A quick question - it is said that FSX requires sheer CPU horsepower. I was therefore wondering what expert opinion was on changing CPU from Q6600 to E8600? I am not into overclocking (mainly because I don't understand how:( ), I work on stock speeds. Given the stock speed of the 8600 is something like 3.3Ghz, and the Q6600 2.4Ghz, is there any material advantage (forget cost, as I'm not concerned about that).Thanks for your thoughts!David

O/Cing the Q6600 is easy:1) Buy this cooler.http://www.directron.com/u120e.html(and a $10 120mm fan)2) Set your Front side buss to 400Mhz3) Set your CPU voltage (vCore) to 1.45v. Boot and run. Enjoy your new 3.6Ghz quad. That's it. Really. Well, almost . . . 4) Buy us pizza (instead of that E8600!)

There are some recent posts in this forum that you might find helpful. In a nutshell: it is not exactly wrong to say that "FSX requires sheer CPU horsepower" - but it is misleading because that is not ALL it requires. Above all, what it needs is the right combination of components and settings. It can get quite technical and fiddly - and, some would say, dull.Any direct answer to your question will, therefore, involve an over-simplification. Subject to that warning: You can expect reasonable performance from FSX with either of those processors at stock speeds. But without overclocking you may find yourself feeling frustrated that you can't set the sliders as far to the right as you'd like without reducing performance unacceptably. Ideally you would go for a quad core CPU like the Q6600, but 2.4GHz is really quite a significant drop from 3.3GHz. By a whisker, given your choice of CPUs, I'd go for the E8600: which is what, in fact, I have in my PC, where it spins along quite happily at 4.33GHz - and by the way I only started this overclocking lark about 8 weeks ago, so I would encourage you to reconsider your aversion to the prospect of doing so yourself.However, as you're not concerned about cost, you might consider a third option: the QX9770 runs very near the speed of the E8600 and has 4 cores: the best of both worlds, if you have the right motherboard of course. A half-way house would be the Q9650.Finally, may I repeat that for best results you need to concentrate on the full range of components, not just the CPU, as well as on getting them all to sing along nicely together.And finally finally: you may or may not be aware that there is a whole new line-up of CPUs just around the corner. This is always a problem, I know, but right now really is not a particularly good time to upgrade.Tim

>And finally finally: you may or may not be aware that there is>a whole new line-up of CPUs just around the corner. This is>always a problem, I know, but right now really is not a>particularly good time to upgrade.>>TimI'm under the impression that you know what you're talking about. When's the new line up of chips coming out? Do you have more info? Any info would be greatly appreciated! :)

I've been around a bit but I don't pretend to have ANY insider knowledge! The new Intel CPUs are due for release in, I believe, November. The current codename for them is "Nehalem". They will have lots of variants (Intel is constantly slicing up the market into tinier segments to squeeze every penny of profit out of us) but at the high-end their selling points are supposed to be (i) abolition of the "north bridge" and bringing the memory controller onto the CPU and (ii) thereby opening up the potential for better/faster use of the RAM; and (iii) in the longer term, offering more cores per CPU; and (iv) re-introducing hyper-threading (under some new name, I think).Exactly how that translates into extra performance remains to be seen. It will vary from application to application. Some very well-informed people are hopeful that it will help a lot with FSX: personally I can see the potential, but I think it's pointless to speculate.But whether or not you end up buying a Nehalem CPU, the release is likely to lead to price cuts in the current line-up - which is why it may be worth waiting just a little longer before taking the plunge, whatever your purchasing plans.Tim

simultaneous multi-threading (SMT), making an 8 core behave with 16 threads-a-threading ( my pre-xmas horror word)

Very cool, thanks for the heads up. I was thinking of making some upgrades in December. I appreciate the info. :)