I'm actually a lot happier. All I did was lower the water setting to high 1x and I gained 5-10 fps in NYC. Now I'm in the 20s. I have a feeling that the two extra cores make a difference. I have a feeling that faster ram makes a difference. I have a feeling that the SSD makes a difference. I have a feeling that a gtx 580 or a very fast gtx 480 makes a difference.I have a feeling that all that added performance translates into even more performance. I have a feeling that all that additional performance translates into spending more money.That does not mean the the 2600K is not a better buy, if you want to save some money. But, Alain did say if money was a concern, the SB was a an excellent alternative.

What you or Alain could do to really help the OP is to test the impact of the two extra cores and the tripple channel instead of taking it by faith that it makes a difference. Just an idea that will be ignored just like always, but it's ok.About graphics, he's set on a GTX580 apparently and that should run 8xSQ + water reflections, but if water reflections don't look realistic to you as happens to be the case for most of us, a 560 should handle 8xSQ without a problem. Actually my 460 can cope with 8xSQ, but it still struggles a bit when I zoom in in the cockpit flying through very dense clouds. No big deal really, but the effect is there. Personally, for FSX I would pick a 560, a 570 at most@TJ: Yes, Intel + Nvidia is the way to go for FSX. Intel CPU's are faster clock for clock than AMD and even AMD hexa cores fall short in FSX, which sort of confirms that 6 cores do not help make up for the lack of raw speed. Same thing as in the I7 990X vs I5 2500K comparison. ANd I know from personal experience since I switched to an Intel quad from a AMD 1090T X6 hexacore with a significant perf boost.As for AMD/ATI video cards, there are countless driver related issues with those. Performance is not any worse, but you will never be able to run the highest levels of FSAA and you will need to spend hours tweaking the sim to get the most out of it

Edited March 4, 201115 yr by dazz

Hence the affirmation why that I rarely respond to these types of forum questions. They almost always turn into a match of whose is bigger.I will say this; 980 is a beautiful chip, 990 is a beautiful chip, SB is a beautiful chip. The proposed OP system is a beautiful thing.I will add I never wait for the next better piece of hardware coming around the corner (there are always corners and always a better coming around one), I buy the best that I can afford to buy and I buy what is on the store shelf today, and I do not buy to upgrade as I basically believe that by the time you need a better GPU or CPU or whatever everything else is outdated anyway.Words of wisdom and note to self.

Gentlemens, I was just answering the OP about his questions regarding his expectation with FSX including video rendering so I told him what I would have done myself nothing more nothing less.When I upgraded from the 775 socket 6 month ago the SB was not out yet, I'm sure I would have buy the SB six month ago, if I had to upgrade today I'll be waiting for the 2011 socket but that's just me.About my SSD PCI-e, I do see a difference compare to what I had FSX on before (velociraptor), the difference I saw right off the bat was the senery not catching up to the plane when flying fast and at low altitude, that can be only me but that's what I saw, I still have popping trees and buildings.It's not about who has the biggest and badest rig, it's about making FSX run smooth with the highest frame rate possible........now I can hear you already....I don't care about my FPS at 20 if I run smooth......what ever work for you is ok with me but I stiil have to see a rig who can run FSX at 20 FPS smooth with the sliders maxed out, so between a rig who can run FSX at 25 FPS average with the sliders in the middle or a rig who can run FSX at 35 FPS + with the sliders all the way to the right.......easy choice for me.I hear a lot of peoples saying FPS doest not matter.....since when? Since when high FPS does not equal smooth play, I also understand that if FSX is smooth at 25 FPS it's better than FSX at 55 FPS full of stutterings, so far I can run FSX at unlimited 35 FPS average cockpit view and 45 FPS average outside view smooth with Orbx scenery, remember sliders to the right, I also tried with locked frame rate at 40 but it does not work...FSX not as smooth...beats me. I consider myself lucky and I'm not here to brag about my rig but to talk with all of you about making FSX better.@ Dazz, how do you want me to test the 2 extra core with the triple chanels? Here, 2600K at 5.0GHz vs the 980x at 4.5GHz http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m52Zz7PY-PI

