It's been quite a while since I've been around here, or, for that matter, since I fired up the simulator at all. (HINT: The last time I showed up, members were still having an intense debate over when the announced Microsoft Flight was going to ship, and whether it was going to be a true simulator, or just an arcade game. How times have changed.) Anyway, one of the reasons for my inactivity was that I had finally reached the end of usable FSX performance from my AMD 5600+ WinXP machine, which I'm pretty sure was at least six years old. I was planning to build a replacement machine, centered around an i7-2600K, at the end of last year, but soaring HD prices put the kibosh on that idea for a time. Now, as prices and availability have started to return to normal, I'm about ready to take the plunge. But, of course, technology marches on...

 

As I said before, I was originally pretty much set on the i7-2600K. However after doing some reading recently, I was wondering if I should go socket LGA 2011 instead, going with an i7-3820. A comparison of the two in Maximum PC indicated a performance edge for the latter in the areas (photo and video work) which would be important in my "day job." But would there be a significant difference with FSX performance that might make me want to stick with the older chip? (Has anyone even compared both of these?) Also, I had been planning on going with an nVidia GTX 560 video card, as being a good choice for FSX in the sub-$200 range. Is there a better choice in that price range now? Thanks in advance.

Depends. i7 3820 is not a massive performance increase, so it's up to you to decide if it's worth your money. If they PC is not strictly for FSX then just go for i5 2500k. For me, i7 3820 is not worth it...

 

Don't get i7 2600k unless you going to do a lot of video editing and rendering.

 

Also, X79 mobos are usually expensive and uncompatible with the rest of the Intel line (LGA 1155) so if you regret or upgrade in the near future you'll have to buy a new mobo again.

Don't get i7 2600k unless you going to do a lot of video editing and rendering.

 

If you noticed in my post, video work is one of my needs, as is photo processing, which need many of the same capabilities. For this reason, the choice is only between the 2600K and the 3820 -- the 2500, although maybe the best cost/performance option for FSX alone, is a complete non-starter for me.

How performance sensitive is your video/photo work? What are your rendering times currently and where do you want them to be? Answering these questions will go a long way towards determining which platform you should buy into. More cores are great for productivity work, I recently built a 16-core/32-thread dual 8 processor Xeon rig for a customer and it's blazing fast, blows my massively overclocked Ivy Bridge out of the water when it comes to rendering, but my machine blows it out of the water when it comes to gaming. Which is more important to you, that's really the important question.

 

Edit: I see that you're only considering quad cores even on Socket 2011. The extra bandwidth isn't worth the additional cost, and Ivy Bridge memory bandwidth scales very nicely with RAM clock, to the point that even a dual channel i5 3570k or i7 3770k setup with some fast RAM (read: 2133 or higher) will outperform Socket 2011 in many memory-sensitive applications. You should change your 1155 socket option to an Ivy Bridge chip, for this reason. In addition, core count is far more important here than memory bandwidth to begin with, so unless you're going to go with a six-core chip don't bother with 2011.