Core i7 2600K @ 4.8 GHZasus P8P67-DCorsair Dominator GT 4G @ 2133MHZEvga GTX 260WD Velociraptor 600 GBEnermax Galaxy 1000WSwiftech MCR 220 /radbox/ Apogee XT/ feserWindows 7 HP - 64bitFlight Simulator Gold (pristine)FSXMark07, Global High Cfg: 87.477 fps avg.FSXMark07, Max Cfg: 24.213 fps avg.

Teaser courtesy of MSN Virtual Earth !!! Now if I could get TileProxy to cooperate through the rest of the flight. I'm really fighting the blurries here... but I suppose LOD15 is a pretty high level of detail for commercial airline operations. Just need to get the 3rd party frame limiter going and perhaps textures will actually have a chance to load. I think I'll be settling for max LOD 13 or 14. This computer is smoking my Q9550! So far FSX seems to run about 15C cooler than prime95 stress testing - even with HT on.

Sorry for rambling on for so long but I thought I would just pass you my Sandy Bridge experiences. Hope the wife doesn't read this, she just thought I was cleaning the computer! Good luck Stephen when you finally get all your bits.Terry

You story sounds very similar to mine, right down to the cleaning of the PC and the wife....I went from 3.78Ghz on the i7 920 to 4.73Ghz on the 2600K. Quite a big jump in performance.

Hi Dazz,I can report that the 2600K at default (3.8 GHz Turbo Mode) is noticeably faster (but not by much) than the i7 965EE @ 4Ghz in FSX so any overclock on the 2600K is a bonus. As you know, it's really hard to give exact numbers because every flight is different however I did record FPS during a 1 min takeoff at Heathrow using FRAPS on the old system and replicated it on the new system to compare results. It's not an exact science but it does represent what I'm seeing on the screen. This is (1)i7 965 @ 4GHz v (2)i7 2600K @ 4.6GHzFrames Time (ms) Min Max Avg(1)1069 60000 7 24 17.817(2)1403 60000 10 29 23.383The low FPS were slight stutters in both machines at various points as scenery loaded but most of the time things were smooth.On another matter, I reinstalled all my DCS Combat sims to the SSD the OS occupies (from a 1 TB Samsung) That made a big difference with regard to slight stuttering at certain points during missions. The whole thing is as smooth a silk now so I'm going to have to consider a 256Gb SSD for FSX and DCS, when the prices come down.Terry

Hi Terry,Great info. So even with a slightly lower stock clock, 3.8 turbo on 2600k is faster than the 965 at 4.0 before any overclocking on the 2600k. Cool, glad I am moving from my 920 @3.8 to a oc 2600K bundle at 4.8 then;) BTW I have an SSD for FSX for all but my photoscnery and it works well:)Thanks again Terry for the benchmarks.

You story sounds very similar to mine, right down to the cleaning of the PC and the wife....

Wow, reading this forum is good therapy for a guilty conscience! I thought that I was the only one that used this brilliant explanation for upgrades... :Whistle:BTW during my last "cleaning" I went from Q9650@4GHz to i7 [email protected] and I am really happy with the results in FSX (and other sims).

Wow, reading this forum is good therapy for a guilty conscience! I thought that I was the only one that used this brilliant explanation for upgrades... :Whistle:BTW during my last "cleaning" I went from Q9650@4GHz to i7 [email protected] and I am really happy with the results in FSX (and other sims).

:LMAO: Welcome to the Club!Nice way to clean... our bank account!!

You story sounds very similar to mine, right down to the cleaning of the PC and the wife....

You cleaned the wife?!

You cleaned the wife?!

You cleaned the wife?!

Did you remember to clean the dog?al :Thinking:

You cleaned the wife?!

Here simming will have a hard time catching-up with the Real World because...(drum roll please)In the Real World, if you fly a glider... the wife cleans the glider! :-)Cheers,- jahman.

