Wanna upgrade without blowing the wad, what kind of FPS increase would I see moving strictly from a core 2 dual to a core 2 quad?Thanx.

Very little, if any. Most users in your situation report decrease in load times and ground texture blurriness, an overall smoother feel to the sim but no actual FPS increase.

Thanx for the reply.Okay, so what couod I expect to see from an i5 or i7?I am trying to decide if I should continue to let FSX performance drive my upgrade cycles, cause all my other sims/games run fine.

Moving to an i5 or i7 should provide a performance boost, though I can't say precisely how much.

Yeah so I figure, problem is that's a costly upgrade and a ~10-20 % FPS increase doesn't justify the cost.Really, the fundamental problem, discussed ad nausem, is that FSX is broken, really with my hardware I should be getting much better performance than I do.

Why not simply upgrade to a faster dualcore like a 8500 or 8600 and overclock to 4.0 - 4.2 ghz, that should provide a boost without breaking the bank.

Well, a new i7 would allow you to overclock much further in addition to the per-clock performance increase over Core 2. If you can hit 4GHz or more you would experience a noticeable performance increase.

I am building a new rig with a core i7. I think they will provide a slight boost in performance over an "older" quad core or a dual core. If you don't want to overclock, then probably a core i7 or a different quad core will be better. Also, you might want to consider RAM choices. The Bloomfield i7s use the x58 architecture which support triple channel ram...theoretically it yields a performance gain but honestly the lynnfield i7s (which only support up to dual channel) bench marked at around the same time.If you are like me and you listen to music or procrastinate (thus having Word open) while simming, you may want to spring for an i7 or a quad core with a high clock speed. I would stick with quad cores anyway because most of the dual core processors are being phased out (and becoming discount processors).