SAAB340

With Skylake I'd say it's worth upgrading from 2500K. I run two systems myself. One OC'd SandyBridge-E and one OC'd Skylake. The Skylake system is giving me noticeable better FPS in FSX during gameplay without needing to look at any FPS numbers. When it comes to photo scenery texture loading however... the 6core SandyBridge-E is still noticeably better at that but at a lower FPS. OC'd Skylake with fast DDR4 is notably faster than SandyBridge, not to mention the improvements the whole platform gives. Yes. Skylake is 4.5 years later and 'only' faster enough to make a difference. But, you will clearly notice the difference without having to resort to reading numbers from a benchmark. If we look back a further 4.5 years we're at the introduction of Core2 and for that matter, the top of the line hardware at the introduction of FSX. The improvement from the first Core2 CPUs to SandyBridge was a lot, lot larger than SandyBridge to Skylake. A further 4.5 years back and we are talking the first Pentium4 CPUs and AMD Athlon, miles behind the Core2 line. So the single core processor improvements have really slowed down. But they haven't completely stopped.

I know its a bit of a late reply Bruce but its better on the SSD full stop. It doesn't matter if that SSD also contains OS and/or FSX. To use separate drives are only of relevance with old school mechanical hard drives. Photo scenery on SSD not only have the quickest initial load times, it also loads quickest whilst flying. I've tested this a lot.

Yeah, the 32bit virtual address space used thay gives you the 4GB hard limit. We totally agree. If you were building a new machine and need to buy new RAM it's obviously not a bad idea to go for the 16GB instead if the 8GB. But as the OP has 8GB already it's not gonna make a difference for FSX to upp that to 16GB. Getting 2400MHz CL10 RAM would yield another 7% FPS. But overclocking the CPU will yield about 15-25% more performance alone. Without paying for the new RAM. Sure enough, both overclocking AND using faster RAM would be even better. But personally I'd be inclined to save that money towards a Skylake system with DDR4 instead as the RAM will have to be changed at next update. A 3570K with a z77 MoBo and water cooling is just waiting to be overclocked. Read up on it and try it. I'd guarantee you'd notice the difference in performance, and it is for free, ready to be done now.

When something looks too good to be true it normally is. That still applies. Unfortunately there's no massive load time improvement with Skylake. Even though I double checked, I basically messed up. There were several MSE2.0 states missing in the scenery.cfg I found out when I checked it over once more. Therefore, I've had to re-run the texture load and load time test. I've kept the original data in the result image in red and marked it as incorrectly configured as the image will still appear in the original post above, and its too late to edit the text in the post. So here are the updated results: Unfortunately there's nothing exciting in them. The incorrect scenery configuration had only a minor effect on the texture loading but had a larger effect on load times. Basically, the texture loading is still in line with the FSXmarkCPU improvements while using the same RAM settings for Skylake and SandyBridgeE. And now the load times are in line with them as well. Sad but true. There's still a healthy improvement compared to the several generations older SandyBridgeE clock for clock, like for like. But compared to Haswell, the indications are that there won't be much Improvement with Skylake when it comes to texture loading or load times.

There is NO performance improvement to be had with more than 8GB RAM. FSX is a 32bit program and is therefore not able to ever use more than 4GB of RAM. That's why we get Out Of Memory crashes when we turn up the settings too much even thou many people have 16GB or more RAM in their computers. As you have 8GB RAM and FSX can use 4GB, that leaves you with 4GB of RAM for the OS and all other background applications that you might have running. That is way more than enough for background processes. Depending on the speed and timings of your current RAM you might be able to get about 10% more FPS with faster lower latency RAM. But that depends on what you use at the moment. Kind of a bit of a waste though to buy new DDR3 now though. You are better off saving that money towards a Skylake build with DDR4. If you are on the standard Intel cooler you can spend less than what new faster RAM would cost on a new Cooler and then overclock the CPU. Overclocking will yield a lot more performance. Its overclocking your system that will give you most bang for the buck at the moment. If you're already on a 3rd party cooler it might even be for free.

Yes, it seems like the bigger V-Nand cells are working better with TLC. Haven't seen any reports of them failing (yet..). I've recently trusted Samsung with my money once again for the 850EVO. There is not much choice if you want a 2TB drive. Think the smaller drives have been out for about 11 months now. I assume a lot of people will be more vigilant for this kind of behavior this time and the 840EVO was already showing symptoms after 11 months.

