I am thinking about getting a Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading.How do you use the threading? How much control or choice do you have?Thanks.Abe

Hi Abe, Hyperthreading Pentiums are just about to leave the building. OTOH it depends most on how you use the sim and what kind of budget you have. Hope this adds to thoughts, good luck and kind regards Jaap Edit: 'Just about to leave the building' may be a bit harsh and an early call, but real dual-cores instead of theoretical dual-cores have been sampled and are being marketed already.

Abe,You turn it on or off in your bios. I had it on but recently turned it off because it was interfering with my startup sound. The Windows Open sound would begin, then pause, then continue. Very annoying. When I turned HT off the startup sound works like a charm w/o any pauses. I see no increase or decrease in FPS with HT on or off. So you have total control of HT.Jim

Thanks Guys.I was under the impression that you can control different aspects of hyperthreading in the desktop not just a simple on/off in the bios.Abe

Windows "sees" HT processors as two virtual processors.I just read about a Windows NT utility called Imagecfg.exe that supposedly works with Windows XP.As I understand it, you can use Imagecfg.exe to assign any application to permenantly run using a specified processor.This means you can assign FS9 to use processor 0 and processor 1 to run everything else. I read that this trick will greatly improve FS9 performance.Use Google to search for Imagecfg command line parameters and use.I plan on trying this trick tonight, so I'll come back here and post the results for all...

Hi Abe, I re-read my reply and would like to apologize. What I really wanted to say; IMHO there are much more interesting options than P4s for simming (unless i.e. video editing is important too). As Jim mentioned, hyperthreading CPUs won't do much for FS. May I ask what you're using now? There's an ocean of choices for almost every budget. Hope this adds to thoughts, good luck and kind regards Jaap

Thanks guys.I have a pentium 4(2Ghz) which is running ok. I do lots of video capture and DVD's. I understand that the Pentium is superior to AMD when it comes to video rendering. And of course I am very much into FS9. Never had any problems with my P4. I appreciate all the feedback I have received so far.Thanks.Abe

Running CPU with HT, and got my stuff configured with imagecfg.exe. Pretty neat, and one really does feel less stuttering and doesn't even notice something is working in the background. Got FS9 on CPU 1 and all FS9 utils on CPU2. System is running on HDD 1 and FS9 on HDD2. That is IMO enough separation, which really proves as a great boost!

Thanks Word Not Allowed. I just downloaded IMAGECFG, I'll try it later.I noticed that you have ATI X850 XT, could you tell me how does it show in FS9 in the hardware section. I show only X850 ....NO XT!!Also in DXDIAG, DirectX 9.0c does NOT show the XT either. Could you tell me what do you have displayed.Thanks again.Abe