I know this sounds like a Ph.D. dissertation topic, but bear with me. I'd like to hear some of your opinions on this topic since there is really nothing out there or no sites dedicated to computer hardware and FS2004 performance.If you have a Athlon-based system that is built around a 333 bus (such as the KT400) and you switch out a 2250mhz Athlon XP with a Thoroughbred core and an L2 cache of 256mb to a 2250mhz Barton core of 512mb, where does the performance of FS2004 lie on a continum from business software (which gain the most from L2 cache) to 3D rendering software (which gain almost nothing from L2 cache)? Also, what are the benefits and disadvantages of overclocking the CPU frequency vs. the FSB with an Athlon XP processor.Thanks,RH

Haven't seen any FS2004-specific CPU benchmarks either. I'd assume the gain is similar to what you see in other DX8 games such as UT2004. However since FS is more CPU limited than most games, those other games have to be benchmarked at 640x480 to eliminate the vid card bottleneck. The extra cache helps quite a bit on the AthlonXP CPUs to the point where a 2250MHz T-Bred performs only slightly faster than a 2063MHz Barton in such games (according to THG and Anandtech) and probably in FS as well.The only disadvantage of oc'ing the FSB is that you're overclocking the entire system, not just the CPU so you need good RAM and if you're very, very unlucky your harddrive or some PCI card might fail (but that usually only happens when doing extreme oc'ing). I'd say overclock the FSB as high as it will go. Either the CPU or FSB will eventually be maxed out, then, start maxing out the other (e.g. if FSB won't go any higher because of the CPU, just lower the CPU multiplier and increase FSB further).

Thanks for the response! Will you get more of an improvement out of overclocking the FSB when compared to the frequency?Thanks,RH

Not sure about that one since I never did much overclocking with my AthlonXP. But probably overclocking the CPU improves performance more especially with the 512KB-cache equiped Athlons which aren't as starved for bandwidth.

>Thanks for the response! Will you get more of an improvement>out of overclocking the FSB when compared to the frequency?>>Thanks,>>RHRE you have mixed out a few things. First of all it

Yeah even the 3200+ Athlon64 is a big upgrade from any AthlonXP especially if you plan on overclocking :) Those Winchester Athlon64's are supposed to be great overclockers (I don't know about mine since I only have 2x256MB of crappy 2-year old RAM tha won't overclock :) ).

Yeah should be added that CPU with less cache runs cooler and thus are a bit more overclockfriendly. Newcastle overclocks better than Clawhammer for that reason even if you run your Clawhammer at 2T timings. It used to be said that the 1 mb l2 cache Clawhammers had a 200 mhz advantage but I would guess in the average the average game the difference is smaller than that.And I had a misstype claimed P4 Extreme had 2 gig L2 cache :(

This is from an article on Anandtech.com when the Barton was first released back in Feb of 2003:"The areas in which the Athlon XP does quite well, including the new Barton core, are its conventional strong points; in business applications it dominates the Pentium 4, showing off a very conservative model rating, in games the chip is quite competitive with Intel but once we shift to the newer multimedia, encoding and rendering environments the Athlon XP is no longer able to do so well."That is where I got my original statement concerning the XPs on a continum. The chip I would like to upgrade to is the Athlon XP-M which run very cool and can be overclocked to 2.6 on air. The ugrade cost is less than half of a new Athlon 64 system, and I am talking about a new Athlon 64 3000 system. Besides, I don't want to have to reinstall windows because that would mean downloading all of the upgrades again and having to reinstall all of my applications. Besides, if FS2006 scales like 2002 and 2004 have, the current Athlon 64s won't be able to run it as well as most folks would like, and youae looking at about only one more speed upgrade in the Athlon 64 before they go duel core and require new motherboards. I just want something to go between before I make a complete motherboard-CPU upgrade. I want to wait until FS2006 is released, so that I can get an idea of what kind of CPU power I will eventually need to get it to run smoothly before I rip this motherboard out again. I have been burned multiple times about upgrading before the next flightsim release comes about because I thought it would be able to run it (with complex scenery, complex weather, upgraded aircraft, and all of that stuff to the max). Thanks for the input!

The funny thing is that in many business applications and particularly mpeg encoding and such it

Thanks for the info! If I upgrade using the XP-M, I will post my experiences and results.RH