So I have some money to spend and I swore to myself that this time I am not going to go down the "upgrade" route but instead I'll buy a whole new system.It'll pretty much be a "for FSX only" system, OS will be Windows 7 Professional.Once I had my financial "pain threshold" factored in, I have arrived at a possible setup:MOBO: Asus P6T SE CPU: Intel® Core i7-930 Socket 1366 @ 2800MHz RAM: 6GB DDR3-RAM, DDR3-1600 (3x 2GB Kit) HD: 2TB S-ATA II (I am tempted to add a 60GB Corsair SSD for OS/Swap here...) Video: 1.28GB nVidia® GeForce GTX470 PCIe 2.0 Sound: Realtek ALC888 7.1 Channel HD onboardI really don't want to mess around with oc'ing or Raid setups.I do expect decent but not stellar performance running FSX on one 1680x1050x32 FP Display.Software side will be:# FSX + Acceleration Pack# MyTraffic X# Flying Club X# Vancouver Plus by Jon Patch and Holger Sandmann# Active Sky X # X Graphics # FS Global 2008# Scenery Tech Landclasses North America and Europe# UT Europe,USA and CanadaLots of VFR / GA Flying as you can derive from the addons...and I like my AI traffic on "high".Would you see any weak points or have some suggestions where the system might be improved?Thanks in advance for your time and suggestions

If your not gonna OC, get the i7 950 no matter what. It's only slightly more expensive than the 930, and has a higher stock clock, plus is easy to OC for future. Without OCing, you're bottlenecking your FSX performance, as these chips are made to OC.

The i7-950 is only $230 at microcenter right now! My only advice would be to consider waiting a couple more months for the new Sandy Bridge processors. If you don't like what you see at that time, perhaps the i7-950 will have dropped even further in price.

The i7-950 is only $230 at microcenter right now! My only advice would be to consider waiting a couple more months for the new Sandy Bridge processors. If you don't like what you see at that time, perhaps the i7-950 will have dropped even further in price.

Yes maybe, becasue if you upgrade now it means switching to LGA1366 motherboard and then you'd have to switch again when sandy bridge comes out.

Thanks for the input genlemen! I am in no need to rush so I may just hold off a little longer for the new CPU generation.Nevertheless: I may be able to get my hands on the above setup with the 930 factory oc'd (so presumably stable) to 3,2Ghz for a "mere" 150 Euros more...the 950 will come at 3,02Ghz stock speed. Like I said above I don't want to oc myself but once the rig comes factory overclocked...EDIT: This in turn makes me think of switching over to an i7 870 (2,93Ghz)...and up the RAM on the box to 8GB with an actual drop in the overall price to bootYou think this may be a smart thing to do? @Luckyman, you are running a 930 + a Geforce 470. How does FSX fare on your system?

i7 870 is a different socket type and core architect. Doesn't perform nearly as well as i7 9xx range.

Thanks for the input genlemen! I am in no need to rush so I may just hold off a little longer for the new CPU generation.Nevertheless: I may be able to get my hands on the above setup with the 930 factory oc'd (so presumably stable) to 3,2Ghz for a "mere" 150 Euros more...the 950 will come at 3,02Ghz stock speed. Like I said above I don't want to oc myself but once the rig comes factory overclocked...EDIT: This in turn makes me think of switching over to an i7 870 (2,93Ghz)...and up the RAM on the box to 8GB with an actual drop in the overall price to bootYou think this may be a smart thing to do? @Luckyman, you are running a 930 + a Geforce 470. How does FSX fare on your system?

FSX runns very well of course, I have my CPU @ 4GHz frame rates are usually in the 50s in bigger cities like seattle and around airports with 30%Ai I get around 30FP/S But in the air it exceeds 200 sometimes.

Well technically it can't exceed the refresh rate of your monitor. My LG monitor is 200Hz, therefore 100FPS and 200FPS looks different. In a 60Hz monitor, 100-200FPS looks exactly the same.

Well technically it can't exceed the refresh rate of your monitor. My LG monitor is 200Hz, therefore 100FPS and 200FPS looks different. In a 60Hz monitor, 100-200FPS looks exactly the same.

Yup I know it's irrevant but that's just what the FP/S counter says.

i7 870 is a different socket type and core architect. Doesn't perform nearly as well as i7 9xx range.

I never thought that dual vs. triple channel RAM and the different socket made that much of a difference. Other than that it appears they are pretty much the same architecture albeit different steppings?Thanks for the heads up!

He's not talking about RAM it's the CPU socket, LGA 1156 or 1366. It's because the i7 has QPI and also the X58 is much faster than the P55 hub.The RAM makes a really small differnce (DDR2 vs DDR3) http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/262240-28-tomshardware

He's not talking about RAM it's the CPU socket, LGA 1156 or 1366. It's because the i7 has QPI and also the X58 is much faster than the P55 hub.The RAM makes a really small differnce (DDR2 vs DDR3) http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/262240-28-tomshardware

Hence my astonishment... Quickpath vs. DMI appears to be the big difference on die and may be responsible for the differences in performance. There is however an Anandtech Article that copares the 920 and the 870 in FSX which kind of places them into the same category...

a few things with that:1: the 920 is old. even the 930 is getting old. Now its the 950+2: they arent taking Overclocking into account, with which 99% of i7 9xx users do, and FSX benefits greatly from. A 9xx i7 will OC better than the 870. Even the 870k

a few things with that:1: the 920 is old. even the 930 is getting old. Now its the 950+2: they arent taking Overclocking into account, with which 99% of i7 9xx users do, and FSX benefits greatly from. A 9xx i7 will OC better than the 870. Even the 870k

They do overclock both to 4.2 Ghz, don't they?FSX appears to scale well with clockspeed but overclocking is not what I want to do. So I extrapolate from the article that the 870 is slightly faster in both minimum and average framerate than the 920 (and probably the 930) at stock speed - and that they draw even at 4.2 Ghz.Staying with the older 1156 socket may not be all that smart upgrade wise, but the important thing for me is the -expected- increase in performance over my current C2D 8500 /GTS 260 system - sans overclocking on my part.

But then again, there are things such as tri channel ram that when you don't OC, could have a significant performance increase in FSX.