
GPU ~ 10000
CPU ~ 17000 (Physx off), 40000 (physx on, doesn't affect overall score much)

The thing that hurts the most is FSX performance. The reason I put this computer together was to run FSX smoothly... When I load a big city aiport (ex: dallas-ft worth intl), on all settings maxed out, the frame rates dips below 10fps :( After doing a little internet research, I know I should be cranking out much better FSX performance on this system! The performance does increase dramatically in a non-busy situation, up to 70+ fps but this is to be expected.

I'm not very experienced with computer tinkering, and nothing is OC'ed except for the memory - which is set to run at its advertised speed (1600mhz). I'm running at this speed by using one of the pre-defined bios memory profiles.

Someone please help me in troubleshooting the slow performance of my system! Where should I start? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!!
 
Try running another game and see what you get. Does FSX support multi-core? Is HT on?
 
The video card came w/ Far Cry 2. I can run that on ultra settings no problem. I'm not sure how graphics intensive FC2 is, tho. Would manually imputing the RAM timings help w/ anything? BIOS posts the RAM at 1600mhz, so I don't know if there would be any point to it...
 
fsx is not the best game to demo your new box. As suggested - try something else. turn off HT.
 
1600mhz 3gig RAM

THIS is the issue
at airports with every thing cranked its going to eat a TON of ram
the fix is get 6GB of ram and a 64bit OS
 
Hmm, problem being...only when I got my stuff did i find out that on the ASUS p6t mobo you can only use one dimm per channel when running 1600mhz RAM. It's got 6 dimms total divided over 3 channels...2 channels per dimm. So basically, i screwed myself by buying 3x1 gig RAM because i'm maxing out my memory on the mobo right now. I'd have to dumb the memory down to 1333 to run both dimms per channel.

I have vista 64.
 
Oh, and on that note, i would love for someone to disprove me on the above! I would order 3 more gigs so fast, my head my spinn...
 
You wouldn't lose much performance by downclocking your RAM. I'd buy more RAM and, also, a nice CPU cooler. Downclock the RAM, overclock the CPU and video card, and add 3 Gigs.... if you can't fix the problem. If it were me and I was having crappy result with a new build, right out of the box, I would reinstall windows, if I couldn't find a solution.
 
Starcrossed said:
You wouldn't lose much performance by downclocking your RAM.
Click to expand...

this

drop the ram down
hell it may work fine with 6x1 at 1600 even with a voltage bump (you may have the force the setting in bios for it to work)

OC the cpu it should do close to 4.0
 
Yeah, you're saying that the benefits of upping the amount of RAM would outweigh the loss of bandwidth - that i get. I'm just annoyed that i'll have to buy 1600 RAM to match what i have now and THEN cranking it down to 1333...or can i just buy 1333 RAM and live with that mismatch if my 1600 is running at 1333???
 
well depending on were you got the ram if it has been less then 30 days
you COULD just order 3x2GB and send back what you have now after you get the new stuff
 
Personally, I'd make sure that you didn't mess anything up with the build or software installations,1st; however, yes downclocking your RAM won't effect your PC much at all. Plus, if you are going to overclock that CPU to its full extent, you will need a new CPU cooler.
 
12GB is a pointless expense unless you really need it. 6GB is a lot of RAM, if you find that you problem isn't due to an installation error. 10k with a GTX 260 in Vantage is a nice score, I believe.
 
texastomek said:
The video card came w/ Far Cry 2. I can run that on ultra settings no problem. I'm not sure how graphics intensive FC2 is, tho. Would manually imputing the RAM timings help w/ anything? BIOS posts the RAM at 1600mhz, so I don't know if there would be any point to it...
Click to expand...

I don't see the problem then. Works fine with FC2, a game, and doesn't with a benchmark. I'd be a happy camper if my new toys fulfills its role of playing video games. :)
 
FSX has a lot of textures I've heard. I think you may be expecting too much from your PC. Maybe reinstall FSX. Your Vantage scores are fine, with what I've compared them to, thusfar.
 
