C2D to Quad - worth it?

[spotlope]

Here's the situation, gents:

I've got a decent system right now (specs below), but the one problem I consistently have in FSX is very long load times for textures and terrain mesh. I'll slew to a new location and wait as much as 3-4 minutes before the textures full catch up with me, which seems excessive.

I've read that one advantage offered by quad-core CPUs is faster texture loading. In the experience of the gurus here, is that the case? If so, I'd be more than happy to shell out the bucks for a quad and retire my C2D E6750. Right now, I'm running overclocked at 3.2GHz just fine, but it'd be nice to have a CPU that would let me bump that to closer to 4.0 as well.

Thoughts? I see that the Q9550 is a pretty good deal on NewEgg. If you'd recommend a jump to quad, would that be the one to go with, or are there other models that are better? (Remembering of course, that I haven't learned how to turn lead into gold just yet.)

Here are my current specs:

CPU: C2D E6750 @ 3.2 Ghz
Motherboard: Gigabyte EP45-UD3P
RAM: 6GB DDR2 @ 800
VIDEO: 285GTX 1GB
DRIVES: 2x 250GB WD HD/ 1x 500GB WD HD - all 7200RPM SATAII
OS: W7-64 (Ultimate)

Thanks!

[harleyman]

Bill


I say yes ..the Q9550 is a great chip..it will OC like a beast too, and is much cheaper than the Q9650 ..

Just get a good cooler for it, the freezer Pro is a good cheap one too.

It will without a doubt vastly improve those texture load times, maybe down to zero..

thats all a quad will do for FSX is texture loading and rendering..so thats your best and next upgrade ..

[spotlope]

Thanks, Mason. I've got a nice Zalman 9600 cooler that I use for my E6750. Hopefully, it'll work fine for the quad as well. The other thing I was looking at was experimenting with solid-state drives, but I have a feeling that now is just about six months too early for that tech. I expect to get into them before the year is out, though, once the economy of scale kicks in and the prices come down.

[harleyman]

Your Zalman wi;; do just fine if not highly OCed..but you can 3.4 to 3.6 easy with it



I am also waiting for SSDs to drop in price and get more reliable and larger