Classic British Flight Sim

Well I plumped for this from Scan, it was on special offer and they accept Paypal so I had some money floating after a few eBay sales and it cost me £15 hard cash so she who must be obeyed was happy



896MB Gainward GTX 260 Golden Sample 55nm, 2200MHz GDDR3, GPU 625 MHz, Shader 1242 MHz, 216 Cores,
First off this is a HUGE card 27 cm long and WILL take up the space of the slot below the PCI-E card slot



Fitting it was not too hard as my case is large but re routing cables was needed. The power supply I have just hits the specs needed and I was expecting it to not be powerful enough (550W) But so far it copes ok.

The card replaced my 8600GTS which was great for FS9 and ok in other stuff but was struggling on the 22" monitor a bit.
I did a frame rate test before changing it with this cracking demo http://www.nolimitscoaster.com/ The demo is pretty good and gives you a frame rate counter. With max detail and resolution I was hitting 30FPS on the GTS card, after fitting the new card I got 60fps with much better colours and detail, I was hoping it would be better but did not expect such a good result.
COD 4 was next tested, again I maxed out everything in the game which I could not do before, stunning is the only thing I can say!

The card comes with software so you can adjust the twin fans etc but I left them on auto and the temp never rose over 50c under load which is 15 to 20 lower than the GTS!!
It also comes with a clocking utility to adjust GPU and memory, again I left these alone as it comes pre overclocked from the manufactuer so it is faster than a standard GTX 260 anyway.

FS9 was fired up and after fiddling and farting about with getting the resolutions right I hit a problem, my 2nd monitor would not work unless I went into windowed mode in FS9 Odd as it always worked before in the GTS. Anyway FS9 crashed on me due to a cranky panel gauge so a reboot of FS9 and I got my fullscreen and twin monitor display again... not sure how?
So FS9 works as before with 60 fps even at dense areas/scenery. I did spot that I got double this in windowed mode, but I prefer fullscreen. Anyway colours more vibrant, textures load quicker when you look around, crisp clean images. I think the difference in FS9 is not as marked (fps) but then again the GTS was more than good enough for that anyway.
Over all impressions? A stunning Graphics card that is near to the GTX-275 in performance but a whole lot cheaper. Potentially it will go even faster but I wont bother clocking it any more. Its cool and very quiet unless you manually run the fan at 100% then its ear protector time. I doubt it will ever go near there in auto mode as the fan was a steady 40% and inaudible during the testing.

got to be 95% in my eyes due to value and performance, btw I am running some 186 Nvidia drivers as they have been great for me for a while and not heard too many nice things about the 190 series (I did not use the drivers that came with the card)

Great demo...I enjoyed it on my setup and also got 30 fps with the default settings but I'll go and tinker with resolution etc. now and see how that drags the FPS down. Sound like a great card you have there

Glad you enjoyed the demo Peter.
I Think I have about the setup as good as I can especially for FS9, I guess a bigger CPU would be the only next step but the 550 hitting 3.6Ghz and running at 50c under full load is more than ample, I can also run it with four cores unlocked rather than the default two, but as FS9 does not need that its a bit of a waste
The system could eat FSX as well, but sadly I have tried it and got rid of it as its not doing it for me

If I could I would love to be able to run 3 monitors so I can really have FS9 on the big one, FSNAV on the other and other stuff running on the third, but thats a way off until 3 o/p cards are a lot cheaper....

Oh yes that demo is definitely a keeper...Strangely, increasing the resolution up to my desktop size of 1280x960 and increasing various graphics settings has increased my frame rates...I don't get the 60 that you get Tony but it does touch 50 at times

I did not try it on that resolution on the other monitor but I guess the higher the resolution the harder the card has to work
Your right though that demo is a "keeper"

Wierd - with an 8800GTS, AMD X2 5600, asus Crossfire mb, no overclocking. I get a pretty much fixed 100fps (with occasional dip to 85) with the coaster demo, with all options on absolute max, including the advanced and other (190 drivers)
The specs of your machine look better than mine - were you running an odd screen resolution?

My mistake I was using the old demo just tried the new one and its running at 100 all the time so I guess thats the limit it will count up to

Thanks I'll give the old demo a try - looks like a fun little game the kids will like too.

Fascinating demo Tony. When I first loaded it I was getting consistent 100fps then I maxed everything out including the advanced settings. That dropped it to 60fps but it never moves more than 1fps either way. Seems just as smooth at 60 as it did at 100, which is what you would expect.

Andy