ok heres my hardware setup, I have my processor, and video card overclocked as much as I can without my system becoming unstable. ive got a dualcore Pentium D 820 2.8ghz (@2.94 Ghz)AsRock 4coreDual VSTA2 gigs DDR2 SDRAM@ 333 mhzGeforce 8600 GT (512 mb ram) Overclocked about 10% <--- thats PCI expressa dvd burner3 hdds (two 80 gb, and one 320gb) (main hdd is SATA)and a 550 watt PSU I have the most current drivers for video card. I don't know how to overclock the RAM and was wondering if it would be worthwile to give it a shot. also was wondering what else I can do with this setup to max out its peformance while I save up enough to upgrade. another thing I was looking for is somthing to make everything run off the 2nd core by defualt leaving the first core for games. (seems FSX doesnt really use much of the second core, but uses 95-100% of the first one) Thanks for your help

[JOBSCHEDULER]affinitymask=3 set that in your FSX.cfg

[JOBSCHEDULER]affinitymask=3 set that in your FSX.cfg

what does this do

Makes FSX use all cores of your CPU

Makes FSX use all cores of your CPU

Oh sweet :P im gonna try that right away! thats what I need

Oh sweet im gonna try that right away! thats what I need

but I will still take other advice on top of that :):)

Get a cheap aftermarket cooler and OC the CPU further. You might need to add a bit more voltage if its unstable

Get a cheap aftermarket cooler and OC the CPU further. You might need to add a bit more voltage if its unstable

How can I add voltage? Im not sure if my BIOS has an option for that

It should. Usually called Vcore

wow I just tried out affinitymask=3 and now it utilizes 95-100% of core 1 and 60-80% of core 2... Im not surre where the extra 2 ghz of processing power is going seems it only raised my fps maybe 1-2 but I still am throughly impressed that FSX is using that much.. it seems there isn't as many blurries as I had before but i only tried for maybe 5 mins.. I will do further testing when I get home tonight, with some other tweaks as well Thanks guys !

wow I just tried out affinitymask=3 and now it utilizes 95-100% of core 1 and 60-80% of core 2... Im not surre where the extra 2 ghz of processing power is going seems it only raised my fps maybe 1-2 but I still am throughly impressed that FSX is using that much.. it seems there isn't as many blurries as I had before but i only tried for maybe 5 mins.. I will do further testing when I get home tonight, with some other tweaks as well Thanks guys !

Great you got some benefits from the Affinitymask , run the fsx.cfg through website I told you, It may remove the AffinityMask but you can put it back.

I ran fsx.cfg throgh the website, and im kind of hessitant to use that cfg file now.. it seems to have changed some of the options that will drasticly lower fsx's looks, which I dont want.. or id fly with fs9, with 45 fps But I will try it just to see what it does as long as I have my original fsx.cfg backed up it should be ok. But thanks for all the good advise ive gotten more peformance out of fsx today then I ever have before.

I ran fsx.cfg throgh the website, and im kind of hessitant to use that cfg file now.. it seems to have changed some of the options that will drasticly lower fsx's looks, which I dont want.. or id fly with fs9, with 45 fps But I will try it just to see what it does as long as I have my original fsx.cfg backed up it should be ok. But thanks for all the good advise ive gotten more peformance out of fsx today then I ever have before.

Don't worry about the fsx looks you can change that in the settings. The higher the settings on your system it will give low performance.

Actually, sometimes lower settings can look better for FSX. For example, having max autogen isn't that much better looking than Normal autogen (especially from 30,000+ feet), but the difference in performance can be quite large.