Always hear of late the Intel i-7/Nvidia combo. What I'd like to know is anyone using a AMD Phenom II quad core (or even the 1055T 6-core) combined with a high end ATI card? If so, how's your simming experience?thx,Cliutch

ATI cards are known to show issues in FSX such as poor performance, stuttering, and some texture display issues in scenery and clouds. Not starting an arguement here but the reason most go for the more expensive i7 is because it's better. Uses newer tech than AMD, uses a 1366 triple channel socket rather than 775 dual channel socket (same as core 2 duo/quad). Has features such as hyperthreading (although no one uses it). It may not same like that big of difference, but these differences have massive effects on FSX and other games. Also rumoured that i7 is easier to OC, I can't confirm that though.

Not really a high end processor, but I have a computer with an AMD Athlon II X2 245 and an ATI card that actually runs FSX okay (it has 4Gigs of DDR3 RAM, which also has a bearing on things too of course). Personally though, I would not favour buying another ATI graphics card as opposed to an NVidia one, simply because as far as FS is concerned, it amounts to swimming against the tide. AMD processors though, I would certainly happily go with.Al

Clutch,I have run the X3 720 and now a X4 965 both with FSX. OC'd to similar clocks they performed almost identical with a majority of the processes only going on the first 2 cores. In higher scenery area's the X4 slightly pulled ahead by a frame or two. As for ATI cards I have been disappointed in the drivers for the ATI cards and their lack of optimizing for FSX. I love the AMD chips for budget FSX rigs and they give surprisingly good performance. All my setups run Nvidia cards. Of course if you want the best with FSX you need to go high end intel chips but it will cost you. John

I have a 955 at 3.9 GHz and it does well, just need to update my video card it has become the bottleneck 9800gtx 512meg, need at least a 750meg.Cheers

I run a 955 at 3.8 and an overclocked 5870. Can get a score of just over 25,000 in 3dmark 06 but fsx still runs like crap. Still stutters like a ***** no matter what I do.

I have an AMD Phenom 965 X4 @ 3.6, MSI 790 FX GD70, 8gb Corsair DDR3 @1600 paired with a PNY 480GTX. It runs FSX pretty well, most sliders to the right and keep my frames locked at 30fps. I run Ultimate traffic2 set at 59%. Running a complex aircraft in a dense area fps drops to the high teens, but remains smooth. Very happy with this setup.

I am using W7/64 bit with a AMD Phenom X6 1090T, not OC and a ATI 5970 vid card, MSI 890FXA-GD70 MB with 8 gigs of Mushkin high performance memory 8,8,8,24, two Intel SSD M-25 series HD, not in Raid, Corsair HX series PS and I am getting great performance in FSX. THere are some new tweaks that allow for using Vsyc with the ATI cards now by an author named *******, one of the files is named SM3_v1.1 zip, you can also check out this web sight about all of this http://www.happy-art.ch/Forum/Flight/FSX-s...de/SM3_v1.1.zip, I plan to try some of these things when I get off work today, so hope this helps. Everthing in FSX runs very well, I would suggest going over to Blackviper.com and shut down all unnecessary background processes and over at the flight1 forum there is a post about turning FSX for W7. :(

Why would you buy a 5970, when FSX only supports single gpu cards, and no SLI/crossfireX. That could effect your performance.

Hey metalman739,That is veeery interesting. So let me ask how about them there clouds. Are they dropping your framerates like a lead anvil or is that a thing of the past? What about stuttering or texture issues (tearing?). Are you seeing any of this as others have reported in the past. Hoping maby new drivers have put these to bed by now. Do you use Eyefinity? And of course the typical "what's your frame rates"?Oh yea, any bad effects by using that 5970 dual gpu? Can you/ shut of one when running FSX?Thanks much,CLutch