Whats up guys? I am wanting to upgrade my cpu to get better performance out of fsx. I currently have a q6600 cpu, 680i motherboard, 4 gigs ram, and 8800gt video card. I overclock the q6600 to 2.8 ghz. I am willing to spend around 300 dollars. Also what is a good way to back up my hard drive? I dont want to lose all my addons if my hard drive failes. Thanks fellas.

Whats up guys? I am wanting to upgrade my cpu to get better performance out of fsx. I currently have a q6600 cpu, 680i motherboard, 4 gigs ram, and 8800gt video card. I overclock the q6600 to 2.8 ghz. I am willing to spend around 300 dollars. Also what is a good way to back up my hard drive? I dont want to lose all my addons if my hard drive failes. Thanks fellas.

Boy this is a hard one to answer. To get any better performance is to go with i7 920 chip and over clock it (has a lot of headroom and has a lot of bandwidth). However, i7's require a new motherboard and new triple channel RAM. So your budget will not allow it. Have you thought of over clocking it further?

Ya I did have it clocked at 3 ghz but I was getting really bad stuttering and framerate problems so I backed it down to 2.8 and my problems went away. I'm pretty happy with my performance but with all my addons I was hoping for more.

Ya I did have it clocked at 3 ghz but I was getting really bad stuttering and framerate problems so I backed it down to 2.8 and my problems went away. I'm pretty happy with my performance but with all my addons I was hoping for more.

Try the Frame rate limiter mentioned in the FSX forum and bump it back up to 3 ghz. Also try putting in the bufferpools in your fsx.cfg file to help with stutters.