I've been doing different upgrades throughout the years and the one upgrade that made the most difference in load times in FSX were CPU upgrades. Upgrading to faster hard drives did make some difference but not as much as upgrading to a faster CPU as far as load times are concerened. I currenlty have an i7 2600k and a 240GB SSD. I didn't notice any difference in load times in FSX going from a slower SSD to around a 2x faster SSD. I noticed some difference in load times after upgrading from a 1TB to a 160GB SSD. Would upgrading to an i7 3930k with quad channel memory from a 2600k with dual channel memory speed up load times in FSX? I can afford an i7 3930k and a decent x79 motherboard and I can sell my i7 2600k and Intel DP67BG motherboard for around $320 and that means I have the X79 motherboard covered if I can sell the package for that price or maybe I can just build a 2nd PC with my current hardware and use it strictly for work, photoshop, and internet browsing right now but if it's a waste of money upgrading to a 3930k for FSX then I'll stick with my 2600k.

It makes sense because at load time FSX uses as many cores as available to it. Also by "a 2x faster SSD" I guess you mean a SATA III vs SATA II SSD? People keep taking MAX sequential read speed as a reference for SSD speed, which is far from reality in terms of load. An SSD only hits max speed in sequential access of large files and / or high queue depths. In the real world with typical desktop loads that rarely happens and random access speed is very similar in SATA II SSD's. So for the most part, while the SSD can't transfer data at 280MB/s or more because of the nature of the workload, the difference between a SATA II and a SATA III SSD is minimalIf you want more cores, I believe Intel is about to announce the new octo-cores for LGA2011 in April or something

Simmers switching from an HDD to an SSD report about a sizable 10x speed-up in load time (and no benefits during run-time).Cheers,- jahman.

The quad memory chanel might shorten your load time with a % or two, so unnoticable. But the extra cores should give you noticable faster load times on the 3930K. Using HT you can reduce loadtimes slightly at the same clockspeed. But using HT leads to lower max overclock, and that increases load times. So in the end you get similar load time but lower FPS with HT and overclocking.

the extra cores should give you noticable faster load times on the 3930K

FSX load times seem to be bottlencked at the HDD, which is why SDDs offer the 10x speed advantage. Any speed increase brought about by an octacore CPU beyond the 10x speed-up of an SSD would seem to no longer be significant.Cheers,- jahman.

FSX load times seem to be bottlencked at the HDD, which is why SDDs offer the 10x speed advantage. Any speed increase brought about by an octacore CPU beyond the 10x speed-up of an SSD would seem to no longer be significant.Cheers,- jahman.

No way you get a 10x speedup in load times out of an SSD. 3x, 4x maybe depending on the HDD speed, and it's very easy to test the impact of core count on load times jahman

No way you get a 10x speedup in load times out of an SSD.

I don't have an SSD (unfortunately) but others in this sub-forum have reported a load speed increase in the order of 10x when lots of scenery is present (as in "10 minutes down to 1 minute").

it's very easy to test the impact of core count on load times

Sure enough, but what I am saying is any speed-up gained beyond 10x is irrelevant. Suppose before an SSD your load time was 12 minutes. Now its one minute and 12 seconds. So you add an octacore CPU. Now your load time is (suppose) 55 seconds. Big deal.Cheers,- jahman.

Edited February 17, 201214 yr by jahman

I don't have an SSD (unfortunately) but others in this sub-forum have reported a load speed increase in the order of 10x when lots of scenery is present (as in "10 minutes down to 1 minute").

No way you get a 10x speedup in load times out of an SSD. 3x, 4x maybe depending on the HDD speed, and it's very easy to test the impact of core count on load times jahman

For me my load times litterally are 10X as fast. With my HDD, load times are like a crawl but with my SSD, it goes by really quickly.

It's not even close to 10 times faster jahman. Believe me, I have tested it. I guess there's portions of the load process that are storage limited and other CPU/core count limted

It's not even close to 10 times faster jahman. Believe me, I have tested it. I guess there's portions of the load process that are storage limited and other CPU/core count limted

For me my load times litterally are 10X as fast.

Cheers,- jahman.

Sorry, I don't buy that

Well I am at this second putting in a 5400rpm HDD in my system to be able to check FSX performance on a slow HDD vs SSD on Intel x25m G2. (I do also have a 160GB raptor and a raid0 with two 7200 disks that I might throw in to the mix.)My guess is that an SSD removes the storage bottleneck with regards to load times and puts the CPU as the botleneck.

Well I am at this second putting in a 5400rpm HDD in my system to be able to check FSX performance on a slow HDD vs SSD on Intel x25m G2. (I do also have a 160GB raptor and a raid0 with two 7200 disks that I might throw in to the mix.)My guess is that an SSD removes the storage bottleneck with regards to load times and puts the CPU as the botleneck.

please let us know about you findings Lars :)

_{I will.Unless my wife strangles me before. She hates it when I fly over the same place over and over again for hours :Shocked: I just forgot how painful it is installing things on a HDD. Especially a slow one}

For me, it's 7x faster on an SSD compared to a fast HDD: ~3.5 min on a 10,000 RPM Velociraptor, ~30 sec from a 300GB Intel 320 SSD. Same machine, same configuration on both drives.