Duo Core6700 vs Quad Core Q6600

Can your motherboard handle quad cores? What video card do they have? Have you tried overclocking the CPU if the BIOS allows it?

For MS Flight Sim X, a Q6600 will be the better choice. It will allow you to have more eye candy up while getting better performance but thats probably if you overclock it. From what I have seen and heard a quad is better for it.

As for the Dell XPS, it is probably able to handle up to a maximum of 8GB of RAM.

Probably, because Flight Sim X is a lot more CPU intensive than GPU intensive, but higher clock speeds would help out a lot too - so even mild overclocking would be pretty beneficial. As for the RAM amount - a Core­™ 2 series system from Dell could probably handle at most between 4GB-8GB, but I don't think any more than 3GB-4GB would help at all for FSX.

Hi BSOD,

My office system is a Dell XPS420 running a QuadCore Q6600 (2.4GHz), 4GB RAM (667MHz) and nVidia 8600 (256MB).

My game system is a Dell XPS 710 running a Duo Core 6700 (2.66GHz), 4GB RAM (667MHz), and an nVidia 9800GTX+ (512).

The idea is to upgrade the power supply on the XPS420 to handle the 9800GTX+, and upgrade the RAM to 6GB at 1066MHz.
Since FSX is processor limited I didn't know if after everything was done, the lower speed quad core would even show a performance increase over the higher speed duo core.
Philip

I also forgot to mention I'm running Vista Ultimate 64bit.

Even on a locked down Dell you can overclock a Q6600 to 3.3 GHz on stock voltage in less than 20 minutes. There are 2 simple steps to doing so, and neither cost you anything.

1) You take out the CPU and put a tiny sliver of electrical tape over one of the pins (just google Q6600 pin mod and you can find lots of pictures- it's simple enough that you don't even need a guide, the picture of the taped-up pin is explanation enough).

2) Download a free program called SetFSB- you have to find the MoBo in a dropdown menu, but basically you adjust the FSB speed from this program while in windows and you can go from 3.0-3.3. My XPS420 is perfectly stable at 3.3 on stock voltage. I tried going above this but got instability at any higher speeds.

That should nudge you over the edge and create some value by making the Q6600 run about 40% faster. Cheers.