Dear Avsim Readers,I am a keen reader of these forums, yet have never post anything yet. Here's my first.I have been a flightsim user ever since FS95, and currently enjoy FSX truly. I use a 3 year old i7 computer, purchased just after its release in 2009. I have a i7-920 (@3.1 ghz), Sapphire HD4870, 6GB of corsair RAM, DDR3-1333 on an P6T motherboard.I use the PMDG 737 NGX with FSPassenger, EZCA, FS2Crew (in the future), REX, Aerosoft/ORBX/FlyTampa scenery, you name it.Now normally my sim looks fantastic, frames are good, and I am a happy user. However, when using the latest sceneries, especially on cloudy days my sim just does not reach that perfect level of smoothness that gets me involved in flying the way I love to.Therefore, I am willing to invest a bit of money in updating, That is, I seek to improve performance as much as possible by investing around 200-300€.My question to you guys, is how ! Should I seek an improved CPU (Hexcore, although over my initial budget?), or change my GPU to a GTX570?Since I believe Avsim is the place where expertise comes together, I look forward to your replies.Regards!

Regarding the cpu, you are in the same boat as me. However, it sounds like you have it overclocked somewhat, have you tried overclocking it more? You should easily be able to get an I7 920 cpu to 3.5-3.6 ghz, even at stock voltages, as long as you have decent cooling. Note I am running mine at 4.1 ghz.FSX really loves raw cpu horsepower, more than anything. More cores will not help FSX.In regards to your video card, I am not that familiar with the ATI offerings anymore, I know FSX seems to really like the Nvidia cards. If you could get your cpu speed up somewhat, then maybe go with something like a GTX 560 ti, it would probably be better balanced for an improvement in FSX, albeit maybe only slight.From reading others on the forum, it sounds like the Sandy Bridge cpu's are performing much better for FSX, due to the higher clock speeds they can overclock to, like 4.5 ghz and up... but then the newer Ivy Bridge chips are around the corner.I am holding on to what I have, to see what Ivy Bridge brings. I am pretty happy with my system at this time overall...

Edited January 6, 201214 yr by dburne

Thanks for the reply. Overclocking any further would drive my temps up, and I am currently really satisfied with my stability. However, I somewhat think my GPU could be a bottleneck, as it is from the GTX260 age. Besides, I have heard many bad comments on ATI cards since my purchase back in '09. Any thoughts on this?

Edited January 6, 201214 yr by Jeffrey Wooldridge

I saw a little improvement when I went from a GTX 260 to my GTX 460, nothing major but a little - I think it better balanced with my cpu running at 4.1 ghz.Hopefully someone that has upgraded from the gpu you have can comment better.

Since you are running an ATI HD4870, what you need is Bojote's Tweaks.The gist of Bojote's Tweaks is replacing FSX's old Shader Model 2 with the less old Shader Model 3. This is really important for ATI/AMD cards because, unlike nVidia, they have deprecated their implementations of SM2.And guess what: Shader Model is essential for rendering clouds! So that's why Bojote's Tweaks are so important for you.Cheers,- jahman.

Edited January 7, 201214 yr by jahman

Hi Jahman, Thanks for the reply. I have already ran that tweak some time ago and did not achieve any notable performance increase. Would you (or anyone) say that Nvidia by any means does a far better job in drawing those clouds in FSX, urnelated to the shader model?Regards

You're welcome!nVidia does better with clouds because it has a better implementation of Shader Model 2.Cheers,- jahman.

I have just ordered a 560ti. Thanks all for the advices!