In the meantime I've replaced my AMD Atlon II X4 640 CPU for a Phenom II X6 1100T. The cost of these CPU's have come down greatly where I live. Maybe it is because everybody is waiting on arrival of the Bulldozer. I suspect the prices will rise again somewhat when people see that these Bulldozer CPU's won't be cheap. I thought it would be nice to give some comments on my new CPU.
Even at default clock speed of the 1100T, the game performed better than with my old overclocked processor. But I didn't buy this CPU to run it at default clock speeds. At this moment I have it stable running at 3,76 GHz. If I want to go higher (and I want), I have to replace my Zalman CPU fan (which is more silent than overclocking oriented).
Since the upgrade of my CPU I've benchmarked the Black Death track at 41 FPS on average (was 32) with the same settings, game version and same measuring method as before. This is a performance increase of 28% and it's very noticeable. The frame rate improved the most at the heaviest part of the track (where the planes on the ground are blown away by the explosions). With my old CPU the frame rate would drop here for a short moment to 8 or 9 FPS. With my new CPU it drops shortly to 21 or 22 FPS. This is at worst a performance increase of 133% on the heaviest part of the Black Death track. The power counts here where it's needed the most.
At the technical side, the upgrade provided me with a better utilized GPU which will now hit 100% occasionally (was 72% if I'm correct). This shows that a 6970 needs a good CPU to support it. I also noticed that core 1 of my new CPU is now fully utilized which wasn't the case with my old CPU (at least it didn't translate to that in a graph).
All in all I'm very happy with this cost effective upgrade. I really enjoy flying with this machine!
