My experience disagrees with Phil's comment re Affinity Mask - at least as far as the loading speed of the game goes. Setting the mask to 14 (i.e. denying Core 0 to FSX) made a huge difference to the speed that FSX loads when its first started up. I haven't timed it, but subjectively I'd say that it almost doubled it.NB - My default flight is at Bristol Airport - which sits on the boundary of 2 of Just Flight's VFR scenery areas (i.e. very large blocks of data to preload).Speculating - I wonder if leaving Core 0 free to manage the disk reading (I don't disable the virus checker, so presume this also needs some CPU resource for each file to be read) is the reason behind this. Seems very counter-intuitive that denying a quarter of the CPU makes things faster - but thats what happened.PS - Once loading is complete, no difference to frame rates etc. - but blurries seem to have reduced (again, faster disk access would seem to be a reason).

Mike,You seem to have a pretty impressive system already. Any comments that I made would be purely speculative, however I am curious how your system would compare to a quad like Gary's. What do think about downloading Gary's benchmark, running it and sharing the results with us? Gary tested quite a few different scenarios. That would give us a direct comparsion and possibly answer a lot of your questions.Ted

Make sure your FPS is set to unlimited. On my C2D/8800GT system, I can maintain 40+ FPS in many situations, but if I lock it to 26, I can only get like 16 fps. Go figure. So I set it to unlimited. I don't notice any worse blurries and it runs very nice on my system that isn't quite as good as yours.