OK i'm thinking of investing in another gaming rig to replace my old Core 2 Duo E6600 machine, which runs FSX like a slideshow with settings maxed + addons. I heard that the i7 is a major improvement over the previous CPUs.My proposed rig: (cannot be changed)Core i7 8604GB DDR3GTX 250No overclockWin XPHere's my question, can I run smoothly with these parameters and what would your estimated FPS be?This is my "Ultimate FSX stress test scenario"Situation: Short Finals, Visual approach.Aircraft: PMDG 747-400X (The least optimized of the PMDG FSX addons)Airport: Any 'MegaAirport' or FSDTWX: REX with real weather, heavy convective activity with lots of cumulus clouds. Very good visibility.Display Settings: All maxed with light bloom. (No DX10) 1600x1050 resolutionTraffic: So much traffic that the Default FSX ATC have to tell almost every other landing flight to go around because the runway is occupied. (This happens a lot with my FS9 in Heathrow/O'Hare/JFK/Kai Tak etc.)Many thanks in advance.

A couple of things. I suppose you mean the GTS250 as there isn't a GTX250. Also, I highly doubt an i7 8xx is going to run your test flight well. My system runs this well, but not super, and it's quite a step up from yours.

Bottom line: FSX + add-ons *needs* as much clock speed from a CPU of the fastest CPU family currently available. This means i7, it also means 4GHz+.

A couple of things. I suppose you mean the GTS250 as there isn't a GTX250. Also, I highly doubt an i7 8xx is going to run your test flight well. My system runs this well, but not super, and it's quite a step up from yours.

Yeah it's a GTS250, typo sorry.Just curious, what would be the result if I overclocked the CPU? Any FPS estimates?

Increases in FPS in MSFS due to overclocking correspond to the percentage of the overclock in a near-linear fashion. E.g. if you OC 50%, your FPS should go up by about that much. However, it's hard to quantify this in pure framerate numbers because there are far too many variables at play.

Just to note when shopping, not that you'll find many left but a 250GTS is just a rebadged 9800GTX+Thought the 250 1GB version is a new board design at much shorter length than the 512mb versionNote difference in GTX to GTX+, the "plus" would be the one you want, smaller die than original=higherclocks etc