I said "just about everyone" You are obviously an exception. It is probably a better idea to base expected performance on the norm rather than the exception. I also said it depends on your flying style. I highly doubt you are running the addons I run at the settings I run.

I guess I'm an exception too! I have an E6850 @ 3.00Ghz 4GB mem and a 9800GTX card, and I get good performance, even with complex aircraft. Take a look at my videos! You can get good performance at 3Ghz, but you need good components. like fast memory 800Mhz minimum. Very important is a video card with at least 70GB/s Video Memory Bandwidth.

That's all fine and dandy... be remember the OP's chip isn't 3GHz, it's only on turbo... My 3GHz AMD chip is crap compared to you guys with the Q9650's... Like I listed...rural flying will be alright, but he's not going to get the PMDG MD11 flying into ORD with 20fps.

You cant just say xx ghz clock speed, as performance cannot be measured by clock speed. Performance per clock cycle varies wildly from architecture to architecture. Things like instruction pipeline length, cache size, cache speed etc makes using clockspeed as a performance indicator pointless. The only time it has some merit is if you compare the clockspeed of two chips of the same architecture, for example i7 920 at 2.66ghz vs i7 950 at 3.06ghz