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Which processor is best?


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Hello. Next week, I'll finally be buying a new processor to replace my now out-dated i5 2320 3GHZ one. There are two options available to me:

 

Intel® Core™ i7-5960X Processor Extreme Edition

(20M Cache, up to 3.50 GHz)

 

Intel® Core™ i7-4790K Processor

(8M Cache, up to 4.40 GHz)

 

While the first one is a lot slower, it can be OC to 4.4GHZ on a cooler. So, that'd mean they'd be 8 cores, each working at 4.4GZ, as opposed to just 4 cores as with the 4790K. Would FSX make use of all of those 8 cores, and will it cause stuttering/tearing? Will X-plane also make use of those 8 cores? If both CPU run at the same speed, then surely the 5960X is best, right? Dumb question, but I hear people say that FSX has problems with more than 4 cores and X-plane has issues with hyperthreading. The 20MB cache of the 5960k would do what exactly for the sim? I'll also be getting Titan X GPU.

 

The 5960X would be better for all of my other games, but how does it work with FSX/X-Plane/P3D?

 

Thanks folks.

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You REALLY, REALLY need to read a bit about how a computer works. These types of questions have NO magic answers. Posting this stuff multiple times across multiple forums is NOT going to solve your problem. Give us a break and to a little homework before posting these "What's The Fate Of The Universe" question(s).

 

Doug

Intel 10700K @ 5.0 Ghz, Asus Maxumus XII Hero MB, Noctua NH-U12A Cooler, Corsair Vengence Pro 32GB 3200Mhz, Geforce RTX 2060 Super GPU, Cooler Master HAF 932 Tower, Thermaltake 1000W Toughpower PSU, Windows 10 Professional 64-Bit, and other good stuff.
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You REALLY, REALLY need to read a bit about how a computer works. These types of questions have NO magic answers. Posting this stuff multiple times across multiple forums is NOT going to solve your problem. Give us a break and to a little homework before posting these "What's The Fate Of The Universe" question(s).

 

Doug

 

 

Ok, maybe the questions are rather broad, but don't you think your response is a little harsh?

 

Klaatu barada nikto

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You REALLY, REALLY need to read a bit about how a computer works. These types of questions have NO magic answers. Posting this stuff multiple times across multiple forums is NOT going to solve your problem. Give us a break and to a little homework before posting these "What's The Fate Of The Universe" question(s).

 

Doug

 

Instead of posting this criticism, you could have provided me with helpful advice instead. Cheer up old chap.

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For FSX and XP, raw computing power rules. So basically the highest possible clock speed. Overclocking a CPU is risky business albeit very easy. Personally I would stick with the CPU that has a higher clockspeed right out of the box and keep it there. The ALUs etc. should be pretty much the same anyway (the core units doing all the FLOPs).

 

Nobody can tell you beforehand if you will get stutters or if this combo will yield the FPS results you dream of (I doubt it). There are too many factors at play here, like configurations, hardware bottlenecks, incompatibilities. Be warned that you may encounter disappointment down this path.

 

If I were you, I would factor in a 1TB SSD too, to run your sims exclusively with their own Windows installation. Keep your other stuff separate on a HDD and another Windows.

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Ok, maybe the questions are rather broad, but don't you think your response is a little harsh?

 

Klaatu barada nikto

 

No, I don't think it is. Having been around this forum since the beginning I believe these types of post a bit over-the-top. I feel it is the responsibility of the OP to do a little homework on his/her own before asking for help. I feel that the OP has failed to do so in this case. A legitimate difference of opinion? Maybe. If so, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

 

Doug

Intel 10700K @ 5.0 Ghz, Asus Maxumus XII Hero MB, Noctua NH-U12A Cooler, Corsair Vengence Pro 32GB 3200Mhz, Geforce RTX 2060 Super GPU, Cooler Master HAF 932 Tower, Thermaltake 1000W Toughpower PSU, Windows 10 Professional 64-Bit, and other good stuff.
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Instead of posting this criticism, you could have provided me with helpful advice instead. Cheer up old chap.

 

OK. But how 'bout doing your homework first? That being said:

 

The 5960 is great for multi-processing. It' sucks for single-threaded apps. So, here's what I recommend:

 

Intel 4790K

Z97 Motherboard

16GB 2133 MHz RAM

nVidia GTX 980

1000W power Supply

Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit

 

OK?

 

Doug

Intel 10700K @ 5.0 Ghz, Asus Maxumus XII Hero MB, Noctua NH-U12A Cooler, Corsair Vengence Pro 32GB 3200Mhz, Geforce RTX 2060 Super GPU, Cooler Master HAF 932 Tower, Thermaltake 1000W Toughpower PSU, Windows 10 Professional 64-Bit, and other good stuff.
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Instead of posting this criticism, you could have provided me with helpful advice instead. Cheer up old chap.

