CPU upgrade question

[mauriceb]

I have the following setup right now:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 at 3 GHZ on a Gigabyte motherboard GA-X38-DQ6 with 2 GB DDR2-1066 memory.
2 330GB SATA2 disk drives configured in Raid 0 mode.
XFX 8800GT video card with 512 MB DDR3 memory

This motherboard supports a quad core CPU, so my question is: If I just changed the CPU to a quad core such as the Intel Quad Q9300 or better still the much pricier Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850, would my PC still boot without making any changes to the OS? I assume the BIOS will recognize the new CPU and I may have to optimize the BIOS settings, but I really do not feel like re-installing all the software.

My guess is that the CPU should be transparent to the OS and that the PC should boot normally. Am I right here?

Thanks,
Maurice

[andarlite]

Yep, you are right. Shouldn't be a problem..... at least I never had any.


Regards,
Henry

[Paul G]

Maurice,

I had a different question but the responses to it may be relevant to you too. I also have dual core and was wondering what the performance increase is likely to be with quad. The upshot is that a higher speed dual is probably better than a quad. In your case you have the former, so you may not notice any increase in performance, if that's what you're looking for.

[Gsey]

Hi Maurice,

My understanding is that if you have used an OEM version of windows then that will not work with a motherboard change. As Henry said a cpu change will be fine but you probably have to make some adjustments in the bios like you said.

Gary

[mauriceb]

Thank you all for the responses. I guess, as Paul said, the question really is what is the performance gain with 4 processors instead of 2 if the 2 processors have a higher clock speed.

I understand FSX will use the 4 cores, but the main program still runs on one core. The other cores are used more for scenery & autogen. In my case, FSX runs OK, but autogen seems much too slow, so even with no performance gain, it would be nice to see an improvement in autogen.

I also find that AI traffic is the real FPS killer, so also wondering if extra cores are able to deal with the traffic, but from what I have read elsewhere, that is still relegated to the one core. Hope I'm wrong ;)

Good to know that I don't need to worry about my original question though ;)


Thanks,
Maurice

[paulj]

This may seem a dumb question but as far as running FS9 is concerned would I get any better performance if I upgraded from my P4 3.2Ghz PC to say a Q6600 quad System running at 2.4Ghz?

This is were I am confused, I would have thought that the more modern cpu's today either Duo or Quad would have to be better than my single core P4.

My present FS machine is getting on a bit now as it's only a P4 3.2Ghz with a Nvida GeForce 7300GS Graphics card and 2 Mb Ram.

I'm thinking of something like a Q6600 Quad 2.4Ghz with 4Mb Ram and a GeForce 8800GT card.

Should I expect to see much of an improvement in FS performance?

Paul

[Gsey]

You will see a good performance boost by doing the upgrade but I also think you will see a night and day difference by just upgrading the graphics card in your current system. The 7300gs really is a low end card.

Gary

[mlscotti]

I too am currently running a p4 w/ 3 mb ram and a 512 ATI graphics card with a projector. I am running FSX however, I keep crashing the system (prob overheat)inthe middle of my flights. I am looking to put together a bare bones system by Tiger Direct. The system I'm looking at is a EVGA nforce 680i Intel Quad core Q6700 2.66 GHz OEM with 4 GB DDR@ and 2- GeForce 8800 GT 512mb graphics cards. You think this is overkill, underkill? any other suggestions i only want to spend $800-$1000.

I will be running project magenta (future)networked on other older computers for MIPs and a touch screen CDU.

[paulj]

Thanks for your reply Gary,
I have now ordered a E8400 duo system with 8800Gt 512Mb card.
I've for the E8400 as it is 3Ghz and I read somewhere that it is better to go for 2 faster cores than 4 slower cores.
Hopefully I should receive this around the middle of next week.

Paul

[LUFTY]

This may seem a dumb question but as far as running FS9 is concerned would I get any better performance if I upgraded from my P4 3.2Ghz PC to say a Q6600 quad System running at 2.4Ghz?

This is were I am confused, I would have thought that the more modern cpu's today either Duo or Quad would have to be better than my single core P4.

My present FS machine is getting on a bit now as it's only a P4 3.2Ghz with a Nvida GeForce 7300GS Graphics card and 2 Mb Ram.

I'm thinking of something like a Q6600 Quad 2.4Ghz with 4Mb Ram and a GeForce 8800GT card.

Should I expect to see much of an improvement in FS performance?

Paul

Hi Paul

FS9 is not designed to take advantage of multicore processors and therefore you will see very little performance gain if any by moving to a similar clock speed dual or quad core processor. The only gain would be to run FS9 on one core and Windows and other applications etc. on the other core.

FSX with SP1 and in particular SP2 has been coded to support multicore processors and therefore spreads the processing load across cores (although one core will be used more than the others because multicore support has only been retrofitted for some functionality in FSX).

On FS9 a higher clock speed is most likely going to be better than dual core.

For FSX depending on the clock speeds of the respective processors it might be better to go for a dual core at a higher clock speed than quad core at lower clock speed however it also depends on the graphics card spec, bus speed etc. etc.

I hope this helps


Lufty