Classic British Flight Sim

Well due to the economic climate I may well go for an upgrade as I can do it pretty cheaply as the prices of hardware are low now..
ok I have at present
AMD 64 3800 CPU
2GB RAM
Asus A8N-SLI Delux motherboard

I am thinking of replacing the above items with this lot

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000 3.10GHz £67
OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 Dual Channel Platinum Revision 2 XTC Series DDR2 £24
Asus M3A AMD 770 (Socket AM2) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £59

So about £150 for the lot from Overclockers.
I always have been an AMD fan so I will stay with them plus the Asus motherboard uses Nvidia drivers.
I would be hoping if I go down this route of swapping these items over and loading up the new motherboard drivers and seeing if I can do this without a reinstall of windows XP...
ANy thoughts from the gurus out there appreciated

Hi Tony..

I'd have thought not but I know a one bloke in particular who has done it several times and managed to get away with it. That said, I know others who tried it once and got bitten There's not a lot 'visibly' changing but the mobo will have a new batch of drivers to install and I guess each component onboard will be seen as new. Risky but you may get away with it ;-)

ATB

DaveB :tab:

As I understand it the main reason Windows won't boot after a hardware change is to prevent people cloning drives to avoid legally obtaining it. I read an article a few years back and it works on some sort of points system so you can change a few components at a time. The points regenerate over time so you can continually upgrade over the years. It's probably worth googling on the subject as it may be possible to incrementally change the components over to avoid being locked out e.g. put the new graphics card in the old mobo for a week or so.

Tony what sort of performance benefit are you expecting to see? Because to be brutally honest, that’s £150 that you'd be better of going for a night out with. Either that or save up and get something that’s going to at least see you through a year.

Some thoughts, Dual CPU's will be dead in a year or so, so save up for a quad. Also, save for 4GB of ram (Unless the 2GB your buying is to supliment the exisiting 2GB)

If your main use is going to be flightsim, and your primarily FS9. I'd wait, even if until just after Christmas when the current latest and greatest will have just been supperceeded and can be picked up for a song.

With respect to a reinstall, its always best. XP does not have any inbuilt protection to stop you swapping drives. Vista does.

Regardless of the OS, the only thing that may cause the OS not to boot on a drive swap is where the hard disk controller is different.

With Vista, following a successful drive swap you will need to re activate. with XP its no odds. ;-)

Tony,

I went from an AMD processor to an Intel one with a resultant change in MB without reinstalling XP (not for the first time I've done it this way). Before removing the old equipment I removed all of the drivers for the MB and processor. This is possible under XP as the affect of the driver removal isn't felt until the system is rebooted but under Vista the driver is actually removed on the fly so you would end up with a system that simply stopped working (or Vista would probably prevent removal of critical drivers). The drivers for the replacement equipment can be loaded when XP starts up again.

Put it this way if you bugger it up the first time around you can always do a clean install of XP anyway!

Regards,
Chris

Cheers for the info guys.
Ben, am I wrong in thinking the AMD X2 Chip has two cores each running at 3.1ghz giving in total over 6ghz, wherehas my 3800 single core runs at 2.4ghz which means I will be having a CPU that not only multitasks but each core exceeds my present one? As for the ram I would remain at 2gb as 4gb is not recognised in XP and I wont be looking at Vista my present cpu runs everything well I just fancied looking at upgrading cheaply.
Chris I take on board what you say about driver removal, Nvidia drivers can be removed from Asus board I have at present in fact I can dictate which goes and it will let me keep the video drivers1 I know Vista like to control and would not allow this, re drive swapping in XP done this before with no major worries.
I think a quad core is not much use to me at present. I have managed all this time witha single so a quad doesnt do it for me yet, not going to buy one for the sake of it unless it can offer more for me??
It just seems that my present set up since I had the 8600GTS card needs upping for me to get a bit more... I ws hoping to achieve double performance to what I have now, cheaply..am I barking up the wrong tree?? HELP

Hi Tony,

I'd not reckon on much chance of double the performance mate. I know how you've been saying your an AMD fan, but they are well off the pace these days, when compared with similar intels. Anyway, enough of that.

If you go with waht you've suggested your not going to get double performance and when you do need to upgrade properly, your looking at throwing stuff away... again.

What you were saying about XP not recognising more than 2GB isn't true. Typically, if you have 4GB installed it will show 3 (or there abouts) of usable memory. The area above this address block is typically used for PCI (or AGP) devices. http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid&ID=888137

Basically, I'd bank £120 and spend the rest on more RAM. Your right abount the processor having two cores, but if your saying you haven't needed more than one, then why go to 2 or more. Certainly FS9 won't use more than one, and if I were a gambling man, I'd suggest that most if not all of your apps (with the exception of FSX) won't use more than one either. Save your money Tony and do a proper upgrade later. ;-)

Yup.. XP will see 3gig (I have 3 installed). TBH.. it's difficult to measure any increase in performance for FS9 and the only way I could tell if FSX ran better would be to remove a dimm to see This is on my old XP3200 btw.. no 64-bit fancy bits and on WinXP SP2 ;-)

ATB

DaveB :tab:

I had a look at the AMD X2 6000 about a year ago - for the price it seemed too good to be true. I was put off by the high power usage, with consequent heat and noise.

I settled on a Core2 Quad (Q6600) running at 2.4 GHz. Don't expect twice the performance from a dual-core CPU (or indeed 4 times from a quad). It simply doesn't work like that in FS, although newer programs might show such improvements.

I'd always been an AMD fan prior to the last upgrade, but Intel are definitely on top now. IMO the best upgrade is probably the fastest Core2 Dual you can afford. I'd get better performance with a 3GHz dual than my 2.4 quad. With careful motherboard selection, the CPU can be replaced easily in a year or two when prices of the fast quads drop.

James

Re the Q6600, I have mine overclocked to 3.24Ghz on the stock cooler without any problems. Nick Needham over on simforums.com (GEX thread) gives useful advice on upgrades. The upshot is that the components need to balance so unless you are changing your motherboard and installing much faster memory then the processor and graphics card alone will not give you the performance you are looking for.

Regards,
Chris