Well, I read this whole thread and still really don't have a warm and fuzzy feeling here. Is there a developer out there that has any metrics to prove or disprove HT ability?Maybe they are busy.Bob

I don't think so Bob, it would depend if you OC a lot as well I would think. If you do not overclock then you should have HT enabled as xplane can utilise it for ai aircraft etc. On the other hand a lot of things are not multithreaded and rely on straight single core processing power. So, which is better - part of the cpu rendering engine running @3.3GHz but having more cores for stuff like AI or having the main threads running on a 4.5+ GHz core but less for AI? Myself, I would choose faster cores and less AI. I would swing this way because I cannot be bothered testing but a lot of experience says that most software benefits from faster cores than it does by having more. The only benefit I have seen in xplane having more cores than 4 is for AI.

Ben once wrote that XP10 will benefit from HT in "theory". We wasn't able to estimate the benefit in praxis and I guess it´s still the state of play.I tried HT on/off on my i7 2600k but wasn't able to see anything significant. Can't max out the CPU anyway due to GPU and PCI-Bus restrictions. HT is nothing to worry about until next-gen GPUs with PCI 3.0 are available and affordable.

I don't think so Bob, it would depend if you OC a lot as well I would think. If you do not overclock then you should have HT enabled as xplane can utilise it for ai aircraft etc. On the other hand a lot of things are not multithreaded and rely on straight single core processing power. So, which is better - part of the cpu rendering engine running @3.3GHz but having more cores for stuff like AI or having the main threads running on a 4.5+ GHz core but less for AI? Myself, I would choose faster cores and less AI. I would swing this way because I cannot be bothered testing but a lot of experience says that most software benefits from faster cores than it does by having more. The only benefit I have seen in xplane having more cores than 4 is for AI.

Sorry for the late reply Jason. Thank you for your synopsis, it really made good sense.RegardsBob