Like the title states, Has anyone tried FSX on a dual chip server rig,Using a W5580,or equivlant chip? I wonder if the extreme cost of such a system would be worth any performance gain,If any? Thank's from Jim

You don't need more than a quad core CPU to get the most out of FSX. More cores will limit your maximum clock speed when overclocking, which will actually decrease performance.

You don't need more than a quad core CPU to get the most out of FSX. More cores will limit your maximum clock speed when overclocking, which will actually decrease performance.

Yeah, more cores. But how about more physical CPUs? I believe that was the question.

Yeah, more cores. But how about more physical CPUs? I believe that was the question.

Same thing, as far as software is concerned. More CPUs means more cores.

I'm refering to your generalizing statement "more cores will limit clock speed". I just fail to see how that could began to directly answer the OP's question. I should also mention I don't care enough about FSX yet to know how many threads it can take advantage of (4 apparantly, if what you say is correct). I am aware of the current discussions on HT and FSX with the Nehalems. Just seems to me FSX would have lots of head room with 8 actual cores.

One Orbx member built a Skulltrail rig that demonstrates that FSX does take advantage of 8 cores. 60-70 fps in Manhattan X.http://orbxsystems.com/forums/index.php?topic=14532.0You have to log in.

FSX has one primary thread and will spawn as many worker threads (texture fetch) as your CPU has hardware to handle. More threads does not equal more performance. Higher clock speeds and more instructions per clock cycle = higher performance.

FSX has one primary thread and will spawn as many worker threads (texture fetch) as your CPU has hardware to handle. More threads does not equal more performance. Higher clock speeds and more instructions per clock cycle = higher performance.

I beg to differ. More fetch does equal better performance. Factored in with a good overclock, it'd be very nice indeed. If you could mister, you'd do it. :(

No one has demonstrated that any multi-cpu (server) platform has improved FSX performance beyond what is available with i7 975/965. I wouldn't spend any money on that setup over a single-chip solution. i9 Gulftown is next in line to steal away the crown from i7 975/965 as best CPU for FSX. Not only 2 more cores but 32nm process and more cache. Engineering samples have been tested and reported on and the chip looks like a monster compared to the i7s.http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=230923-jk

I beg to differ. More fetch does equal better performance. Factored in with a good overclock, it'd be very nice indeed. If you could mister, you'd do it. :(

Texture fetch is not compute intense, and therefore not a performance limiter in FSX. Tell yourself the opposite all you like but more cores doesn't magically improve FSX performance.

All this talk of "magic". When you spend that kind of money on hardware, it damn well better do something magic. Don't be so touchey, guy!

All this talk of "magic". When you spend that kind of money on hardware, it damn well better do something magic. Don't be so touchey, guy!

It just doesn't work that way though. As the price of PC parts increase, the price/performance ratio decreases. You may gain 10% more performance with an i7 975 vs. a 950, but you pay twice as much. There are only a few applications whose performance increases linearly with core count, and sadly games are not among them. Video transcoding is, however.

More cores is not always better. Infact if my memory serves me well, I think Intel said they were canceling one of their 8 core products. Let me tell you. As you get more cores, heat and limited space makes things difficult. You also have to remember that all games are not optimized for 8 cores. There are even some games today that still aren't quad optimized. As you get more cores it becomes very difficult for the programmers to program for all of them. The programmer can have different threads on different cores or different processes on different cores, but it becomes hard to keep track of all of them because one processes has to be broken down into many others and run in parallel, and when you do that one completed processes may be waiting on the other and it becomes one big mess. Also you have to keep track of an enormous list of code. The less code you have, the better it is, the easier to manage, and most of the time the less time it takes to process. Now what 8 cores is good for is for video encoding, photo editing, large batch conversions, multi tasking cpu intensive programs, or if you just want to show off playing two games at a time :(More cores = more data processed, but little performance increase in the real world. What CPU manufacturers should be focused on is getting default frequencies higher. From 1990-2000 there was a MASSIVE increase in core speeds for the time. 2000-2005, pretty good too, we doubled the speeds (Around 1GHZ to 3GHz @ '05) 2005-2009 it seems like we hit a wall, we are stuck around 3 GHz. They should be testing frequency @ R&D...With 8 cores I think performance may be the same as a high end quad core, or it will be worse, because splitting up so many tasks and keeping track will hard for the CPU. Also with FSX everything is sent back to the first core so it would just create enormous overhead and latency problems. Now if the 8 cores are running over a certain frequency you may be able to overcome some problems and get great performance...EDIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_programminghttp://www.cilk.com/multicore-e-book/

The first thing to note is the lack of scalability. The native‐threaded code offers speeduponly on a dual‐core processor, and it doesn’t even attain a factor of 2, because the loadisn’t balanced between the two threads. Additional coding will be needed to scale toquad‐core, and as each generation of silicon doubles the number of cores, even morecoding will be required. You might think that you could write the code to use 1000threads, but unfortunately, the overhead of creating 1000 threads would dominate therunning time. Moreover, the system would require memory resources proportional to1000, even when running on a few cores or just a single core. What’s needed is a loadbalancingscheduler that manages memory intelligently, and — as luck would have it —that turns out to be one of the services that most concurrency platforms provide.

Corespeed is the most important icw as many cache as possible.About a year ago PCPilot did some pc tests with different setups.At the end it appeared that an overclocked E8500/8600 to 4 Ghz gave better performance than a Q9650 clocked at 3.6 Ghz.The primairy thread at Core 0 is responsible for the perfomance ; the higher it's speed the better the performance.I will not upgrade till 2012 when Aerosoft releases Aerosoft Flightsimulator 2012.