Looks like a good rig, when can you get it?The GTX460 will boost you frames, as you've prably seen in the chart.Glad I convinced you to make the best possible upgrade!

I could get it in a week but my Wife 1.0 software will require a few cash updates before I can spend money on toys, otherwise she will crash me on my desktop. So within a month I guess. You can be sure I'll be here talking about it when I get it.If this rig will give me a good showcase of the Orbx PNW scenery, low and slow, with no ******* blurries, I will be delighted. Also, looking forward to the new Battle of Britain sim from the Il2 factory. That's looking great!Thanks again for the tech chat. :Peace:

I could get it in a week but my Wife 1.0 software will require a few cash updates before I can spend money on toys, otherwise she will crash me on my desktop. So within a month I guess. You can be sure I'll be here talking about it when I get it.If this rig will give me a good showcase of the Orbx PNW scenery, low and slow, with no ******* blurries, I will be delighted. Also, looking forward to the new Battle of Britain sim from the Il2 factory. That's looking great!Thanks again for the tech chat. :Peace:

HelloI have been considering upgrading to wife v2.0 which will enable a much easier H/W upgrade path in the future

I could get it in a week but my Wife 1.0 software will require a few cash updates before I can spend money on toys, otherwise she will crash me on my desktop. So within a month I guess. You can be sure I'll be here talking about it when I get it.If this rig will give me a good showcase of the Orbx PNW scenery, low and slow, with no ******* blurries, I will be delighted. Also, looking forward to the new Battle of Britain sim from the Il2 factory. That's looking great!Thanks again for the tech chat. :Peace:

No problem, I hope you get the GTX 460 too that would be great, even if you don't its fine. The smoothness of the textures are mostly your GPU.

HelloI have been considering upgrading to wife v2.0 which will enable a much easier H/W upgrade path in the future

Problem is, when uninstalling Wife 1.0, there is a chance of Blue Screaming of Death and permanent damage to your hardware.By the by, can someone recommend an L1156 MB for an i3 CPU, please. There are a million of them out there and all I know is that Asus boards are good. I know nothing else. I don't want to pay over $150. OC is a plus, but not essential. I would be installing 4GB of RAM right away, maybe more later.

Problem is, when uninstalling Wife 1.0, there is a chance of Blue Screaming of Death and permanent damage to your hardware.By the by, can someone recommend an L1156 MB for an i3 CPU, please. There are a million of them out there and all I know is that Asus boards are good. I know nothing else. I don't want to pay over $150. OC is a plus, but not essential. I would be installing 4GB of RAM right away, maybe more later.

Since you had to do so much research I'll so some for you here:this is the one I recommend http://www.newegg.ca...1-634-_-ProductVery good price and it will be perfect to overclock with. And it supports the i5, i7-8XX for a future upgrade.

Since you had to do so much research I'll so some for you here:this is the one I recommend http://www.newegg.ca...1-634-_-ProductVery good price and it will be perfect to overclock with. And it supports the i5, i7-8XX for a future upgrade.

Thanks. I was checking out the prices at NewEgg but all MBs look the same to me except for the price, and I like the price on that one. :Peace:

Yea and you have to read the reviews to make sure that it won't die and can overclock well. So yes this one is good.

Phew! I thought for a minute you were going to go for the 9650 from 2008 over this year's i3. You have made the right choice in the i3. I've never been a latest n greatest kind of guy but neither have I ever gone for anything as "budget" as the i3. I'm a mid-range kind of guy and the i5 seemed to suit my needs more. But I took a chance and got the i3 and I don't regret a single thing about it.There's not much info on the forum about the i3 so I am pleased to play guinea pig and with great results. I'm at 4.4ghz on two cores (no HT) and FSX is smooth as silk at 1280x1024 with my GTX460 as from the link above. Call of Duty 4 is maxed out at 75fps (i.e. 75hz, the max freq of my monitor) and just awesome. Having the raw speed on just two cores just means that things like video encoding is slower.There is no doubt that an i5 and i7 will give gains in FSX but it depends on what your expectations are and what you're willing to pay. I figure the pinnacle of home cinema is 1080p (1920x1080) at 60hz so anything around that is good for me. I don't need my sliders maxed out. It's hard to judge on FSX because benchmarking is so tricky with the plethora of settings out there.At stock this setup is very power efficient as well - around 70-80W for general browsing use, less than my laptop! (Although the latter does include powering a screen).Motherboard: I got the Gigabyte H55M-UD2H because it was around $100. I have to say I arbitrarily decided to assign myself the "Spirit of the Build" for the purposes of proving to myself and forum members what one could do without spending $100 on a Noctua cooler or $160 on a motherboard with a ton of copper on it. I get the vibe that any motherboard will do, YMMV from CPU chip to CPU chip. There are guys around (see our thread linked to by luckyman) who got their i3-540 up to 4.6ghz on air (a guy called savesammax). Overclocking is a must with these chips. Just because it's fun!Don't sweat it too much on what mobo you get, H55 or P55 chipsets will be good. P55 is theoretically better for overclocking but H55 will support the integrated graphics of the core i3 processor for my system's future retirement as an HTPC!Which leads me onto your Socket 775 system - turn it into an HTPC with a motherboard with integrated HDMI graphics like those Zotac mini ITX ones.Final piece of advice - get involved with forum life on www.redflagdeals.com - those guys are always finding great deals at NCIX, newegg, infonec. Look out for combo deals for mobo and CPU.I think I must have wife 3.0 beta - as mentioned on another thread, since I upgraded to the i3, she's into COD4, so she's very pleased with the upgrades!

