zenTera

Hi all, me again, still thinking about my new rig to come soon. I just ordered the above mentioned board and wanted to get the X-Fi Platinum, too. My dealer told me not to buy it as the soundcard has serious problems witn nForce4 motherboards (which the ASUS is). I also found many reports on the creative forum that made me really scared. Is anybody of you using the configuration above? If so, is it working for you the way it's supposed to be? Which BIOS version and chip driver version do you use then or what did you do to get the card running? I'd really like the X-Fi Platinum in my new rig, must be really good if it works, but at the moment there seems to be no way to go. ASUS blames Creative and vice versa. Tom

Yeah, I would have liked the FX-57, too. But it's about 700,- EUR more than the 4000+, and that's absolutely crazy. Everybody told me it really wasn't worth that much more money. Maybe in future we will be able to update with the FX-57 for a reasonable price. Until then I guess the 4000+ and the XFX 512 will bring a nice performance (of course not everything maxed out). However, I hope it will bring a much better performance than my "Aldi" discounter PC with Intel 3.4 (Socket 478) and Geforce 6610XL (whatever that my really be).

Thanks for that info, Evil-Scotsman. One of my dealers just claimed that he awaits the cards on Monday - well, wait and see. If I can't get one 'til mid of next week I'll give AW a try. But I'm still afraid, that they don't have the OC Extreme Edition but only the ones with "normal" clock settings. Are you kidding or do you really think your two 256 will outdo the 512? So maybe I should think of raiding the grandma next door and getting me two 512 in SLI ;) Just curious what my new rig will bring with the AMD 4000+, one XFX 512 and 2Gigs OCZ, I guess the CPU will still be the bottleneck and the second 512 wouldn't bring so much more - for LockOn at least.

Evil-Scotsman, thanks for your offer, but I don't want the 256, I want the BEAST;) I tried everywhere in Germany the whole day long, but no chance over here. Nobody has the 512 and nobody can even tell me when they might be available again. Alienware uk might be a solution. Just looked at their german webpage, and same problem there: if you want the 512, the production of your PC might be "delayed". Furthermore it seems they've got the "normal" one, but I want the OC one from XFX. Oh man, and I do really want it urgently. Yesterday I ordered my new PC from my dealer; they will start building it next Wednesday and the only thing missing then will be the graphics card:(

So, good luck to everybody who wants these babies. I tried to get one in Germany. Some dealers announced that they would get it today - but no go. They all changed delivery date to "unknown". Not one single dealer in the whole damn country has this card in stock.:icon_evil Somehow this reminds me of ATI: The cards are officially announced, but you can't get them anywhere. If I didn't know, that some guys have really already purchased the card, I would think they are kidding on us.

Hey Monnie, thanks for your quick reply. Guess I still will wait until either ASUS or Creative (or both) state officially that the problems are resolved. Sounds terrible what you can read at the Creative forum, and I don't want to spoil my new rig (which will come next week hopefully) from the beginning. Tom

Hi MonnieRock, I've seen in your sig that you use an ASUS A8N SLI Premium and a Creative X-Fi. Which X-Fi do you have? Does this combination work for you? My dealer told me (and I read this in different forums) that the X-Fi doesn't work with nForce4 Chips (which the ASUS has) and I should wait some more time with the purchase until the they get rid of the problems. Thanks Tom

Thanks for your replies up to now! For some things I've decided, but for other things I'm still totally confused and need some more help. What's (nearly) decided is: ASUS A8N SLI Premium, 2x1 GB OCZ Platinum 3200/400 2-2-2-5, 500-600 W PSU from BeQuiet or Enermax, Creative X-Fi Platinum. What I'm still not sure about: GPU will most likely be the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 (hope it will be available soon, I can't find a shop in Germany in the moment who has one in stock). But which one? I nearly decided to get the XFX card, which is slightly overclocked, when I read in another forum about BFG-cards, which are even more overclocked. Anybody got an idea how these two brands are? Should I prefer one of them? And by any purpose maybe a hint where to get the BFG's in Germany? My dealers around sell only the XFX or Point Of View (the latter at standard clocks)? And still total confusion about the CPU! My dealer told me the FX-55 wasn't worth the money over the 4000+, I should better invest in good RAM (which I plan anyway) to see an increase in power!? @TucksonSonny: If I understand you right there is no overclocking possibility with the 4000+, but with a simple change in BIOS I could run the FX-55 with the power of a stock FX-57? @All: Any experiences with the X2 4800? It's got the same price as the FX-55. Is it really true, that todays applications run slower with the DualCore than with SingleCore? Especially: would LockOn be slower with the X2 4800 than with the 4000+ or the FX-55? Hope you can give me some more answers. I'm afraid this rig will be my last one for the next few years (becoming daddy next year), so it should be a fine one, especially for LockOn and Pacific Fighters. Thanks Tom

