recent PC upgrade

[heywooood]

Last month I began having problems with FSX...randomly, it would fail to boot properly - it would hang on loading at around 83% (loading AI aircraft) usually
or it would crash out to the desktop.
Soon - I was having trouble getting the PC to boot so I ran the admin programs looking for faults and they were all over the place...I thought it might be the hard drive so I booted from the backup flash drive and was still
getting errors...
Finally - it just would not boot - the fans would spool up, there were no beeps from the mobo alerter - just no boot up.

I have no way to test PC components other than the usual methods...so I took it in to a shop - turns out the mobo was the culprit - an MSI board (the first and last I will ever use)

Since it was the mobo - I opted for a newer CPU - Intel I7 4790 @3.6Ghz
Sure I wanted the 4.0Ghz but through an error on their part (the shop) they purchased and installed the 3.6 and thats what they billed me for - so rather than make a long story longer (they made other errors like forgetting to order the parts for a week but I digress...) so I just accepted it as is.

Coming from an I5 @3.2Ghz wouldn't seem like a big jump and I wasn't sure about what I had spent ($438.00 for new mobo CPU and 1 RAM stick because apparently one of those had failed as well) for what looked like a 0.4Ghz bump
in processor speed - BUT - the difference is remarkable.
Improvements in overall FPS to the point where I can use KMRY from FTX without dropping to 20FPS - in fact all of my aircraft get no less than 26FPS even in weather...
Improvements in turbulence effect
Improvements in weather rendering and FPS in heavy weather
etc..etc..

Once I reset the FSX.cfg Affinity Mask to utilize the 8 core CPU architecture it has been like day and night

[Don Quixote]

Nice to hear hat your hardware upgrade worked out well. And that's a great price you got it for!
I did almost exactly the same upgrade couple of weeks ago, replaced my aging i5-750 with the i7-4790K, along with a new mainboard and new RAM. I had to fork out rather more cash though. :dizzy:

I've also experienced a similar increase in performance (using P3D2), especially that flights are much smoother than before. With the old CPU there were frequent pauses, stutters, etc. which are now almost completely gone. And I can turn up the AI traffic without getting single-digit frames, which is great.
The effect was even greater with XPlane 10 - the framerate nearly doubled!

In short, CPU technology has definetly improved over the last couple of years, even if the clock speeds have not increased much. And even our old FSX/P3D sim engine benefits from these improvements.
By the way, your 4790 (non-K) DOES go up to 4 GHZ in turbo mode!