Hi,Is there anyone who tried replacing a Core2 Duo E6600 with a Quad Q6600 and if yes - were there any significant change in performance? I'm still using FS2004 under WinXP but guess I will go go FSX under Vista eventually.Thanks in advance for any input on the subject!

I haven't done that.But I can say that if I had an E6600 I would not be inclined to change to a Q6600. That is especially true if I were running FS2004.You would not see any increase in performance in FS2004. Under FSX your frame rate would not increase, but load time might improve due to FSX SP1 and later's ability to thread texture loading across cores.At some point moving to a quad would be good. If you already have a fast Core2 (and you do), I personally would be less inclined to move to a quad right now, unless I were upgrading for the long haul. Then I would get a G0/SLACR Q6600 and overclock it. Or I would wait a month or two and get the Penryn quad, overclock it.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

I changed last week from a E6700 (overclocked by 20%) to a Q6700, which I'm currently overclocking by 12% (to 300 MHz). Its been a big improvement to FSX (with SP2/Acceleration) - I've been able to push the scenery sliders a lot further to the right, and despite this also have raised my locked frame rate from 22 to 25 without running into blurring.Having said that , FSX supports multiple CPU cores so I think you'd need to move to that to see similar gains.Bob,

Thanks for the input guys!Not sure what to do, already have a Q6600 SLACR but haven't broken the seal yet so I have the option to bring it back to the store for another couple of days - one part of me wants to try it out and see how good it overclocks compared to my E6600 (currently running my E6600 stable @ 3.15 GHz on air using a Thermalright Ultra120 Extreme) and the other part of me says "Save those money boy!" ... hmm ... ;)

Do a search on this forum to find quad versus dual core performance showdowns. In short, it is not worth the upgrade from where you are now.Gary

Will do but my thought was that part from the difference between duo-quad maybe the quad is a better overclocker and maybe I could then reach say 3.5 GHz or even more and maybe that would increase the FPS in FS to justify the cost...Well, will do some searching and see other findings on the same topic - thanks guys!

If I had the chance to do it I would personally do it. It will better for the future. The two cpus are the same except that the q6600 has 2 dies instead of one like the e6600If you have it go for it (very good for fsx)

Your E6600 should be able to push much higher than 3.15 with that cooler on it (providing your mobo can take it of course)Glenn

Didn't think I would go to Vista and FSX in a near future but after replacing my old x1900xtx with a 8800GT which resulted in bad AA I thought maybe it's time to move on...so if I read your post correct you noticed a significant improvement going from a Core2 Duo -> QUAD in FSX?Also, are you running FSX under XP or Vista and do you or anyone else know what part DX10 plays in all this since my new GFX card supports DX10?

Did try higher settings but never managed to get it 100% stable, running at 3.4-3.5 resulted in my PC reboot by itself from time to time although I increased the voltage as well. Not sure what the culprit was - the memory or the motherboard...? My motherboard is an ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe and my memory is Corsair DDR2 CM2X512A-6400.

I'm using Vista - and have tried DX9 & DX10.DX10 gave faster frame rates than DX9 on my Core Duo, but if anything its slightly slower than DX9 on the Quad. Not sure why, can anyone explain this?I've gone back to DX9 because most of my third party aircraft lose their external texture and appear as all-white images (the only one I've found to work with DX10 is Alphasim's recent Intruder). The other well known issuw with DX10 is flashing textures on runways, but I could live with that if it wasn't for the third party aircraft issue. If they both worked without these sort of problems, I think DX10 is the way to go - suspect it needs another 6 months or so for these driver and software support issues to be resolved.

OK...beeing a newbie both when it comes to Vista and FSX do you mean you can choose if you want to use DX9 or DX10 in Vista? I thought you didn't have no choice but to go with DX10 because as I understood it it's built-in in Vista?Well, guess I will start by installing Vista and FSX using my current CPU and see how things turn out and maybe I then switch over to the QUAD if I'm not happy with the performance hoping that will give FSX a boost.

Yes, there's a tick box in the Scenery Settings page you can either select or deselect DX10.Its slightly more difficult than that because the change doesn't take effect until you close and re-start FSX - and also because DX9 & DX10 have their own settings for screen resolution, anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing - so if you want the same settings in DX9 & DX10 you have to select these settings in each mode. Not really a big issue though - switching backwards and forwards is quite easy.

OK, will be able to see this myself soon - just about to install Vista :)

I would go for the future so go with quad and overclock it, but get the right cpu revision (think its g0 dunno.) DX10 should be a little faster because of the architecture so I would go with that and hope it works out for you.