 

There allways has to be a POS somewhere in the forums that is only willing to criticize your questions instead of helping, and that my friend, is because he doesnt really know.

maybe his "first class member" level inflates his ego too much.

 

Now, if a reffer my self to my very old processor i can tell you that both choices would be more than enough for me, but you have to be carefull what graphics card you are going to use (a good one) and make sure that everything is compatible in your PC.

i allways repeat it, all this performance matter is relative to what you are used to see,

Many want performance and nice graphics, i dont know maybe because they refer to what they see on the net or other games they,ve seen before.

I have an old system because i didnt have a big reference for comparaison.

When i first saw FS it was in Professional school, but all PCs they had for student use where low performance so that was my reference.

 

:

Instead of spitting your frustrations i suggest you to provide the OP another link to understand how PCs work.

I also suggest you to read a book about good manners and behaviour.

 

And whats that "do your homeworks" suggestion anyways ?!?!

i never saw a forum where you have to "upgrade" your knowledges before posting some questions !

THATS WHAT FORUMS ARE MADE FOR !!!

FSX ACCELERATION, ASUS P5QPL VM EPU-INTEL E8400-3GHZ-DDR2RAM4GO-WINDOWS7SP1 -GT220GEFORCE

if you never wonder about something, its because you know everything....:rolleyes: :rolleyes:

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I'd go with the 4790K... unless you intend to use that machine as a workstation as well it's really not worth it for the more expensive CPU, and Motherboard. You are much better off with a chip who's base clock cycle is 4ghz than one with 3ghz. Those extra cores will do nothing for the graphics, just things like AI flight models in X-plane, and I/O in FSX.
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Today's CPUs are still insufficient, but I believe in 2-3 years FSX with addons will probably run fine.

 

Are you serious really ?

fsx was made for minimum 1.0 ghz processors.

now they have quads, around 4ghz, from what i've seen on the net, with almost

all sliders on top, i dont consider them as "insufficient" as that.

FSX ACCELERATION, ASUS P5QPL VM EPU-INTEL E8400-3GHZ-DDR2RAM4GO-WINDOWS7SP1 -GT220GEFORCE

if you never wonder about something, its because you know everything....:rolleyes: :rolleyes:

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Another item that really helped my FSX performance was a Solid State Hard-drive. Random access without spinning discs is a wonderful thing.

 

And don't load FSX into the default program file location. Create a new folder on your primary drive titled FSX or whatever works for you. Then load all your FSX stuff there.

Being an old chopper guy I usually fly low and slow.
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Are you serious really ?

fsx was made for minimum 1.0 ghz processors.

now they have quads, around 4ghz, from what i've seen on the net, with almost

all sliders on top, i dont consider them as "insufficient" as that.

 

That 1 GHz requirements was a very, very optimistic minimum. It was almost borderline false advertising. FSX and it's predecessors were designed for fast single core CPUs, not the multi-core models we have now. When FSX was in its early design stage Intel was still talking about producing 10 GHz single core CPUs by 2010 or so. This obviously never happened.

 

True, today's processors do let one turn the sliders up a fair ways. However you still can't max all sliders and enable all options while flying a PMDG airliner into high end add-on cities and airports without frame rates dropping significantly. If we had those 10+ GHz processors, we would likely be cruising along at well over 30 FPS by now with no problems. Well maybe OOM errors would be an issue, but not performance.

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It looks like CPUs will continue down the road of increasing core count, improving processing power per clock cycle and, probably most importantly in the consumer market, improving power usage. Current CPUs are plenty powerful for the vast majority of consumer computing needs, and those tasks that do need more processing power have been moving to a multi-threaded design to take advantage of multiple cores, or even to using GPUs through CUDA and/or OpenCL. Many users have ditched their big desk bound PCs in favour of laptops they can take almost anywhere. Between this, and the growing mobile market, CPUs that are very power efficient are in bigger demand than those designed purely for performance.

 

Flight sims are a little unique in that there isn't as much demand for them, so they don't get the same resources devoted to development and have stagnated a bit. While Lockheed is improving P3D, it still largely has the same core limitations as FSX when it comes to multiple-core CPUs. Lockheed may be a large company, but even they aren't going to spend $200+ million on P3D the same way Rockstar did for GTA V. X-Plane has made some advancements towards better utilizing multiple cores, but it is still lacking elsewhere, leaving it unsuitable for many.

