You should be able to overclock that processor to easily 3.0 if you have enough cooling.

As it is though it is better than my rig and mine runs FSX quite well. 

Well, I recently bought a new rig (you can see the specs in my signature). I also got FSX Deluxe.

I have no real intention of being disrespectful to FSX, but the prevailing feeling I get when I take a look at it is that it's a software product that was not structured or built, but was instead done by just piling up everything (software code, models etc) in some non-organized way. Sure, it has some reasons to be heavy on the PC to some extent, but not nearly as much as it is. Big, open spaces are demanding and require a fair amount of computing, but it's just not optimized properly; not even close.

I was ready to give up on FSX, but instead I decided to give it another chance. If I up all the settings and keep the scenery settings at medium-high level with dense traffic and keep the traffic sliders below 30 (airport vehicles = 0 ) I get fair performance (which in my view is no less than 30 fps). Since you answered my topic, you know how the menus would behave. Putting the traffic sliders to 100 drastically slows the sim and doesn't produce nearly as much visible traffic as it  probably should. Upping the scenery settings above the level I mentioned is more than likely not an option for people who have sub 3K$/4GHz CPU PCs.

Overclocking wont help very much (in my case 3.2 overclock didn't) and although the sim uses all four cores, overall CPU usage is not very high which practically means at least two cores do very little when they could be doing much more.

One thing I like about FSX are the cockpits. They are really nice. It's a shame about the rest of the sim. It could really be thoroughly enjoyed by lots of people, but I guess that's the rule in big business: you know what your consumers want, but you give them just the opposite and you sugar-coat it.

Cheers

ivan.lybe wrote on Feb 4^th, 2009 at 6:43am:


Ivan, have you followed the setup optimizations that have been documented here on SimV by Nick.  If you haven't they can make a world of difference.  MS, with FS anyway, has always built the sim for future hardware to maiximize the life of the product.  Also, based on Nick's analysis, MS did not move to shader tech.  I don't have a clue why and that adds to the CPU load.  I believe that if you follow Nick's setup you will use more than just 2 cores.  I'm using a 2 core machine and while the sliders are not maxed I can enjoy the sim just fine.  Just something you may want to check out.