Hello Gang,It is great to have AVSIM back online. It was a shock not to be able to go here first thing in the morning like I had for the past several years to lurk and see what was going on in the MSFS world. I have a chance to swap out my CPU and ram for very little cost so I need to know if it might make much difference in FSX FPS. I have a Asus P5K motherboard, Vista 64 Home OS, 4g of 1066 mg ram (don't know what kind), Nvidia 9800 GTX Superclocked + graphics card and an Intel Q6700 (default clocking at 2.66). If I make the swap I will be exchanging the Q6700 for a Q9550 and replacing the ram with 4gig of the 1333 version with a heat sink (so I am told). Is there likely going to be much difference in speed or smoothness? Presently I can expect something like 20-25 FPS under almost all conditions with the FPS Limiter program running and using Nick's recommendations for enhancer settings with all sliders except traffic far to the right. I have most of the downloads and the ussual highly modified cfg file. Your guess is as least as good or better than mine, since I know little about the relevant hardware.What do you think? I sure appreciate the benefit of your expertise. Thank you.Spirit Flyer

hey, you should see a small improvement as the q9550 is new technology (45nm) and has a higher clock speed, and you said it was only for a small price so i cant see a reason why not lol

I did a similar upgrade in January. E6750, 2GB 667,8800gt to my sig below. There was FSX improvement, but it was not huge. Seems to me that I have reached a point where the more money I spend, the less improvement I see. I am happy with the performance I get. But even if I wasn't happy, I have surpassed the upper limit of what I can spend. I think OC'ing a good answer. Even if I wanted a high end i7 system...let's see...i7...or sleep in the house...Bob

Thank you both. I guess I might do it but I likely will revert to my default decision making process, which is not to decide, which I guess is a decision, or not. :( Spirit Flyer