Gentlemens, I was just answering the OP about his questions regarding his expectation with FSX including video rendering so I told him what I would have done myself nothing more nothing less.When I upgraded from the 775 socket 6 month ago the SB was not out yet, I'm sure I would have buy the SB six month ago, if I had to upgrade today I'll be waiting for the 2011 socket but that's just me.About my SSD PCI-e, I do see a difference compare to what I had FSX on before (velociraptor), the difference I saw right off the bat was the senery not catching up to the plane when flying fast and at low altitude, that can be only me but that's what I saw, I still have popping trees and buildings.It's not about who has the biggest and badest rig, it's about making FSX run smooth with the highest frame rate possible........now I can hear you already....I don't care about my FPS at 20 if I run smooth......what ever work for you is ok with me but I stiil have to see a rig who can run FSX at 20 FPS smooth with the sliders maxed out, so between a rig who can run FSX at 25 FPS average with the sliders in the middle or a rig who can run FSX at 35 FPS + with the sliders all the way to the right.......easy choice for me.I hear a lot of peoples saying FPS doest not matter.....since when? Since when high FPS does not equal smooth play, I also understand that if FSX is smooth at 25 FPS it's better than FSX at 55 FPS full of stutterings, so far I can run FSX at unlimited 35 FPS average cockpit view and 45 FPS average outside view smooth with Orbx scenery, remember sliders to the right, I also tried with locked frame rate at 40 but it does not work...FSX not as smooth...beats me. I consider myself lucky and I'm not here to brag about my rig but to talk with all of you about making FSX better.@ Dazz, how do you want me to test the 2 extra core with the triple chanels? Here, 2600K at 5.0GHz vs the 980x at 4.5GHz http://www.youtube.c...h?v=m52Zz7PY-PI

50% more cores translate into 17% more performance in a heavily threaded benchmark like Cinebench. Nuff saidAlain, to test your system on 4 cores and dual channel you just have to disable 2 cores (1.- in BIOS or 2.- via msconfig -> Boot -> Advanced Options -> Nunber of processors) and remove 1 or 2 RAM sticks to run it on dual channelAnd I completely agree with you and your take on performance / FPS / smoothness

50% more cores translate into 17% more performance in a heavily threaded benchmark like Cinebench. Nuff saidAlain, to test your system on 4 cores and dual channel you just have to disable 2 cores (1.- in BIOS or 2.- via msconfig -> Boot -> Advanced Options -> Nunber of processors) and remove 1 or 2 RAM sticks to run it on dual channelAnd I completely agree with you and your take on performance / FPS / smoothness

OK I'll try that.Yeap! 50% more core = omly 17% more perf. ....don't forget 4.5GHz vs 5.0GHz....here same test with the 980x closer to 5.0GHz

Sure Alain, but a 5GHz overclock in a SB chip is achieved with far less Vcore than a 980X. A 5 vs 4.5 GHz overclock is a fair comparison. SB overclock better, you can't take that from them

Sure Alain, but a 5GHz overclock in a SB chip is achieved with far less Vcore than a 980X. A 5 vs 4.5 GHz overclock is a fair comparison. SB overclock better, you can't take that from them

I agree.... No offence but the SB is an overclocker for dummies, I mean what do you do....nothing, how hard is it, raise the voltage and the multiplier....overclocking the old way is much more fun....at least you can brag about reaching a good overclock by tweaking here and there, adjusting voltage here and there.... Here is a thread I had with Nick when I put my rig together, we had (at least I did) fun exchanging idea and doing the overclock part of it...it's a long thread. http://www.simforums.com/forums/nick-what-do-you-think_topic34241.html

Dario,I have GEX, UTX, Manhattan X, Imagesim KLGA, FSDT KJFK and with complexity and AG to the right, 50% ai, and 10% cars, with poor weather setting and flying a jet, FPS are in the 20's in NYC flying into KJFK. This is with 32aS and HQ textures.I want to be in the 30s.Do you have any of the above sceneries? If you do, can you test FPS with your system. For under 1K, I can pick up the 2600K, motherboard, and faster RAMI'm considering socket 2011, but if this can be achieved now, why wait?Thanks.Jose

