FS9 as one hopes it could be . . . many thanks to all for your input

Wow is all I can say. As a few who have read my ramblings over the years might recall, I had been planning an upgrade to Penryn sometime after the first and voila, it's arrived. Wow, what a difference and what an amazing sim! Now how is that, 5 years of service on this product and it keeps improving. I had always been able to have very acceptable performance, but now, nothing can stop it.It is a true pleasure to fire up the Queen O' the Skies it all it's full glory, and land at LAX at sunset with puffy clouds and nice flowing liquid smooth performance no matter what the situation. That is a true first for me, ever.I bought FSX to dabble in sometime, but I tell you I am not too keen on getting re-bogged down again after this amazing quality now. Gotta try it soon tho, but I will try to keep it to VFR stuff and enjoy that for what it is.Besides setting up a very strong machine, I have added just two tweaks to top it off, which means, to have velvet smooth performance at very high frames in any condition, in or out of the VC in highest detail mode. I had the frames before this, but there was the odd hiccough. That ended with two moves: lean boot as discussed recently in another thread (see Bill A's stutter thread), and now the wonderful discovery that smoothed it out to perfect: enabling System Cache (LargeSystemCache)I do admit offloading a few other addons like ActiveSky and FDC etc to other cores just makes the thing snappier, period. They do their thing with zero affect on the sim.IQ is excellent, though slightly different, from the ATI I was raving about. The x1950Pro does give things a slightly cleaner look, but I think I've forgotten what the diff might be now as this guy is very clean now having set it all up nicely. I am using a wonderful free utility called Advanced Gamma Corrector that sits in the tray and lets you tweak gamma/brightness/luminance/contrast via user assigned hot keys in any environment.Thanks to all the advice from Sam and others for nudging me to jump in. I am very happy with every component in the box.The QX is ultra tolerant of overclocking. I've read the articles on internal chokes to limit performance, but I don't have a need to move beyond 4.0, and at the voltage and temps it operates at that clock speed I have no reason to assume it won't go to 4.3 or higher and hardly break a sweat. For FS9, the 4.0GHz is overkill, as I'm sure the other later model core duo users can attest. Amazing!