SPARTAN VI said:
I don't see the problem then. Works fine with FC2, a game, and doesn't with a benchmark. I'd be a happy camper if my new toys fulfills its role of playing video games. :)
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's all fine and dandy, but it sucks at FSX - the game i really want to play.

I got my RAM from Newegg...I think the only way i can return it is for a replacement of the same stuff :( I had all intentions of getting more RAM soon, but now i'm in a pickle.
 
While more RAM would make the sim pause and stutter less when panning the view etc., it should not affect the actual framerate when the plane is just sitting still on a runway.

To be honest, I don't think there's a system out there that can run FSX at the highest detail settings with acceptable performance. Certainly nothing less than a Quad core CPU at 4 GHz. My system would probably produce about 5 FPS with all settings maxed out at a busy airport.

The FSX team has admitted that they messed up - when development of FSX was started, even before FS9 was released, Intel was still babbling on about how Netbust would soon reach 10 GHz.. everyone was expecting CPU clockspeeds to keep going up. Since the Flight Sim series are always developed with "future" hardware in mind, that won't be available for at least 3 years after the sim is released, they built the sim for 10 GHz single-core CPUs. Then, while FSX was being finalized, the industry made a 180 degree turn and started pushing dual and quad core CPUs, still running at 2 - 3 GHz. :eek:

FSX SP1 and SP2 add some optimizations for multi-core, but only the terrain compositing engine is multithreaded at all. Everything else runs as a single thread. Multi-core dramatically increases the speed at which terrain is calculated and loaded, but does very little to improve the framerate.

Also the sim offloads very little graphics work to the GPU. There's no performance difference between an 8800GT and a GTX280 even at super-high resolutions. In some instances a GTX280 is even slower because there's more CPU overhead due to the more complex architecture.

If your other benchmark results are normal, I would suggest simply lowering a few settings in FSX. Definitely reduce autogen and scenery complexity a few notches. Also reduce all traffic sliders to around 10% and the Airport vehicle density to minimum.
 
Turn down the settings, look for articles related to getting FSX to run smoothly, etc. I doubt more RAM will help, myself. I've found a lot of games are programmed poorly, rather than the systems being at fault, like the previous poster stated. Probably best to point the finger at MS, not your build, which is a great PC for sure. If you do downclock your RAM in the future, I wouldn't fret much, it just isn't that big of deal and your framerates will suffer very little.
 
JimmiG said:
While more RAM would make the sim pause and stutter less when panning the view etc., it should not affect the actual framerate when the plane is just sitting still on a runway.

To be honest, I don't think there's a system out there that can run FSX at the highest detail settings with acceptable performance. Certainly nothing less than a Quad core CPU at 4 GHz. My system would probably produce about 5 FPS with all settings maxed out at a busy airport.

The FSX team has admitted that they messed up - when development of FSX was started, even before FS9 was released, Intel was still babbling on about how Netbust would soon reach 10 GHz.. everyone was expecting CPU clockspeeds to keep going up. Since the Flight Sim series are always developed with "future" hardware in mind, that won't be available for at least 3 years after the sim is released, they built the sim for 10 GHz single-core CPUs. Then, while FSX was being finalized, the industry made a 180 degree turn and started pushing dual and quad core CPUs, still running at 2 - 3 GHz. :eek:

FSX SP1 and SP2 add some optimizations for multi-core, but only the terrain compositing engine is multithreaded at all. Everything else runs as a single thread. Multi-core dramatically increases the speed at which terrain is calculated and loaded, but does very little to improve the framerate.

Also the sim offloads very little graphics work to the GPU. There's no performance difference between an 8800GT and a GTX280 even at super-high resolutions. In some instances a GTX280 is even slower because there's more CPU overhead due to the more complex architecture.

If your other benchmark results are normal, I would suggest simply lowering a few settings in FSX. Definitely reduce autogen and scenery complexity a few notches. Also reduce all traffic sliders to around 10% and the Airport vehicle density to minimum.
Click to expand...

Well, when I do what you mention at the end there, it runs just fine lol. But damn, $1500 system pushing 7fps on a game that's by no stretch new? Really???
 
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