@alain I am a little confused about your latest FSMark11 results (80+fps). I believe you posted around 50 fps in the pre-final FSXMark11 runs a few days ago. What has changed? Even the 50+ fps results were amazing but certainly attainable. I ran the FSXMark11 runs on a more sedate 980X (4.0GHz, mem @ 1600Mhz) today and got just about 40+ fps average.ThanksDave

Dario,I have GEX, UTX, Manhattan X, Imagesim KLGA, FSDT KJFK and with complexity and AG to the right, 50% ai, and 10% cars, with poor weather setting and flying a jet, FPS are in the 20's in NYC flying into KJFK. This is with 32aS and HQ textures.I want to be in the 30s.Do you have any of the above sceneries? If you do, can you test FPS with your system. For under 1K, I can pick up the 2600K, motherboard, and faster RAMI'm considering socket 2011, but if this can be achieved now, why wait?Thanks.Jose

Sorry but I fly in Europe for the most part, so no, I can't compare my system to yours in NYC with all those addons. That been said, if you know you're CPU limited there (and you are more than likely), I bet an OCed SB (4.6 4.8GHz) will yield an extra 30 - 40% FPS compared to your I7 @ 4GHz. Maybe not 30FPS all of the time but pretty closeI've said it before: don't expect much from LGA2011 because it's the same old story (1156 vs 1336) the significant performance leap comes from the new architecture, not from more PCIe lanes, or more cores or more memory channels or PCIe 3.0... Jose, you don't even need to believe me, search the web: I'm just a copycat googler, nothing of a guru, just test it yourself and do the maths.

Jose, you don't even need to believe me, search the web: I'm just a copycat googler, nothing of a guru, just test it yourself and do the maths.

I concur! Thanks for your candid response.

@alainneedle1After my previous post(page 1), you supplied two MemTest snapshots that were very revealing.You don't have any words here but I think the pictures speak for themselves. If I read this correctly, the SB system has a faster memory transfer rate but the 980X has an AMAZINGLY low latency of just 10.9ns - whereas the SB has a latency of 40+ns. Are you saying that latency is one of the crucial elements of FSX performance? Are you still saying that you got 80fps FSXMark11 with the maximum cfg file or is the earlier result (50+ fps) the answer? Are you implying that you got the memory latency way down and the results shot up. Sorry, but I am a little confused. Could you explain how we could get that kind of very low latency - can you simply purchase it or is it something that is a BIOS adjustment result?

I concur! Thanks for your candid response.

I'm not sure if you were expecting me to take offense or what, but no, I didn't. Why on earth do you keep asking me for for my opinion anyway? Not only you don't value it too much, which is perfectly fine, but also you have all the tools there right in front of you to figure out yourself what's the best you could do, namely your own rig and the interweb. You can even filter all the info and keep what you want to hear if that makes you happy

@alainneedle1After my previous post(page 1), you supplied two MemTest snapshots that were very revealing.You don't have any words here but I think the pictures speak for themselves. If I read this correctly, the SB system has a faster memory transfer rate but the 980X has an AMAZINGLY low latency of just 10.9ns - whereas the SB has a latency of 40+ns. Are you saying that latency is one of the crucial elements of FSX performance? Are you still saying that you got 80fps FSXMark11 with the maximum cfg file or is the earlier result (50+ fps) the answer? Are you implying that you got the memory latency way down and the results shot up. Sorry, but I am a little confused. Could you explain how we could get that kind of very low latency - can you simply purchase it or is it something that is a BIOS adjustment result?

The first test is from Dazz, the SB does have a faster transfer rate, I tweaked the hell out of these stick, one just came back from repair two weeks ago... ...pushed to hard, the Gigabyte UD-9 has a lot of options in his bios memory wise.These stick are the best I ever used for sure, can't find any triple chanel sticks at 2000MHz 7-7-7-21 1T , the lower the latency the better for FSX that's for sure.I am flirting with danger here because i have to have my QPI/vtt at 1.47v to be able to run that high overclock stable....Also low cas (timimg) is always better, you can tweak your memory in bios BUT be carefull cause it's easy to blow them up with the wrong settings. The 80FPS test result came from the old test with FSX reinstalled, futher more I did disable all services I don't need running in the back ground for the test. I was "gonna" try the other test but I would have to reinstall FSX again and I don't think I'm up for that since I reinstalled a lots of addons.....I hope I answered some if not all of your questions.