Addendum: something like thishttp://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=56244&vpn=i3%20530%20%26%20H55M%2DE33&manufacture=Bundle%20Deals&promoid=1207It's "only" an i3-530 which is essentially a lower multiplier than the i3-540. Some have gotten good samples of the 530 and have gotten more GHZ than my 540.

Great advice on Bangoman's part!I still say though, you can cheap up on the cooler but dont scrimp on the motherboard, you need something rock solid that will last and perform, not the cheapest you can find..

...but dont scrimp on the motherboard, you need something rock solid that will last and perform, not the cheapest you can find..

I would tend to agree with that. However, I get a feeling (not based on evidence or fact, just a hunch) that this generation of motherboards (skt 1156) will perform fairly equally where the i3 is concerned. A lot of the reviews are concerned with the performance of a mobo with i5's and the i7-8xx series. The i3 doesn't need a lot of voltage to get up to said speeds so I don't think the electrics get as abused. I'll be sure to let you know if my mobo goes south.Having said that I don't leave it overclocked 24/7, only for gaming. Stock speeds and speed stepping are more than adequate for general daily use. The Gigabyte motherboard has a nice profile system system that makes it very simple to change between stock and OC'd on boot up. The other thing I like about the Gigabyte is that for a "budget board" the H55M-UD2H has the same BIOS and settings as its higher end range, which makes it super easy to follow overclocking guides. If you believe all this copper malarky then the UD2H has almost as much copper as the higher end ones.There was also interesting discussion on another forum about the cost/abuse ratio, i.e. the lower the cost the higher the abuse and the higher the gains! I'm not going to be too mad if I fry a $100 mobo but I really don't think that's as issue. We shall see.

I think I'll get the prize for being a major PITA here, but...Over at Tomshardware they have a bunch of performance charts for CPUs and the 9650 beat every i3 and most i5s in every test.So (and leaving aside the future upgrade options), given that the 9650 appears to run as fast or faster than the i3s and most i5s, is the increase in RAM speed and BUS speed on the L1156 MB and the DDR3 RAM going to even things out or make it faster?

Yeah i5/i3's are just newer versions of the Core Duo line.. they were never meant to outperform anything, just a name change and more Media instructions.

Yeah i5/i3's are just newer versions of the Core Duo line.. they were never meant to outperform anything, just a name change and more Media instructions.

But there a must better deal and they perform really well. Not that far off from the i7.

But there a must better deal and they perform really well. Not that far off from the i7.

I don't disagree that it isn't. But at a certain level they both(i5/core duos) lag behind the i7. Read up on QPI (quick path interconnect), it's really what sets the i7 apart from any other chip. The next Gen Sandybridge also has 2x the QPI lanes as the i7. It really is that simple, however manufacturering the QPI components is very expensive, the increase die size yeilds less chips per wafer.

I don't disagree that it isn't. But at a certain level they both(i5/core duos) lag behind the i7. Read up on QPI (quick path interconnect), it's really what sets the i7 apart from any other chip. The next Gen Sandybridge also has 2x the QPI lanes as the i7. It really is that simple, however manufacturering the QPI components is very expensive, the increase die size yeilds less chips per wafer.

Thing is he's on a budget and it's basicly the best thing he can do with his money. Of couse the i7 performs better though!