6700k has a built in gfx. The outputs for it are on the motherboard. But you should/will be using a regular gfx card. So make sure the gfx card you're getting has the outputs you need.

Today I've done a further look in to load times and texture loading. I have terabytes of photo scenery myself. Personally I don't use much demanding 3rd party aircrafts or airports. I know that's certainly highly unusual here. So the texture loading improvements that can be gained by using the increased core count in the Intel Extreme line of CPUs is basically irrelevant to 99.99% of people who reads this. But I personally find it an important measurement. Load times however, the time it takes to load a flight, is still a relevant metric for all of us. Texture loading and load times are very much CPU limited as long as you use an SSD. So they scale linearly with CPU clock speed. When I got my SandyBridgeE system I had a quick look at how much effect RAM had on texture loading and load times. The finding then was that it didn't really matter. Today I had a look with the Skylake system @ 4.5GHz and used 2133 15-15-15-36 2T and 4133 18-20-20-40 1T RAM for the comparison. Basically, RAM still doesn't matter for texture loading or load times. (You can't see it without looking in to the decimal points, but by taking the average from 10+ measurements in each test that I've done here, there is a tiny trend that emerges of about half a % improvement by using the much faster RAM. The variance between each of the measurements is still a lot greater than that and half a % is in reality nothing.) I also tested at 4.3GHz at 4 relevant AffinityMasks so I could compare against the SandyBridgeE measurements I've made in the past. My Skylake build uses the same Intel X-25M G2 SSD for OS/FSX that I used to have as my OS/FSX disk in my SandyBridgeE system before I upgraded a while back. So today I simply moved across my 1TB Samsung 840EVO SSD that has all the scenery needed for the test and got to work. This is how Skylake compares to SandyBridgeE (and very likely to regular SandyBridge as well). When it comes to load times and texture loading I guess I should mention that AffinityMask=84 on a Hyperthreaded system performs the same as AffinityMask=14 without Hyperthreading. And AffinityMask=85 with Hyperthreading performs the same as AffinityMask=15 without Hyperthreading. From these results we can see that the texture loading improvements are fully in line with the FSXmarkCPU improvements while using the same RAM settings for Skylake and SandyBridgeE. In texture loading the 4 core 8 thread Skylake still can't beat the 6 core 12 tread SandyBridgeE, but it's getting close. Especially if we factor in the higher possible overclock for Skylake. But as I said before, this is irrelevant to 99.99% of all of you. I know of photo scenery lovers that have left the 8 core 16 tread HaswellE for Skylake and they are very happy with the result. Pretty much all the Intel-E CPUs are poor Overclockers. It's a lot harder to get 6 or 8 cores that all can achieve high clockspeeds on the same chip. So the overclock and the all important single threaded performance that is what matters most in FSX does suffer. What this also shows though is that Skylake offers significantly improved load times over SandyBridgeE. I thought load times were speedy on the bare install we use with FSXmark11 but I thought I'd just forgotten how fast things load without all the add-ons I usually have. But this test confirms a very significant speedup over SandyBridgeE. I've double checked and I have the same add-ons installed on the same disks as I had with the SandyBridgeE when I tested it previously. I used native SATAIII of the chipset with SandyBridgeE as well. The speedup with Skylake is 60-70%, getting larger the more threads that are used. Is this all due to Skylake or is it the sum of a few large, but gradual speedups through the generations of IvyBridge and Haswell? I can't say. Anyone that has upgraded from those platforms that wants to chime in? What I do know is that I'm really enjoying it. I've shown before how much using SSDs instead of HDDs for scenery speed things up. The upgrade from Lynnfield to SandyBridgeE didn't offer anywhere near this load time speedup. Even compared to using all the 6 hyperthreaded cores on SandyBridgeE, Skylake still cuts out 1/3rd of the load time using its 4 hyperthreaded cores. That is very much noticeable. On a HDD I'd not expect as much of a speedup as the HDD will be the botleneck, but I'd still expect to see a noticeable improvement. Now its time to do more flying and less testing on this Skylake build. I've got a brand new SSD waiting to filled with scenery =). My wife just asked how long I'm planning to spend all my free time in front of my new toy as she claims I've only said about 10 words to her the over the last two days. Don't think that is totally accurate but she has a point. Happy flying!

