Hay guys i am lookinng doing an upgrade and i am running 3.00 gig q9650 with a gtx470 and 600w power supply and 8gig of ram. I am thinking of changing to a i7 930 2.8. does anyone have any thoughts on this. I will end getting a gigabytee board but there to many to choose from.Paul

Have you tried overclocking your Q9650? I run mine at a steady 3.6 (will try to crank it up later)What is your RAM speed?Which cooler you using?

I have over clocked it to 3.6 and i have bigger fan. it crashes if you go higherram is CMD8Gx3m4a 1600mhz 2048mbPaul

Well, seems you

Won't you have to get a new motherboard/RAM just for i7 upgrade? You are running the fastest non-i7 CPU out there with the fastest air OC. You have a good video card, sufficient RAM, any extra money you are going to spend is not right in my opinion, now is the worst time to upgrade, quad i7 is coming to an end. A year from today, you'll have octa cores and hexa cores running everywhere, quad core will be history. Intel will release the new octa core for mainstream hopefully end of this summer. In fact, they released the 8 core for XEON and releasing 12 core soon for server boards. It makes me wonder if they will do the same for mainstream. They will, it's just a question of when. I'd wait for another 6 months or so and maybe pay $100-200 more, but get something that will last for 2-3 years.No point of doing a full upgrade to a mainboard/CPU that's been out there for 1.5 years. A lot will be happening soon, the SSD prices will come down (Intel), the new ATI/Nvidia series will come out (hopefully a better FERMI), and whatever you are spending money for will collect dust.I can tell you the Fermi/i7 combo looks like windows vista. A nice not "so-great-but-getting-there" public beta which will help these companies (Intel/Nvidia) to get the best. Hang in there, don't waste any money.

There is an observable difference in smoothness in FSX between a Core 2 Quad and a Core i7 at the same clockspeed. That being said, a highly-clocked C2Q can still do FSX justice, even with add-ons and high settings. I run mine @ 4.0 and in worst case scenarios like KSEA or KJFK on the ground with most settings at their highest I still pull off FPS in the upper teens. I'd say try to clock that Q9650 up a bit more and if you're not satisfied, then consider an i7.

Hay Guys thanks for that. my system is only a year old so i think i am going to hold out. I get good frames at all airports most of the time a fly pdmg aircraft. i do have adon scenrey for australia that is a big frame rates hits and i am running add on traffic. i can fly into jfk the md11. forget the 757cs and 767.Paul