Hi all. After giving up with Crysis my next target for decent framerates at my resolution of 1680x1050 was FSX. I've read a few reviews about it being a CPU hog and not responding well to GPU power. I recently got a Crossfire setup with a 3870 and 3850, but by far and away the biggest gain was from my new CPU which is a Core2 E8400 which I've overclocked to 4.3Ghz. What amazed me is that even at this frequency, 1.3Ghz above stock speed on a brand new CPU, Core0 is for the most part maxed out at 100% usage, and Core1 takes a severe bashing too! I've followed various guides and I at last have between 30 and 60FPS at 1680x1050 with most settings on high with 2xAA and 4x AF and the game looks amazing.Does anyone have any links to recent reviews of FSX with dual/quad cores and how performance is effected under Vista? I'm running XP and would like to know how it performs in Vista. Most things I've read are quite old.

I would set your AA to at least 4x and AF to 16x

Hate to have to pimp my own thread ;-), but here ya go for, among other tests, a reasonably recent showdown of XP and Vista on the same system: http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...pe=search#32194. See message # 77 for a repost with all the graphs and pictures.Re maxing out your CPU, FSX will max out at least one core on any CPU, no matter how fast it is. Same as previous FS iterations before it (except they were limited to one maxed out core only).Gary

So, are we saying then go Quad Core?~Nate

>So, are we saying then go Quad Core?>>~NateIn my opinion, yes, but of course there are caveats to anything. That could be (and has been) a big loooong thread.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 think you have to balance out speed with cores. So far dual cores are overclocking better than quads but quads will let you run more external programs without as much of a performance hit.

but by far and away the biggest gain was from my new CPU>which is a Core2 E8400 which I've overclocked to 4.3Ghz. What>amazed me is that even at this frequency, 1.3Ghz above stock>speed on a brand new CPU, Core0 is for the most part maxed out>at 100% usage, and Core1 takes a severe bashing too! Is this air cooled or water cooled? Just for my information

At the same clock speed as a dual? Yes, a quad is faster. But quads don't come out the box quite as fast a duals (for the same price that is). Also, it is only the really expensive unlocked quads that get near where you can overclock a dual to. As I (sort of) say in the subject thead, get the fastest core speed happening that you can and any more than two cores are a bonus, not a necessity, on the smoothness/blurry reduction front.Gary

Watercooled