Hi,I have a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz HT processor in my pc. I was wondering if anyone knows of any good processor affinity utilities that will temporarily change the affinity of all the services running so that you could put FS2004 on one logical processor and the rest of the services and applications on the other processor? Also does anyone know how much I can overclock this processor using stock cooling? Thanks in advance.

switching apps will give you no benefit so no point in trying. overclocking it on stock can be possible ~100mhz but since it's a prescott, it will want to burn itself. you need some good cooling for 300+mhz

You can do this within the window task manager...Open manager, Processes tabRight click process and pick affinityFs9 is a threaded process and will use multipleprocessors to give you better than single CPU performance. Ihave posted a detailed analysis and posted this before.http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...ing_type=searchRegardsTom

Many system processes will not permit assignment of CPU affinity...not sure that it's a great idea anyway, as the OS is designed to best manage this. Assignment of CPU constraints to non-system processes may be a player, however (external programs like ActiveSky, Radar Contact, etc, and other utilities you need to leave running). You can also use the task manager to do it manually each session, or you can use Microsoft's imagecfg utility to write a process affinity mask into the executable that will constrain the program to a specified CPU or vCPU any time it loads.As to overclocking a 3 GHz P-4, it will depend somewhat on whether you have a Northwood or a Prescott CPU core--the 3 GHz P-4s were produced in both CPU families. The Northwoods can be OCd on stock cooling further than the Prescotts...although I will say that I don't like the idea of overclocking anything on a stock fan. RegardsBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VSantiago de Chile

Hi,I was able to set the processor affinity using the Task Manager but it did not improve my performance. I did further checking and found that I have the Intel Pentium 4 3.0E GHz with 1MB cache which makes it a Prescott processor I believe. It is installed in an ASUS motherboard. I performed an experiment last night and overclocked the processor to 3.40 GHz by changing the FSB setting to 227 and left all the other settings including the memory timing settings at Auto. I was able to boot up successfully without any errors and ran FS2004 for a few minutes. I also monitored the cpu and case temps using the Asus monitor. The case temperature stayed at around 26 degrees celcius and the Processor peaked at close to 55 degrees celcius with the stock heatsink and fan. The speeds remained relatively constant the whole time. The idle cpu temp was around 45 degrees celcius. The typical idle temp when not overclocked is at around 40 degrees celcius. Are these numbers reasonable? I haven't ran any special tests yet? Is it enough to just increase the FSB speed and leave all the other settings at Auto or should I manually adjust the memory timings, etc? Is it necessary to upgrade the CPU cooler if the peak temperature with the stock setup will not go above 55 to 60 degrees?

Well, 55 deg isn't horrible if it'll stay there during a long FS session, but I think you really need to run something like Orthos for at least 4-6 hours to see if the CPU is really truly stable at that temp and speed.As for the rest, no two overclock setups are the same...lots written in a number of hardware forums devoted to overclocking.RegardsBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VSantiago de Chile

Hi there Tom,Improving FS9 frame rates is what we're all looking for and your affinity posts certainly seem interesting for all dual core users especially when the Windows task manager shows one core doing all the work (almost 100%) while the other is just loafing. This gives and maintains an average processor load of about 51%.However, when a running FS9 process is assigned to both cores while all others (accepted by WindowsXP) are assigned only to the second one, I notice no difference in the average processor load (or frame rates) during any FS9 flights but it does look as though the total load is now spread across both cores. Core zero centers around 60% while core one centers around 40%.This raises the question: How do you manage to sometimes have an average of more than 51% when FS9-ing yourself ?My rig is a P4 3.0 Ghz. 800 FSB with hyper-threading dual channel etc.RegardsHans