i am upgrading my system mostly for gaming, fsx to be specific, i need to know which cpu i'll be better off for performance the E8400/8500 OR THE Q9450?????? i dont wanna know about other cpu like the q6600 i just want to know about these 2 thank you.

As far as i know FSX is cpu dependent an thus will benefit more from the quadcore (Q9450). I may be mistaken however.

Nah you're right. Go with the quad, FSX will use all of it (and need it too).

 
I'm sure that FSX only uses one core, unless it's been patched since i last played it (Which admitedly was a long time ago).

Quite the contrary! It scales up to 8 cores I think..

I have no idea but would like to see this explored in fsx.  Post links if you happen upon any.  

well on their main page here, it says "multi-core" optimized. I know this doesn't mean anything, but if you google around a little, there were many reviews on the subject, I'm sure you'd find one.

I've tried google.  Haven't seen quad vs dual scaling though, especially anything from the past year. http://www.behardware.com/articles [...] q6600.html

Q9450. Patched FSX takes significant advantage of quad core. Of course, unless you patched it, FSX is single threaded, ONLY.

Anyone with a Quad and capable mobo want to try disabling cores to tests this.  My MSI P6N SLI platinum can't do it *cry*, but I know evga's 680i can as that is what [H] did for supreme commander testing: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/arti [...] VzaWFzdA==