I've been running it overclocked at 4.7ghz for years. In the meantime I've spent zero time keeping up with the ivy and haswell stuff and their benefits. 

 

Is there any practical reason to upgrade given the architecture of FSX/P3D? When the 5xxxC stuff comes out, will there be any reason to upgrade?

 

My GPU is a GTX 970. 

I would probably wait for the Skylake k-stuff to come out.  I went from an i7-2600k to i7-4790k, and the gains were not earth-shattering.  If skylake is not a huge leap either, you could probably grab a used 4790k for relatively cheap.  Great GPU tho, love my 970gtx.

You have 4 physical cores running at 4.7Ghz so my inclination is to say no, sit tight. But do tell us what your RAM speeds and timings are...

 

I've got a 3770K at 4.8Ghz with 8gb of RAM at 2200Mhz at 9-11-11-31. I feel like if I won the lottery tomorrow, there's not much out there that I could buy to get better performance on the CPU end.

 

My outlook on Intel is dim though: I think they're making gains primarily in architectures, die shrinks, and number of cores... and not raw clock speeds. I think what flightsims need the most is the latter.

My outlook on Intel is dim though: I think they're making gains primarily in architectures, die shrinks, and number of cores... and not raw clock speeds. I think what flightsims need the most is the latter.

 

I think that is due to them being restricted by silicon. Once they move past making chips with silicon, you'll see increased clock speeds. I read a few articles about computers using light instead of silicon.

I think that is due to them being restricted by silicon. Once they move past making chips with silicon, you'll see increased clock speeds. I read a few articles about computers using light instead of silicon.

 

Interesting, thanks for the links. Similarly, I recall an article in the WSJ a couple of months ago regarding the death of Moore's Law. Let's hope it picks back up soon...

That's what I figured. 

 

I'm actually cool with CPUs being largely stagnant and games focusing on the GPU. Makes it easier for everyone. 

My outlook on Intel is dim though: I think they're making gains primarily in architectures, die shrinks, and number of cores... and not raw clock speeds. I think what flightsims need the most is the latter.

 

That's akin to saying there's been no progress at all in internal combustion engines because redlines haven't significantly increased in 50 years.

 

There's nothing that requires flightsims as a class of application to require clock speed, only that it's easier to write single-threaded code and rely on the hardware to increase your performance. There's lots of ways to increase performance via parallelism, it just requires a different development approach. It's how GPUs have by and large radically increased performance over the past few years.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

I read somewhere that aside from clock speed, a processor's performance can be improved by upping the instructions per clock cycle and performance per watt.