Hi all, I'm thinking of building a new rig, but I'm not sure, if it will really make sense or if I should just upgrade my system (if that is possible at all). By now I have a stock discounter PC from "Aldi", Intel Pentium 4 3.4 HT, 1 Gig of Infineon RAM (not sure, I think it's CLK 2.5), don't know the manufacturer of the motherboard (Aldi/Medion seems to build their own boards), and the grafics card is a nVidea 6610 XL (seems to be a litttle bit better than the simplest 6600, not GT or something like that). So, I definitely want to get a new card, the 7800 GTX (maybe the 512). This would surely mean,that I would have to get a new power supply, too (Enermax or the like). What do you think: Would it make sense to go from the Intel to an AMD 4000+? Would the AMD bring more performance than the Intel 3.4? If so, would the FX-55 be worth the 450,00 EUR it costs over the 4000+ or should I stay with the 4000+? If I would change to AMD I would like to get an ASUS A8N SLI board. What do you think of it? Can anyone tell me the difference between the standard, deluxe and premium version? And finally, is some special RAM from Corsair, Kingston etc. really better and worth the bucks than some Infineon or the like? If so, any recommendations which one to take with the AMD and the ASUS board? I know that there are some people here that really seem to have great knowledge about computer hardware - hope you can share it with me and give some help. Thanks in advance Tom

Maybe a windows problem? Try to keep your right SHIFT key pressed for a while. A popup-window should come up. Press settings and look, if the upper checkbox under the keyboard-tab is perhaps checked - if so, uncheck it. (don't know your OS anyway, this one works under XP)

Great find again, thanks. Maybe ED should hire you for 1.2, seems you know their stuff better than they do :rolleyes:

Thanks for the info! Does anybody know if you have to uninstall older 4.x versions or if you can just install new versions over the previous ones as kind of an update? Otherwise I would have to activate my Vector Expansion again ( and I really hate these online-activations of any kind).

@ Groove Do you try with keyboard or with a programmable joystick? I also had difficulties when programming my X52, can't remember if the problem was also there with keyboard only. Anyway, since the 'old' commands Home and End don't seem to be used by FC (at least at this point), I remapped the engine commands in FC to Home and End again (also with Shift- and Alt-combinations) - working fine now. But the keyboard-commands really seem to do strange things sometimes. I for myself just tried to change zoom-level and target-size for the target-box of the SU-25T, but I can't get it to work. plus and minus do nothing, also in combination with Alt and Ctrl. Instead I suddenly gave my wingman the command to complete mission and rejoin!? Maybe it's because I use a german keyboard-layout? Really strange, will have to look further into it as soon as I get a little more time next week. But maybe by purpose someone also had this problem and has already found a solution?

Hi all, bought my new computer in November 04, set it up with all desired and undesired programs and of course my favourite FlightSims like FS2004, Pacific Fighters and best of all LockOn. And I was really disappointed. I had a P4 3GHz before with a Radeon 9800 XL (special version for "Aldi"-PC), which showed as a 9800 PRO with the ATI-drivers. Then I bought the new "Aldi"-PC with 3.6 GHz and a 6610XL (again a special version of nVidia 6600, don't know where's the difference between 6600 or GT). Well, as I said, I was really disappointed. I hoped for better FPS, but not only didn't they show up, the games even crashed a lot. No chance to play a selfmade dogfight mission in LockOn 'till the end, always ended up in a bluescreen. Another curious thing: I play without AA and AIF (at least I thought so), at 1280x1024 I personally feel I don't need them. But I encountered a problem with heatblur; as soon as I went under 500 km/h (or mph?) and heatblur came in, I used to have a slideshow with - let's guess - 0.5 FPS. But absolutely curious: This only happened when flying the Eagle - the Russian birds had no problem with heatblur. Enough said, here's my solution, which is so simple, that I'm somehow ashamed to post it, but anway, maybe it helps someone: 1. I simply created a new partition on my HD with PartitionMagic and did a fresh Windows installation on this drive. There's nothing on this drive except a fresh up-to-date Windows XP Home SP2 and my flightsims. The only drivers running are TrackIR, Saitek X52-software...and since today Starforce . So at startup I can choose between my "normal" Windows config for application programs etc. and my FlightSim-Windows. And since then I really got better FPS in all flightsims, and it's really stable...haven't had a single crash since then. Ok, I'm still a bit unsure about going online to play in Hyperlobby someday without having my Norton Internet Securitiy running in the background . 2. As an ATI-User I'm not really familiarized with nVidia drivers and options. I simply used the standard options when I got the new PC with that nVidia-card. If you go to the driver's options for quality and performance, it says something like "by application" (don't know exactly, 'cause I've got the German version) and you see a greyed out option for "off" up to "2x..", where "by application" is checked and the greyed out options for AA and AIF are set to "Off". The solution to my F-15-problem: I unchecked "by application" and put AA and AIF to none. So now I can fly the Eagle at 100 speed with heatblur and without stutters...and there's no visible change in eye-candy. Okay, these were simple ones, but maybe this can help one or the other of the community. BTW: I still don't understand, why that AA+AIF+Heatblur made problems only with the Eagle, but not with the Russian birds . Regards Tom

The new 1.1 manual is really great, and I appreciate it very much to find even a well made quick-start-manual in the doc- folder. But...like in 1.0...again there is no keycard.:icon_frow Am I the only one missing it? Will ED provide us with one? Or did I even miss something and just can't find it?