After 3 years of dedicated service, I must finally put my AMD Phenom II 965 and Crosshair III to rest.
It has been great to me, providing me many hours of flight time in FSX flawlessly.
However, after a final overclocking attempt, the "Extreme Over-volt" option in the crosshair's bios ran the CPU/NB voltage to 1.700 during a bench test. Needless to say, it did not appreciate that, and quickly shutdown, never to restart. After many attempts to resuscitate, I must admit defeat.
As Dr. Bones would tell Captain Kirk about an unknown red-shirt on an away mission, "it's dead, Jim".

So, to keep things moving in the right direction, I just ordered the new AMD Vishera 8350 4.0 GHz processor to stick onto a new Asus Crosshair V Formula-Z mobo. All my other components will be as listed:

AMD 8350 4.0 GHz
Asus Crosshair V Formula-Z
8 GB Kingston 1600 MHz CL8
ATI 6870 Radeon 1GB
Cooler Master HAF 932 case
(1) 500 GB and (1) 200 GB HDD
Antec 850W PSU
Windows 7x64

Eventually, I plan to O/C this one as well, but only after I see FSX at stock.
Lastly, I should probably upgrade to a SSD, but this will have to do.

I welcome thoughts, suggestions/recommendations.

Anybody here have a similar setup? Problems? Advice?

Anybody still believe in AMD anymore?

Thank you.

I am very pleased to announce that this chippy is now running at 4.55 GHz!
Not a huge gain, but significantly better than the phenom II.
So far with the auto tune feature, on air it did this by itself.
If I start messing with it manually, I wonder what it could do. Maybe a liquid cooler, hooboy!

So, at this clock, I can personally say that the performance is significantly better than the 965 @ 4.0 GHz. The 3Dmark11 scores are significantly higher, and of course, FSX runs locked at 30 FPS almost constantly. Makes those final approaches into Chicago or Hong Kong so much smoother (which was the reason for this purchase anyway).

Not just trying to toot my own horn, I was hoping someone would be interested in the new FX offerings from AMD. It is a healthy and robust pairing between that and the Crosshair V Formula-Z. I give it 3 thumbs up, even though I'll have to borrow one to do it.