HeliRaptor

First is my system was build to handle 2 main tasks VMware Virtualization (vSphere 4 to be exact) and FSX (as well as some BC2 in SLI):ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 motherboardIntel Core i7 Extreme 975 with slight OC to 3.45 on air (Cooler Master V8 CPU Cooler keeps CPU idle around 36C)12GB Corsair Dominator (DD3 at 1805 mHZ)2 - EVGA GTX 580 SC (Black Ops Edition) in SLI (Only one is used with FSX)1200 Watt PC Power and Cooling Power SupplyCreative Labs X-Fi Titanium750 GB Seagate drive dedicated to OS and a few apps750 WD Black Dedicated to FSK500 GB Seagate drive for storageThis system runs everything I though at it at max settings with no issues until I run FSX. FSX would struggle to produce a constant 30FPS even with all Nick_N tuning suggestions. I thought that it was odd but just lived with it and changed misc settings as needed. Over the last couple days I have been playing around with the Affinity Mask setting and HT.I found that with HT off (only 4 cores) and no Affinity Mask settings that it still performed rather horrible. I turned on the Affinity mask and played with the numbers and found that with HT on (all 8 cores) and Affinity mask of 255 that the system now could easily sustain 30 FPS in Boston Logan International and the JFK Airport in New York. I would get an occasional stutter but it was now more than acceptable. I then unlocked the FPS and chose unlimited to see what would happen. I now seen rates in the mid 50's and it on occasion would hit 140 or so, but mid 50's was the average. This was also experiencing some intermittent stutters and a bit more often.I now set the Affinity Mask setting to 15 with HT on and found that FSX would still use all 8 cores but it appeared that most of the load was on only the 4 physical cores as the 4 virtual cores had a very light work load that may have been the OS or one of the couple add ons that I am running. With these settings I experienced the high frame rates as above but the stutters were gone. This seems to have made the simulator much more enjoyable to use. I will keep these settings and play with them some more and report if anything changes.FSX itself is set to UltraHigh on most areas that can be tweaked. I have the traffic dialed down to only 20% as that is plenty of ground and water traffic for my use.Thank You for starting this topic and helping me make my sim experience more enjoyable.At some point I will be experimenting with SSD for FSX to see if I gain any other improvements other than faster load times.