Hi All,I'm just thinking of a processor upgrade. Made necessary by having very low (5-15!) FPS in the UK around London and UK2000 airports.Only realised that my CPU seems to be a bit of a bottleneck by an experiment with overclocking - Never had over clocked before and decided to give it a try tonight - I was incredibly surprised. Using UK2000 East Midlands I got between a 5 and 10 FPS increase by overclocking from 3.4GHz to 3.8GHz!!! However when setting up a little flight in the NGX an old friend who I hadn't seen in a while paid me a visit.... Mr BSOD!So I've been looking. First off. I'm an AMD man and have never been able to be persuaded otherwise - Plus my entire system is geared up for AMD and also I'm hoping that an AMD to AMD upgrade wouldn't necessitate a windows re-install - Took me plenty of time to get FSX just how I like it!Anywhoo I'm currently running a Phenom II x4 965 Black edition (3.4GHz) - The one I'm looking to upgrade to (as its a steal at the price!) is an AMD Bulldozer FX-4 4170 (4.2GHz).Whilst there are the 6 and 8 cores out there, I remember reading and a little scouring the forum seems to reveal that FSX prefers a higher clock core than more cores - correct?Also what do you all reckon, will I see a bit of an increase with that processor? The GFX card is over-specd and the memory is more than ample (16GB!) so the bottle-neck (as backed up by OC tests) seems to be the processor.Thanks,James*Edit* My browser hung during posting and somehow I've ended up with two new topics. Would a mod be kind enough to delete/merge one for me please?*

So I've been looking. First off. I'm an AMD man and have never been able to be persuaded otherwise - Plus my entire system is geared up for AMD and also I'm hoping that an AMD to AMD upgrade wouldn't necessitate a windows re-install - Took me plenty of time to get FSX just how I like it!

I hate to break it to you, but the newer chips aren't that much better. AMD's perform much lower than Intel in FSX scenarios.If you have the money and the patience for a month, wait for Intel's Ivy Bridge. Once you get one and OC it to 5GHZ with an Nvidia Kepler(PCIe3), I don't think you will ever turn back to AMD again. Trust me on this. The performance jump from your CPU to an IB @ 5GHZ would be massive. You will likely see more than a double in FPS in most situations.

Ben is right. If you need your PC for Gaming / FS, AMD may be cheaper than Intel, but they are really inferior. Just read a review on the new FX6100 6-core and it was performing up to 50% under the 4-core i7 2600K in benchmarks. I had one AMD CPU a few years ago, the rest was all Intel.If you want quality / performance go Intel, you won't regret it. As much as I would like to see AMD coming up with a great CPU again (it would mean competition and we all would benefit from lower prices) you have to be honest and say that AMD is no competition at all for Intel at the moment and hasn't been for a few years now. They build cheap CPU's. That's it...

Yeah i would second that i have an AMD 955BE but as soon as IB is coming out am changing to Intel.. to be honest @3.4GHZ my 955 with NGX and traffic.. ok not at heavy airports is steady at 25-30FPS..

Yeah I think its Ivy for me when it comes out too to be honest. But for now I'm stuck with the AMD for the forseeable future. So trying to make the best of it.Unfortunately the processor isn't going brilliantly so far. Its ok but only really starts to perform when overclocked. Which is what I'm trying to do. Managed to get it to 4.8 and its relatively stable. However was only able to run Prime95 on it for about an hour before it fell over. No idea what to do really, not being a hardware scientist I haven't the fist clue what to change to make it work :( - If any of you are overclocking wizzes then please poke your heads in here!!Regards

Intel is better for FSX. If you can afford Ivy go for it and wait a month. The down side is that you would have to change your MoBo too.