Should I or Should'nt I?

[Guest Insignia87]

Hi Everyone,I was just wondering if I could get some advice about my machine, and how I can improve gameplay as I am an avid FSX pilot! Ideally I am looking for the best visuals that I can afford as I want to make my flight experience as realistic as possible. Reasons for this are that I will be going to Oxford Aviation Academy in a few months, and I would like to have a decent machine to practice on while im there!Here are my specs:AMD Phenom II X2 550 3.11 GHZ (not OC'd: Any advice about this would be great as I have no idea)Gigabyte MA77-UD3P Motherboard2GB Corsair DDR3 Ram250GB Toshiba HDATI HD4870 2GB SapphireTrack IR 4 PROSaitek Pro Flight YokeSaitek Throttle QuadrantSaitek Cyborg Evo (for airbus'!)Ok, so I have been looking at the Phenom X4 quad, and also at the i7. The i7 will require me to buy another motherboard so this isn't really an option for me due to lack of funds.The X4 looks a pretty good price, but I have heard you will need to overclock to reach decent performance levels, thus spending more money on cooling.I also have one more question: Does anyone know how I can connect 3 keyboards in a daisy chain esq link. I know what you are thinking (why would you need that?). Well, I plan to link the 3 keyboards, place an mdf cover over them with cutouts for push buttons that correspond to a key on the keyboard and furthermore correspond to an action within fsx. If anyone has any ideas how this can be done, and also how to program multiple keys on 3 keyboards to assignments in FSX would be great!!Sorry, I seem to have ranted on a little there, I appreciate the help.Kind regards,Insignia87

[TechguyMaxC 516]

A quad core will help with heavy AI, autogen, and texture loading. FPS will not improve. You need sheer clockspeed (and an efficient architecture) for that. You could drop in an X4 but to get noticeably better performance you'll need to o/c well above where your current X2 sits, since the X2 and X4 Phenom II's use the same micro-architecture. As for the keyboards, just get 3 USB keyboards. No daisy-chaining necessary.