Looking forward to seeing what you end up squezing out of your system in the end as you learn to master Skylake. It didn't actually cross my mind that the MoBos might limit the RAM 'already' at 3600. Very good thing to be pointed out. I guess we will start to see reasonably priced kits up to that sort of speed. DDR4 certainly have come a long way already even though its still very young and is away to become mainstream. I use the AsRock Fatal1ty Z170 mITX. It looks like AsRock have done a good job with their board designs when it comes to RAM. 4133 is the highest strap I have on offer in the BIOS. Been thinking of making use of the unlocked BCLK to see how far my RAM sticks can go. It won't even POST at any timings tighter than 18-20-20-40 @1.4V. Seen the great results at higher mem voltage though. It's always tempting to bump that Voltage higher when overclocking...

Yes. It's the same RAM used all the time. Thanks. I think Skylake and Ivys in general manage a similar overclocks. Maybe a small advantage to Ivy if you De-lidded. But the RAM should ofset that. Hope you got a good chip.Happy building!

I've got myself a 6700K and also a set of high speed DDR4 RAM. A TeamGroup Xtreem 3866 18-20-20-40 2T XMP 2x4GB kit. (Based on the new Samsung K4A4G085WE-BCPB IC's for the overclockers that are interested). I've been able to Overclock the RAM to DDR4 4133Mhz 18-20-20-40 1T on 1.4V. I thought I'd show what the improved IPC and RAM speeds actually do for FSX performance. First of all I put it through the FSXmarkCPU test to show the pure IPC related improvements over previous architectures. If we disregard the furthest left Skylake result for now, we can see that Skylake gives a small 4% pure IPC improvement over Haswell, a 16% improvement over IvyBridge, a 21% improvement over SandyBridge and a 31% improvement over Lynnfield. The IPC improvement over Haswell is really minor, especially if we consider that Broadwell should be in between as well... However, we also have to consider that Skylake uses DDR4 RAM. DDR4 starts at 2133MHz 15-15-15-36 2T. Given that you can't buy DDR4 slower than that, its not realistic comparing Skylake using DDR4 running at 1600MHz 9-9-9-28 1T. 1600MHz 9-9-9-28 1T is a fairly slow DDR3 speed. However you get even slower DDR3 RAM. Especially if you have a kit from early on. Intel actually only officially supports 1600MHz DDR3 RAM on the other listed CPU architectures. Everything else is considered overclocking by Intel. So it's a much better comparison to use the left Skylake result. That gives a much more respectable 11% improvement clock for clock over Haswell, a 23% improvement over IvyBridge, a 28% improvement over SandyBridge and a 39% improvement over Lynnfield. So what does that mean in reality. When your FPS dips low it's normally the CPU that is the limit. So at the same CPU clock, at a time where; Haswell dips to 27FPS, IvyBridge dips to 24FPS, SandyBridge dips to 23FPS or Lynnfield dips to 22FPS, Skylake would only dip to 30FPS. You might say that you can use faster RAM on the other architechtures as well. That is true. But Skylake doesn't stop at 2133MHz, it just starts there. As I said in the beginning, I've been able to use 4133Mhz 18-20-20-40 1T on my 6700K and that is a lot faster than any of the other architectures managed to do with DDR3. Lynnfield was really tricky to combine a high CPU overclock past 1600MHz on the RAM. The memory controller wasn't strong enough. SandyBridge only have a 2133 memory strap so you can't use memory faster than that. Most CPUs manage that though. That still means that even using cheap DDR4 the 6700K at stock speed performs better than any SandyBridge system overclocked to 5GHz. Did I mention that Skylake overclocks too and can use way faster RAM? IvyBridge allowed for a lot faster RAM. Max memory strap is 3200 i believe. However the memory controller in only 1 out of 4 CPUs is able to manage RAM as fast as 2800MHz. Haswell has an even better memory controller where pretty much all CPUs manage 2800MHz RAM and about half of them manage 3000MHz RAM. So what about Skylake? It has a very strong memory controller. The word is that pretty much all CPUs manages 4000MHz RAM. So how does this high speed RAM translate to FSX performance? Today I've been busy running a whole lot of FSXmark11 benchmarks at a variety of CPU and RAM speeds/settings. These are the results: First of all, both CPU and RAM @ Stock speeds. CPU @ stock speed. The RAM @ 3000MHz 15-17-17-35 2T. A common XMP setting for DDR4. This is very sweet spot when it comes to pricing of DDR4 at the moment. Above this and the price starts to soar. CPU @ stock speed. My RAM @ XMP settings 3866 18-20-20-40 2T I appreciate that not everyone is comfortable with overclocking. I'd encourage you to learn how to, but it's not for everyone. Some people are not in to CPU overclocking but are happy to go in to BIOS and set XMP. Well, this is performance Skylake has on offer for you if you consider an upgrade. For those of you that are more in to overclocking I'd managed to get my 6700K up to 4.7GHz on 3.75V. My setup can't handle more heat unfortunately. My Skylake rig is a Fractal Design Node 304 mITX chassi using an old but trusty Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme cooler with a single Noctua 120mm fan in the less than ideal pull configuration. It's not intended for any serious overclocking, but I had to try and see what was possible. I know the serious overclockers will be able to produce even better results. Westman already has. The results I achieved are nothing to be ashamed of though. With stock RAM With 3000MHz 15-17-17-35 2T RAM With 3866MHz 18-20-20-40 2T RAM With 4133MHz 18-20-20-40 1T RAM As you can see, faster RAM does indeed bring more performance. The move to 3000MHz provides the biggest jump in performance, but even faster RAM still helps. You might be saying that the improvement by RAM is so small and doesn't matter. Let me provide you with this final result and you can have a think about it: CPU @ 4.3GHz RAM @ 4133MHz 18-20-20-40 1T Compare 4.3GHz CPU with 4133 18-20-20-40 1T RAM to the previous 4.7GHz CPU with stock RAM. The 4.3GHz CPU one is ever so slightly faster. Just the change in RAM is actually the same as a 400MHz CPU overclock, and that is without actually overclocking the CPU. When you have fast RAM you can still overclock the CPU for even better performance. By going for DDR4 around 3000MHz instead of the slowest 2133MHz RAM it equates to a 200-300MHz CPU overclock. RAM does matter when it comes to FSX. It's one of few programs that can actually make use of faster RAM. There is no magical RAM speed/latency that is needed. FSX is able to make use of faster/lower latency RAM. Just bear in mind though that the price/performance ratio of a high performance RAM kit is appalling. So if money is of concern never pay a lot extra to get faster RAM. But always pay a little extra for a lot faster RAM. DDR3 at 3000MHz is/was very pricy. DDR4 at 3000MHz is a lot cheaper. Thanks to all the people that have contributed to FSXmarkCPU, FSXmark11 and to Westman for providing more details about what RAM overclocks that are typical on different CPUs.