 

As for 64 bit, it isn't exactly a silver bullet. If this was the only change, it would really only delay the problems, not truly fix them. Part of the issue with FSX and OOM errors is that some of the underlying design decisions date back to the world of slow hard drives and CPUs (ie. think FS 2000 era). One example is how the sim handles scenery textures. In the old world, the same textures were used multiple times across different regions and it made sense to keep them in memory. This cuts down on delays due to fetching the data from a slow hard drive, and the individual textures weren't that large, thus they didn't take up much address space. Fast forward to today, however, and you have people loading the sim up with very detailed photo real scenery textures where each texture is specific to one geographic location. The sim doesn't really know how to handle them properly, and just keeps them all in memory. Eventually this leads to the OOM errors some users struggle with. Improving this would go a long ways to improving the sim's address space issues. FSX Steam Edition has made some improvements in this area, allowing some users to complete flights they couldn't under the box version.

 

So all of this leaves us with making do with the best of a non-ideal situation. Faster quad core CPUs will trump slower hexa-core, or higher, models. This must then be combined with adjusting the in-sim sliders appropriately to get smooth performance.

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Are you serious really ?

fsx was made for minimum 1.0 ghz processors.

now they have quads, around 4ghz, from what i've seen on the net, with almost

all sliders on top, i dont consider them as "insufficient" as that.

 

At that time i had an old processor AMD 1.8 ghz

I would run fsx on 20% sliders pretty well.

Its really a matter of taste.

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With a i7 running normal at 4.67GHZ, no overclock, & a SSHD I can can keep the sliders firewalled on almost any piece of software or plane I've tried.

 

The only oom result I've had so far with this rig was when taxiing around the Heathrow extended airport with all sliders at max and using the lighted taxiway system. Three is so much scenery crammed into that software on top of the FTX England software it's crazy.

 

Yes my processor is a 2011 based one and I'm running 32g of DDR4 2400 ram. But that's for use on other things. It's the raw speed of the cpu & probably the SSHD that is what makes this work with FSX. Not any of that other stuff.

 

BUY CPU SPEED!

Being an old chopper guy I usually fly low and slow.
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With a i7 running normal at 4.67GHZ, no overclock, & a SSHD I can can keep the sliders firewalled on almost any piece of software or plane I've tried.

 

The only oom result I've had so far with this rig was when taxiing around the Heathrow extended airport with all sliders at max and using the lighted taxiway system. Three is so much scenery crammed into that software on top of the FTX England software it's crazy.

 

Yes my processor is a 2011 based one and I'm running 32g of DDR4 2400 ram. But that's for use on other things. It's the raw speed of the cpu & probably the SSHD that is what makes this work with FSX. Not any of that other stuff.

 

BUY CPU SPEED!

 

which i7 runs at 4.67ghz stock speed?

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It looks like CPUs will continue down the road of increasing core count.

 

Understood it won't grow in Hz, I hope the power will increase by other means (pardon my knowledge is very limited).

A 3 GHz i3/5/7 is more powerful than a 3 GHz C2Duo, which in turn is more powerful than a 3 GHz Pentium 4. Can we hope this tendency will continue evolving in a similar manner?

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Understood it won't grow in Hz, I hope the power will increase by other means (pardon my knowledge is very limited).

A 3 GHz i3/5/7 is more powerful than a 3 GHz C2Duo, which in turn is more powerful than a 3 GHz Pentium 4. Can we hope this tendency will continue evolving in a similar manner?

 

Each new CPU generation has been slowly improving performance per clock cycle. However the improvements aren't exactly earth shattering. The real solution in the long run is a new or heavily updated sim engine.

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757 Fanatic,

It looks like money is no object for you and for that I'm jealous!

 

I agree that CPU speed for FSX is the way to go, and not necessarily the number of cores.

My experience:

I started with an AMD Phenom II x6 1035 @2.6gHz - it had 6 cores. I learned how to overclock this chip (came stock on a store-bought computer) to 3.5gHz and indeed, I did see a good improvement with FSX performance. Still not where I wanted FSX to perform, but it was OK with the tons of addons I had.

I finally bit the bullet and built my own computer (with the advice of the many good people here and my budget) with an i5 4690K CPU and overclocked it to a stable 4.7gHz. I even ended up keeping my old 6950 GPU.

THIS was a huge performance difference! It was like night and day.

So, even though the phenom had 6 cores, it also had a slower clock speed. The i5 has 4 cores and a higher clock speed.

I'd go with the higher clocked CPU and spend the money you just saved on the best motherboard, memory, SSD, power supply, CPU cooling, addons, etc.

Good luck!

E-Buzz

i5 4690k @ 4.7gHz (Water-cooled), 8GB ram, GTX 960 2GB, 850 EVO 1 TB SSD, 50" LED TV + 2x27" monitors, Thrustmaster HOTAS, Win 8.1 Pro, P3DV4, TrackIR, EZDOK, a bunch of Orbx stuff, a chair, a hacked-up desk, and a cold drink.
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