I'm looking at uprading and I see most of you are using duo core instead of quad core.My computer guy thinks quad gives you more for your money.I showed him Geofa's specs in fsx forum and he wondered why not use 2.4 quad instaed of 2.66 duo.I just told him you guys were the experts and I would post the question.Thanks,Ron

We had a little discussion at http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho..._id=31596&page=. Maybe it helps. I personally own a quad core rig, but as currently only two cores will be really supported by FSX, I tend to say that clock speed is still more important than the number of cores.

>-SNIP->I personally own a quad core rig, but as>currently only two cores will be really supported by FSX, I>tend to say that clock speed is still more important than the>number of cores. FSX uses all three of the cores that I assign to my Q6600. The consensus seems to be to assign FSX to 3 cores instaed of all 4. I assign all processes other than FSX to core 0 and FSX to cores 1-3. During scenery loading I've seen all 3 of those cores running at 100%. Inflight I usually see core 1 at around 50% and cores 2 & 3 going from 2-3% up to 25-30%. So, I'd say that the quad core would be the way to go. The Q6600 G0 stepping is easily overclocked from the stock 2.4 Ghz. I run mine at a conservative 3.13 Ghz. Paul

I would get a quad if I were building now. I'm going to build in a few months and I already know I'm gettin' a quad.If you built a dual and overclocked the ___ out of it, you would still only be a little faster in fs. I think the key is, how long are you going to keep the computer? 1 year? Get a dual. But 2-3 years? Get a quad.You'll thank yourself later.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

At the same clock speed, a dual and quad core are pretty similar in performance with FSX alone, but if you run a few addons the quad pulls slightly ahead. Note, I said at the same clock speed and generally dual cores are clocked higher quads at the same price point, so from a dollar perspective the dual core is a better buy. One final twist is that if you throw overclocking into the equation, the quad almost catches up to the dual in achievable speed and thus the playing field is leveled.Between a 2.4 quad and a 2.66 duo and not overclocking, I'd pick the 2.66 duo as it is $100 cheaper and slightly faster overall. If overclocking, I'd still go the 2.66 duo as they will roughly perform the same at around 3.0-3.6GHz overclock but you are still saving $100. For the same money and overclocking, I'd go for the quad :-)Gary

People are hitting 4.7GHz on AIR with the new E8500. There is no way a quad would get that high due to lower multipliers unless you buy the $1000 unlocked version. Being that dual and quads have essentially the same clock for clock performance in FSX, the chip with the highest clock speed will have the highest fps. So if you want the highest fps possible in FSX, you want the chip thats capable of the highest clock, and if you want the highest clock per dollar, you want the E8500 DUAL CORE.

The E8500 will have a nice big 9.5 multi. Nice. A 450mhz FSB might be about the highest,stable 24/7 setting, but that's really pushin' it. 450 x 9.5 = 4.275. For the mid-range O/Cer, that's it. 4.7 is a 500mhz FSB. That's for speed trials, well into advanced O/Cing. A 500mhz FSB is not a reasonable 24/7 setting for anyone. The P35 (or the X38/X48, or whatever they are variably calling it) will handle a 400mhz FSB. That's it, for a max stable set-and-forget FSB for the rest of us. So now we have: 400 x 9.5 = 3.8Ghz. Intel's got our number, We are now FSB limited. No more free lunch. I'm running 3.6 on my quad. I want to give up 2 cores to get 200mhz on the remaining 2? I'm not putting a meter on it, all 4 cores sure get a-hopping during flight load sequence, during flight, and generally, more often than not. I consistently see CPU utilization go to 75-80%. I'm feeling that my 2 full cores at 3.6 "advantage" would be a bad bargain to give up for two single cores with a 200mhz incremental advantage. If the cost was the same, it seems a pretty clear choice. So I'd have a hard time advising any thing to do with the Penryn. The Q6600 will remain the sweet spot 'til the next gen arrives in Q4/08. Then, we'll see how Intel handled AMD's Hypertransport buss implementation. This should be interesting.

I'm running a QX9650 at 4.1 GHz on moderate voltage at 1.42-1.44v (normal is up to 1.38V), a 412MHz FSB, 10X multiplier. I've gone up higher but I wasn't confortable with the voltage needed both on the MCH and the CPU for daily use. A 27% OC is rewarding for fairly simple overclocking with very moderate increases in "juice".All cores are used in FSX SP1 under Vista (I'm hoping to receive Accel soon) with no modifications of the default affinity setting.Core 1 is at a solid 100% (I assume this is the rendering thread), core 2 shows 80 to 100% utilization, cores 3 and 4 see very similar activity between 40 and 100%. When loading a flight, all cores are pegged. It does seem that loading of scenery is threaded separately as cores 3 and 4 seem very cyclic in their load. I'll need to run some more tests on that using performance monitoring.I'm going to go on a limb here since I haven't completed my tests, but I have a hunch that add-ons that use SimConnect can effectively make use of additional cores. So, for example, a weather generator could run in parallel to FSX on the same machine with very little impact.Generally speaking, quad cores have more level 2 cache than dual cores, and this makes them a bit faster at equal clock speeds. More and more software applications seem to be finally catching up with true parallel processing hardware, and writing threaded code that behaves well. One big caveat: you must have enough memory to take advantage of this.Get a Penryn chip if you can, just because they overclock so well and have very reasonable voltages. The quads will be faster than the duals at the same clock speed, core for core, because of the L2 cache.In Q1, a number of new chips will be available as well and expect prices to go down again for the 45nm process chips. Hope this helps,Etienne

>>Generally speaking, quad cores have more level 2 cache than>dual cores, and this makes them a bit faster at equal clock>speeds. The quads will be faster than the duals at the same clock speed, core for core, because of the L2 cache.>I'm disagreeing with these comments. The quads have the same amount of cache per core, so it cannot really be said they have more cache. In fact the FSX bechmaks I have seen show identical performance at equal clocks between dual and quad. For example this chart shows a comparison between dual and quads at 3.0Ghz on SP1. The performance is identical. http://sio.midco.net/FTP4/IMG0021312.gif