Whatever you do, do NOT buy a flightsim PC with an AMD CPU in it. Period. Unfortunately the AMD CPUs are a lot slower for flightsim compared to Intel i5 and i7 CPUs. You can get away with an i5 CPU. FSX is one of very few programs where RAM speed also matters. Not as much as the CPU, but its still a vital component.

SSD gives you faster load times and prevents a few stutters when sound files are loaded. It doesn't give higher FPS though. Invest in a larger SSD is still my recommendation. I'm personally allergic to any computer that doesn't have an SSD as OS drive.

What DDR3 RAM speed and timings are you running at the moment?

What's clear to me is that a procedure like FSXmark11 could really be of benefit for P3D v3 for hardware guidance. The most obvious name for this benchmark would be to name it P3Dmark15 if it was created now. It could use the same flight path as FSXmark11. (Wouldn't have to) It could use the same testing procesure as FSXmark11. (Wouldn't have to) It would have its own unique, specified settings for the benchmark. (Including aircraft type) It could have a set of different optional resolutions specified on top of a standard 1920x1080 that I believe almost everyone's rig is capable of today. (My suggestions would be 2560x1440, 5760x1080 and 3840x2160) It wouldn't take very long to define this benchmark if the same flight path and test procedure as FSXmark11 was used. Would this be the most optimal benchmark one could concieve for compareing how different hardware perform in P3D v3? No. Would this be more relevant than 3Dmark scores for how different hardware performs in P3D v3? Yes!!! It's probably not a bad idea to upgrade FSXmark11 to FSXmark15 either. With a few optional resolutions specified and maybe a few changes to the settings etc? (Any benefit from harmonising with the settings for a P3Dmark15 as far as possible?) FSXmark11's resolution was specified to what it is because it was the highest resolution almost all monitors of the day were capable of in order to be able to facilitate as many people as possible to do the benchmark. That could obviously be changed today.