I just moved into a new house but there is a power outlet outside (for the Christmas lights)!I picked up a Hyper 212 in the end for C$30. It's made a big difference. It was an easy overclock to 4.370ghz. I know I can get it further by putting in some more Vcore and Vdram. Still not bad for a $130 CPU, $105 mobo, $100 RAM and a $30 cooler. Although Intel's prices are a-dropping so this setup could yet become the ultimate bargain...So on the new overclock from EGLC to EGLL on a stormy day down the river:min 41fps, max 78fps, avg 62.2fps and subjectively smooth as silk. (Light bloom left turned off, 1280x1024)FYI I use the virtual cockpit as I would in real life and then some outside views with vigorous panning in cruise to tax the VPU a little bit. and this cooler runs much lower temps than the stock cooler - max core temp of 68 deg C at 4.370ghz (base clock 190 x23 multiplier, RAM multi 8x = 1520mhz at 7-7-7-21). My 8800GTS seems to be coping fine.Does anyone have any input as to when the 8800GTS becomes the bottleneck to the Core i3? Or is it already happening? I have a 1080p TV I ought to try this out on, just need to get a DVI to HDMI adapter, unless I want to try the Clarkdale's built in graphics  :Tounge:

Nice performance pretty amazing really! I've said this before I'll say it again, that GPU is really old. Yes FSX is CPU dependant but when I switched for the Ati HD 4850 to my GTX 470 with the old Core 2 Duo E6600 still in, there was a huge differnce like 40 FP/S. The graphics card definetly plays a big part especially if you might get a bigger screen eventualy!

I started looking at other threads and forums for fps and screenshots - despite my nice high fps, my screenshots didn't look so good. I dug around the settings and things were not as "ultrahigh" as I thought. Hence my "great" fps.Sorry to mislead everybody. I'll have a quiet word with myself later. To be clear on my settings:Graphics: ultrahigh, 1280x1024x32, AA on, anisotropic filtering on, preview DX10 on, flare on, bloom offAircraft: ultrahighScenery: high (couldn't see a difference to ultrahigh at my resolutions so didn't bother)Weather: high, draw at 60 miles. Again couldn't see a difference at ultrahigh.Traffic: started with high, then maxed out the GA traffic to give me some circuit traffic to deal with (of which I saw none at City or Heathrow - I suppose that's realistic!)So I'm up to 4485mhz (195x23) which gives me min 24fps, max 73fps, avg 36.6fps. Still very smooth subjectively and looking good, although the rain looks terrible - just a lot of lines. I guess I'm reaching the limits of my 8800GTS here? (To answer my own question)I think that's as far as I can push it with stability, but I've posted on an overclocking forum to see if there are any tweaks to be made. (http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=653981)@luckyman - thanks, I guess it being "budget" I went in with low expectations, but I am very happy overall. I'm sure you are right about the gfx upgrade, I just gotta get my act together. But part of this was seeing what I could do with the 8800GTS and so far I have no complaints. I'm sure there are others out there with similar hardware and I just wanted to get some information out there with this kind of upgrade, so I hope it's helpful to someone. Again sorry for the misleading stats before, pls don't hate   :Straight Face:

Woah, what a great overclock, I DO hate you now hahawhat are your temps like?regarding the rain looking bad, are you using DX10 preview? rain looks stupid in DX10

Yeah I'm using the DX10 preview. It looks crap whether on or off! The clouds and the sunset look amazing though. I like the dusk setting.Thanks for the comps on my OC - don't forget I got the idea from you in this thread and the one I started! Temps are 65-70 deg C under full load with Prime 95, must be about the same in FSX although I haven't formally looked. I didn't have time to get a DVI/HDMI adapter today but I will sometime and try 1080p and see what frame rates I get.I have to say I enjoy the overclocking, it's a game in its own right! I might have to slacken my memory timings (currently 7-7-7-21) to get past 4.5ghz - I see your timings are 9-10-10-29 - is it worth it for a few extra mhz? I may also have to sacrifice some memory bandwidth to get higher CPU clocks. Again I wonder if it is worth it? The Clarkdale 32nm has a weaker memory controller compared to the one in your Lynnfield Core i5.

I see at OC.com you have experimented good results tighting your ram latencies. That's never been my case hence why I didn't bother to manualy set my memory latencies, but I will for the sake of testingI know the clarkdale's IMC is in a separate die and it tends to limit OC at high RAM speeds, but hey, 4.45GHz on a 30 bucks cooler is awesomeDo you think your memory bandwidth is limiting you? that would be a great surprise to me.

Actually my insistence on 7-7-7-21 may be limiting my progress up the CPU frequency scale. TBH I'm not entirely sure if my memory bandwidth is limiting my FSX performance - I can't find anything that suggest one way or the other.

Nope wasn't my RAM, I tried slackening timings, lowering mem multi etc.. So don't worry about testing your system. At 4.485ghz things weren't stable in P95 and my Vcore was way too high. FSX ran without so much as a stutter. However, I'm not willing to risk BSOD in the middle of a kick-&@($* NDB let down or something so I'm looking at about 4.4ghz, some final tweaking to do.This thread has been going for a month now! Interesting to read the first page. It would be cool if we could do a side-by-side comparison of the i5/i7 @ 4 ghz vs i3 @ 4.4ghz. I don't doubt for a minute that the i5/i7 will do a better job than the i3. The important thing is it is a very individual choice as to how much that extra performance is worth. Unfortunately the i3 is here in Canada, the i5 in Mallorca and the i7 (chris493) is in Western Australia. Couldn't get us all much further apart!

We can always try this: http://www.flightsimworld.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=140426I've been trying 4.2GHz, but it needs 1.48 Vcore to be stable and temps hit the high 80's under IBT, so I guess I'll stick with 4GHz

The zip file is found here: http://library.avsim...m=fsxmark07.zipI gave it a try using the "Global High.cfg"  file in the zip package (rather than fiddling around like in the forum post link). I got min/max/avg = 20,  51, 35.687.I tried th "max.cfg" but FSX crashed (but not BSOD). Maybe my overclock isn't as stable as I thought...Some pics from earlier today (check out how bad the rain is in pic 1):

I don't think the OC is the culprit. What does your event viewer say about the crash? DX10 is buggy as hell, could very well be the reason

Yeah! Great overclock that's pretty amazing. DX10 is so pointless you should really turn it off.

So using the FSX07 benchmark at full max, DX10 disabled (using their cfg file) I got min/max/avg 6, 18, 10.6. And it looked terrible!

Never heard of the program but where does it put you? Which city. And their CFG might be a problem becasue it's not properly tweaked!

Oh it's the link from dazz's post above. It essentially is an autopilot flight in a CRJ around Seattle, passing Sea-Tac, Paine and Boeing fields. There are some cfg files to load up some standard settings as well as instructions. So "FSX07 benchmark" just refers to a preset flight with preset settings using FRAPS for 300 secs to measure min/max/avg fps. I guess it's just a way of standardising things and we could have made our own for the thread but this one already exists.Here's the thread: http://www.flightsimworld.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=140426 (note they use medium high rather than the more demanding configuration of the high settings contained within the zipfile)Here's the zipfile: http://library.avsim.net/search.php?SearchTerm=fsxmark07.zip