Some of you might be familiar with the disaster that happened to my main flying rig and the lame excuses ive been using for my poor flying recently ( ohh, laptop, that explains it :roflmao: )
So, anyway, i went and bought some cheap bits to get the desktop back up and running again.
In all, i spent just over £100 and got:
an intel e2140 ( stock speed 1.6ghz, core2duo arch with 1mb L2 cache)
an Asrock conroe-1333-dvi-h
2gb of generic ddr2-533 ram
At stock speeds, this combo is benchmarking about the same as the p4 prescott 3.4 i was running ( but doing so a LOT cooler )
Now, last night, i tried some tweaking to see just what this little cheapo rig could do and left it running prime95 overnight and have achieved what looks like the best stable OC for this board/cpu combo.
2.81 Ghz :eek: ( 352x8 ) :eek:
a 1.2 ghz overclock on aircooling with a stock cooler :eek:
Still need to work at keeping the temps down though, the stock Intel HSF alows the cpu to get to 51c under load ( after 8 hours ).
Black Death benchmarks to follow later today ( using my old 7600gt )
Sporran
yes please 
same processor, asrock MB too Mine is runing at 2.0 GHz, but you got me thinking 
Seems i need to do more work on the Overclock Nepe. The settings i was using are fine using the onboard video, but it seems it pushes the pci-e bus too hard for the 7600GT to be stable.
Or maybe the GT got some stress when the old system died. Will know better today.
Other folks with the same cpu/sku are commonly getting 3ghz+ with different motherboards( mostly later chipsets than the i945 though ). I may need to lower the overclock to accomidate a PCI-E card.
Sporran
cant you alter the pci-e bus separate from the fsb sporran?? i can with my board.
set your PCI bus at 101, leaving it at 100 will leave it linked to the FSB. Setting it at 101 will lock it at 101 and separate it from your FSB.
EDIT: Just had a look at your boards BIOS options
Try it at CPU/PCI-E ASYNC, with the PCI-E set at 100. On a lot of boards with the PCI bus set at 100, it actually is syncing with the FSB, setting it to 101 locks it. Your board has the option to run the CPU overclock un-sync’ed with the PCI bus.
Nice info, thanks all.
I am using a AGP 6800GT in my 4CoreDual-SATA2 MB, with 1066 FSB.
Memory is 1 GB DDR-400, will update soon to 2 GB DDR-II 667.
Will post my results too.
Due to the stabity problems id been having with the 7600gt at overclocked speeds, i tried a fresh install today…running at stock speeds…
Now, here is a funny thing ( funny as in tales of the unexpected, not ha ha ).
I mistakenly installed from a custom nlite disk i had made for another of my systems, this disk had multiprocessor support removed.
System running at stock speeds ( 1.6 ) with the 7600gt is now able to maintain a stable 60fps whilst flying … with 4xAniso and 8s Antiailiasing… and with detail set to High Quality ! on a 7600gt @ 1280x1024 
Using the same conf.ini as in the p4 3.4 ( which struggled to maintain high 40’s fps using the exact same settings and 2xaa and 2xanis)
anyways, enough from tales of the unexpected…
off to fiddle with the FSB strap
Sporran
PS: also got a ruddy big crt 21" monitor… i can see stuff again :roflmao:
I needed comparison running same settings on a proper multiprocessor hal, so a quick reinstall later…
Less than half the performance …
same settings in conf.ini, same driver set, same graphic card settings… same process number.
Il2 now maxes the cpu at 50% in task manager ( i understand il2 will only run on a single core )
Now, why should it run SO much better on an OS customised NOT to support smp ???
any idea’s ?.. is there some setup tweak particular to core2 that i am missing ?
Sporran
Alternatly i might just be going senile … DOH
Hmm, in my rig I think I saw IL2 using the 2 processors. Will confirm it yo you tonight.
Not sure about Intel chips Sporran, but the AMD dual core chips have an optimiser driver that needs installing alongside mobo drivers etc.
HTH,
WB.
I have Intel Core 2 CPU, 6600 @ 2.4GHZ.
Standard IL2 install and both cores seem to be working while flying. Here’s the task manager graph:
i use a program that allows me to set the cores to run different apps, im sure you have heard of/tried it before, but it improves frames for me to have il2 on one core, then all other progs on other core/s.