E8500, Q6600 or wait for Q9450?

[Racalac 0]

im in a pickleright now I can either go out right away and get a Q6600 or an E8500...or i can wait for the new 45nm Q9450's to come out in March... im stuck on what to do though... should I wait?the only thing that turns me off of the 9450 is the 8.5x multi :SQ6600 will easily overclock to the 3.0ghz spec of the E8500, and is 40 bucks cheaper where I am.or should I go with a plain Dual core with a stock clock of 3ghz wich already is 45nm? (vs the quads 65nm)I do plan on overclocking on air with a thermalright Ultra 120 Ex. heatsinksome info from the guru's? lolcheers!

[Guest]

Wait, and in march wait some more for the next new thing sure to be on the horizon by then.And so keep on waiting forever.

[Racalac 0]

>Wait, and in march wait some more for the next new thing sure>to be on the horizon by then.>And so keep on waiting forever.lol I realize the aspects of using the term "wait" in the pc hardware world.back to now, and not later, the 9450 is comming in a few weeks. what im asking is if its really worth waiting for a 9450 wich wont oc as well as a Q66 but has a smaller die (45nm), or to go out and get a Q66 wich overclocks rather well at the cost of having it run hotter? (bigger die, 65nm)E8500 i've put on the back burner because FSX utilizes multi-core's more so than most games at the moment, so a quad seems more logicalim just looking for opinions thats all.

[Magic Man 2]

Except that quad cores offer little more performance wise to FSX than a dual core...

[tfm 169]

I know nothing at all about overclocking - but I might be able to help you on the difference made to FSX by having more than two cores.I have two Dell Precisions with dual core Xeon 5160s running at 3GHz. One of them has one 5160; the other has two. Thus: two cores vs. four cores.On the four core machine, the ground textures viewed from the cockpit are crisp all the way to the horizon, all the time. On the two core machine at the same (pretty high) settings, the ground textures are crisp in the near distance, but take a long time to load for far distance: in fact, long distance textures are almost always blurry on the two core machine.There are other differences between my PCs. The two core machine runs Vista-32 with an ATI 3870. The four core machine (which gets higher framerates) runs Vista-64 with an Nvidia 8800 Ultra "super-overclocked" by EVGA. The four core machine also has faster disk drives. I cannot exclude the possibility that these factors (or others that I don't know about) account for the noticeable difference in the crispness of ground textures; but I doubt it.As for waiting: obviously we all set our own upgrade cycles. But if you can hold out for Nehalem at the back end of this year/ early next year, you might find yourself buying at a more interesting time. There are some signs that Nehalem just MIGHT be able to deliver a really worthwhile performance boost; but if it is disappointing, or if it is priced too high, you should still be able to find better value for money with the Core 2 parts which by then should cost less. Who knows: by then, you might even be able to predict what FS11 will prefer ...Tim

[Ray Proudfoot 8,957]

Tim,FSX cannot take advantage of multiple cores except for loading scenery when it will be slightly quicker than a single or dual core machine. This isn't my conclusion but that of Phil Taylor on his blog.Whether FSXI will be able to take advantage of multiple cores cannot be determined at this stage but Phil has already said it's very difficult to write FS for more than one core.As for waiting or buying now all I can say to the OP is to buy a E8400 now. That processor together with a Radeon HD3870x2 graphics card has produced a three fold increase in frame rates in FS9 for me and an healthy boost to FSX frame rates.The differences in scenery texture appearances you described will almost certainly be down to the differences in the two graphics cards. There is a huge difference in the performance of an 8800 Ultra and a 3870. Hardly a fair comparison!;) I wonder if Anisotropic Filtering has been set the same on both cards?The only difference quad core processors will make is if you have several apps running alongside FS. Then the load of running those can be spread across several cores.I prefer to run FS apps on a second (and third) networked PC leaving the FS PC to run FS only. I suppose you could say FS then benefits from multiple cores. It also extends the life span of my PCs to 6-7 years.The Core2 Duo Penryn processors are excellent value for money and I would strongly recommend anyone considering a new system to invest in one together with the HD3870 X2 which I think will become the must-have graphics card.The problem of waiting for the next generation of processors is that you'll always be waiting whereas the current reasonably priced ones really work well in FS.

[tfm 169]

Not sure about that, Ray. This is from Phil's post for 9/4/2007:"At render time, we run the terrain texture synthesis on threads across the cores. During flight on multi-core machines, as terrain and terrain textures are loaded you will notice significant multi-core usage. As all tiles are loaded, the multi-core usage will fall off, this is expected. As the terrain is re-lit, approximately every minute, you will see multi-core usage increase. As you bank and load terrain tiles, or as you fly forward and force a load of more terrain tiles, you will see the multi-core usage increase."Thus as I understand it, the advantage of multiple cores is that they improve how FSX deals with loading textures. This is, I think, precisely the improvement that I have noticed: not better framerates, but better sharpness through reduced texture load-times.Tim

[Ray Proudfoot 8,957]

Tim,Whilst I accept that multi cores will assist in texture loading the scenery being sharp right to the horizon doesn't sound right. It's not like that in real life. There is a loss of definition with distance. Once those textures are loaded they should appear identical. The change in appearance I believe is still down to the different graphics cards and their settings.A friend is having a new Quad-core system delivered in a few weeks. It will be interesting to compare with him.

[Guest Ben74]

i recently upgraded to a Q6600 (G0 stepping), overclocked on an old air cooler to 3.2ghz. i'm very happy with the performance. i get very few blurries, even with high res scenery like megascenery. i was able to turn my LOD radius up to 8.5 without much performance hit.

[tfm 169]

RayCould be the cards, of course; but I'm still not convinced. I'd be interested to know what you think when you've seen how things work out on your friend's new pc. I hope you are both in for a pleasant surprise.Tim