Would FSX benefit from running say 2x Intel Xeon's? I was looking at the W3550 Bloomfield's @3.066GHz on maybe an ASUS Z8NA.

I think so. Based on what I've read from other members in other forums, an Intel Board, lots of ram, two qx9770, and two 4870's would rock fsx.It's a lot of money.

No. 4 cores is enough. Clock speed is more important once you reach 4 hardware threads. HT is pretty much useless too, even detrimental in some cases.

Would FSX benefit from running say 2x Intel Xeon's? I was looking at the W3550 Bloomfield's @3.066GHz on maybe an ASUS Z8NA.

As I recall, with earlier generations of CPU, the Xeons provided access to quad-channel RAM which, clock-for-clock, gave them a slight advantage in FSX over consumer CPUs which could only handle dual-channel RAM. However, that advantage could easily be reversed by over-clocking consumer CPUs and/or RAM.I remember going from a Dell Precision 690 with dual Xeon 5160 processors at 3GHz - the prize of their day - to a computer with an E8500 overclocked to 4GHz. The result was higher FPS, but significantly worse blurriness/slower texture loading: a conseqence of swapping from four cores to two cores and of losing RAM bandwidth. Today's i7 CPUs give you the best of both worlds: triple channel RAM - at faster speeds/better latencies than before - as well as four cores (hyperthreading doesn't work for FSX).Would you benefit from 8 cores? A bit: you'd get less blurriness when changing views from external to internal, for example; you'd get a slightly faster load time; and autogen would snap in a bit faster. However, whether the extra performance would justify the cost and complexity, is a separate question. I suspect that the law of diminishing returns means that four cores is about optimum for FSX's needs.However - and this is just a hunch - if you go for 2 CPUs, I suspect you might you have to settle for a lower overclock than if you were just fiddling with 1 CPU. This is because I imagine that adding cores makes it harder to get the cores synchronised (the "skew" setting in the BIOS???). But this is just guess work on my part, on the principle that ANY added complexity seems to make overclocking harder.If you are happy to experiment then do, please, go ahead and let us know how you get on. But if it were my money, having gone down the Xeon route in a previous generation of technolocy, I'd settle for a nice i7 and overclock it to 4+ GHz.Tim

Thanks for the responses. I'm currently using a Q9650 OC'ed to 3.6 with 4GB Ram and a GTX285. I can achieve decent performance everywhere except approach, especially when I use an add-on AC and a 3rd party airport. I thought my problem was with my TH2Go but even if I use one monitor I still tank on approach! I've seen a few posts here with the i7 975 and a high OC that seem to work well, but if I'm gonna venture into that price range I was curious if there are other options.