In all honesty, I doubt he wants to bend anything. So, use logic, use common sense, use what you have .....but don't use force.

And good luck on your build should you go that route.

Dropping the CPU in is a piece of cake, just be gentle and make sure those wonderful golden arrows in both in the right corner. The hardest part for me after building 5 rigs is locking in the CPU heatsink... making sure not to lift up and let air bubbles into the thermal paste application. Just keep some rubbing alcohol handy in case you screw up.

nononononononononono

Just make sure you have plenty of DRINKING alcohol if you screw up ....  

It'd probably be no different with an i5. At equal clock speeds, all the i7 generally gives you is HT and (on some models) more L3 cache. Neither really matters for games.

Ironically, HT can actually reduce performance in lightly multi-threaded applications if the threads get assigned unevenly due to Windows being dumb.

I wrote a blog article about that some time ago that may help you.

http://kona0197.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/how-to-build-a-computer-step-by-step/

For most people that are not doing heavy number crunching (with other programs for work and the like), the i5 (at least during the second generation i series chips) was often more than sufficient and much nicer on the pocket. With my board I can upgrade to a newer i7 series chip if I wanted too. That being said, I've gotten my i5-2500k chip from 3.3ghz stock up to sustained 5.1ghz just to see what it would do. Idled around 45°C (when it normally idles around 31°C) and under load only reached 65°C (when it usually only reached 50°C) ... all with a giant air cooler and huge Antec 902v3 case. Mix that with a 560ti 1gb card that was (a year ago) all under the cost of a macbook air ... for comparison's sake.

kryo....I wouldn't ever be looking at an i5 .... for FSX it needs to be as seriously top-end as you can get.  It's a 32bit proggy so you have to fool it into using more ram ...and relocating core loading away from the first core to help with on-going number crunching.

Mine's a first-gen i7 920 2.67GHz running 12gig in 6 banks of 'paired' triple-channel 12800 DDR3 ...and the GPU is an ASUS GTX590 with 3gig of GDDR5.

It'll run Res Evil 5 at 120 fps without a sneeze ...but in FSX at times I'm lucky to get a tenth of that...

Be that as it may, I have to wonder how and why does the rest of the world even bother with or attempt to run such a program? You don't suppose the fault is in the software, NOT in the hardware, do you?

The fact that some things wouldn't run on my 8800GT, ok. The fact that some games won't run well on whatever is fine.

If FSX won't run above 12fps on your rig or any other, and you want to keep throwing cubic money at it, by all means, go right ahead. I'm happy for you.

Depending 'where you are' you can get 60 or 70 fps but if you're within a detailed airport [where you can recognize car makes and models...the detail is that fine] mapping square kms of topography in real time...and AI flight paths as well as your own ...GPS...radar....animations...specular shine...self-shading....and when you see them the stars are in the right places.... realtime weather from real weather.....all in a long-in-the-tooth proggy being replaced by MS with a 'toy' version that's more 'game' than sim.

The skinning for the aircraft is significantly more complex than a GUI as it seems just about every model does it differently...and the only saving grace is much of the bigger stuff uses DTX5 compression otherwise the image files are huge.

The rest of the world uses it because it is the best flight simulator available, and yes, it's the software....it cannot be made 'properly' multi-processor aware and still hits ram limits [not 64bit].... and it comes from an era when GPUs were considerably weaker than those available today.

NOTHING can genuinely run it maxed out...everything is a compromise....

If it is CPU-bound and only weakly multi-threaded, that's actually an argument in favor of the i5. HT is only going to be of benefit in situations where you have more than four threads and each thread can't fully saturate the core it's on. So in this case (as with most any case for gaming), you'd likely be better off shifting the price premium for the i7 towards a higher clocked i5 instead.

And triple channel memory isn't really of any significant benefit on quads (part of why it hasn't been available on anything but hexacores since that first generation).

Granted all this is moot in our case because the i5 didn't exist when you built that machine, but it's useful information for anyone looking to build/upgrade now.

This. Unless the FSX is not superbly multithreaded, i am pretty sure i5 3570 would smoke first-gen i7s fairly easily, possibly even the sixcore ones, because of higher clocks and higher IPC given the architectural improvements between the Nehalem and Ivy Bridge,,,

Good info, guys, even though I am an AMD fan.

Same here. I just built a rig for my sister with one of those new AMD "APU" chips. That A8 chip I got was doing really well compared to one of my i5 rigs. For a lot less money too...

Wow guys, for a second I thought I walked on set filming a TNG episode in engineering and Geordie was let loosing some techno babble. Kona, thanks for the link, will bookmark for future referencing and thanks guys, I know where to come to if I go that route...

Oh, and Happy Holidays to you all, we made it through the Apocalypse....