Hi David,The MSI motherboard would not power up at all or show any signs of life. My power supply might be at fault, but that is a bit unlikely as it worked perfectly a couple of hours before. So after doing everything I could to trouble shoot, I stripped it down again in preparation for shipping the MB back. After I speak with NEWEGG on Monday I will know more about how the RMA process works and how long I will be down. I figured that since I likely have time to wait before I am up and running again I just ordered a new Corsair PSU and a COOLER MASTER HAF X RC-942-KKN1. So much for an upgrade being had for a few hundred dollars...Ha! The Storm Scout is just too tight to work in when it is full of drives, big graphics and sound cards and a huge push-pull air cooler and 7 fans. I could not even get my hand in between the fans and the back of the case to pull the CPU power plug, so a full tower it will be. If I don't like what I hear in regard to the motherboard from MSI or Newegg, I will likely just take the heatsink off, pack it up and send it back for a refund. Asus or Gygabyte are looking pretty good right now. I guess I will have time to start reading my new book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, finish a few writings I have been putting off and figure out what to do with my spare time! Perhaps I will be flying again a week from now, but maybe not. I am already having the jitters and withdrawal symptoms! Kind regards,

Hello Everyone,I can't believe how much I miss flying. Of course, before now I have gone weeks without using FSX when travelling out of the country, and except for checking in and reading the forums everyday, never missed it very much. Not now! I am almost going up the wall!Newegg has given me an RMA for the MSI P67A-GD65 LGA 1155 motherboard, even paying for the cost of shipping it back as well as a full refund without restocking charge. :Hug: I don't reckon this is the first time they they have seen a DOA on this board, or all the others. My new ASUS P8P67 Deluxe motherboard, COM HAF 942 full size case and Corsair modular PSU are all shipping today. A few minutes ago FEDEX delivered my additonal Mushkin 1600MHz (8g total @ 6-8-6-24) RAM so I should be good to go sometime this week. Meanwhile I am reading Sandy Bridge FSX threads on AVSIM with envy on my 7 year old AMD Athlon XP that I first ran FS2004 on. In fact I just installed the latest drivers on the GeForce 7600 GS. This thing is slower than cold molasses rolling uphill, but somehow it once managed running FS9 with all the trimmings not too badly.With a little bit of luck :Four Leaf Clover: I hope to be back in the cockpit sooner rather than later. Thank you for all the advice and encouragement.Kind regards,

Hehe, YES! I have a 7600GS sitting in my closet. Stephen, I'll ship it to you so you can run SLI on your new system... but I'll tell you it needs a fan. The fan that came with it got so loud that I ripped it out and zip-tied an intel CPU fan to it until I eventually bought my GTS250. I will say though, the 7600GS did an alright job even with FSX for me. Aside from the disappearance of many different spikes and artifacts, I observed practically no difference when I upgraded to my GTS250. I wouldn't be surprised if two of those guys in SLI could beat my GTS250.

So far I thought that it's better to switch off Hyper Threading and run the processor chip a bit faster. Now I discovered on my system that photoreal textures are better loaded with Hyper Threading on. Hence I run my i7-2600k @ 4.6 GB air cooled with HT on. I have crisp photoreal textures and a very high image quality.My FSX was never as good as now.

I'm going to go ahead and declare that hyperthreading and tileproxy do not play well together. At least that's my conclusion after 4hrs+ of messing with it today alone. With HT on, the sim was quite jittery regardless if I had frames limited or set to unlimited. Things are much smoother with HT off.

I now retract any previous statements I made about TileProxy operating better with HT off - it appears I was wrong and you were correct RelaxX. Now that I finally have TileProxy up and running properly, I also can confirm that Hyper Threading on allows much better photoreal texture loading. This conclusion comes even after comparing 4.6GHz HT On vs. 5.0GHz HT Off - 4.6GHz HT On still won. And of course when blurry textures started loading while I was running 5.0GHz, frame rates began to drop.

Good thing I have a nice stable 4.8GHz with HT on ;)

Oh, I'll be right there with you after I mod my h50 tomorrow . Do you use TileProxy???