I’ve been enjoying the remaining good weather up here in the northern U.S..

I haven’t made too much progress on the shell, however I have been playing with my PCs trying to figure out what is the best setup for my ‘pit.

Although I love FS9, I also love eye candy. That said, I have decided to take the leap back into FSX. After some reading, and some purchasing, I think I’ve come up with a very strong FSX system that will last for awhile, or at least until the i7 processors come down in price.

FSX seems to be CPU bound, so given a great graphics card, check, fast memory, check, and a fast hard drive, check, the biggest item is the fastest CPU you can find. I won’t get into any of the debate over quad or dual core. I have come to the personal conclusion that quad cores won’t do me any good on a machine that’s only running FSX. Yes, SP2 does take advantage of multi cores, but not enough in my opinion to make a difference.

I purchased a Intel E8600 Dual Core processor (3.33 GHz). This is the new 45nm chip that runs cooler and is more energy efficient than the older 65nm chips (Be sure that your motherboard supports the 45nm chips! My old board did not, even though it supported the older dual cores).

The board I have allows overclocking and it appears that you can get this thing up to 4.0 GHz with no voltage modifications at all and just simple air cooling.

So far, so good. I’m getting good framerates at the default processor settings, so it will be fun to push this processor to se what it can do.

It appears that I can get FSX to run at least as well as FS9 did on my previous dual core chip. Plus, FSX has some features that I have been really missing with FS9.

It’s time for some fun!

I apologize for any inconvenience.