Identifying the bottleneck

[ematheson 19]

I fly FS2004 on a laptop. The laptop is not a shabby performer, but I've never entirely gotten rid of stuttering - even on FS9. The game stutters badly when increasing mip levels on terrain tiles - and gets even worse when using addon scenery. The delay in loading terrrain textures must surely be due to a slow component somewhere, but I don't know quite where. I suspect that the hard-drive is old and slow and that switching to an SSD would fix the issue, but before I pull the trigger, I'd like your input on identifying the issue, as RAM or graphics card issues are a possibility.

 

GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6620G 512Mbs DD3 with core clock 444Mhz and memory clock 667Mhz

in Crossfire with AMD Radeon 6660M 1G GDDR5 with core clock 600Mhz and memory clock 800Mhz

 

CPU: AMD A8-5300 quad core clocked at 1.4Ghz (don't know more than that)

 

RAM: 6Gbs installed (don't know more than that)

 

HDD: Toshiba MK6476GSX SATA Disk Device 640Gbs 5400 RPM 8Mbs Cache

 

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

My guess is that the CPU is the bottleneck... but indeed hard to pinpoint.