I am mulling over buying P3D this weekend and thinking of dropping my OC from 48x to a more reasonable 46x on my 2700K. Has anyone decided to scale back a little?

Just check a few boxes under shadows and I guarantee you won't be CPU limited :lol: 

 

No seriously, while it remains to be seen how it will do in full parade dress, I think the scales have tipped dramatically in the other direction. 

Even though P3D loves GPU's that doesn't mean it can do with a slower CPU. There ALWAYS will be settings for which you need a good CPU. If you lower the OC, your CPU might become a bottleneck and the GPU might be slowed down. I think that with P3D you can use every bit of juice you have. I certainly will not lower my OC because I know for certain this will have a negative effect on the performance in some way.

 

I would only lower my OC if I could run P3D with ALL sliders maxed and +30 fps plus smooth performance. And that I know won't happen anytime soon, not even with the GPU upgrade I am planning.

I'm getting great performance on my I5-3570k @ 42x.  I don't think overclocking is as vital as it once was, but there's still a performance benefit to be had for sure.

 

I've never ran a higher overclock since I use my simming pc for other production related tasks; however in FSX I always knew I was missing out, whereas in P3D I don't quite have that same feeling.

I recently finished building this system and set up three BIOS profiles; 3.4, 4.0 and 4.5. So far, I've been very happy running at 4.0. The 4.5 was setup to squeeze every last drop out of FSX and I don't think will be used much.

In the cruise, in fact anywhere except about 10,000 below - reduce your clocks down to 2.5GHz.. you might be surprised...

Almost forgot I started this thread. I've decided to bring my OC down to 4.6Ghz from 4.8Ghz on my 2700k for the simple fact that the Sleep/Wake issues I was getting at that OC was annoying. The issues seem resolved dropping this down a hair. I really can't see 200Mhz making that much of difference, but we will see what happens in P3D.

Going from 4.8GHz to 4.6GHz is only a 4% drop in speed... I can't imagine that would make any perceptible difference.  I have opted for 4.3GHz OC on my 4770K... I have had it as high as 4.8GHz but things start to get slightly flaky at that speed and the system is cool and rock stable at 4.3GHz.  I can tell no difference in FSX/P3D (or in any other application for that matter) between the two speeds on my system.

 

Scott

That 200MHz is about 4% down from your original. If P3D would scale linearilly with CPU clock (which it most certainly does not), you would lose the same amount in FPS. With 30FPS that would little over FPS which is mostly unnoticable. I would never trade the stability for something that gives very little performance benefit with pretty much any other software out there other than benchmarks, but that is just me.

I've got an I980X running at 4.2 with a gtx780 and I'm getting phenomenal performance with the stock planes. But what I'm noticing is a big hit in fps with the more complex 3rd party planes, much more of a hit then I had with P3D v1.4 or FSX. 

 

I'm hoping that this has everything to do with these products being designed for the older software and that product's designed and optimized for use with P3D v2 will preform better.  

Was pointless of me to run that 4.8ghz OC I really thought it was gonna benefit me in FSX, I'm back down to 4.5ghz where it runs stable and cool.