There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.
If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.
Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.
The Staff of SOH
You never mentioned what is your drop dead amount is to spend. Old Intel i7 920 technology is pretty much dead and buried as is FX6300. The new Haswell i7 and i5 CPUs are by far faster processors than the AMD FX6300 or even the newer FX9590 and you can pick them up for just a little more money at newegg.com, amazon.com, or microcenter.com. You can run FSX on AMD just fine if you are willing to overclock! However P3d and X-Plane 10.3 will lag considerably. It is not GHz alone that determines the fastest chip. Even at the so-called AMD 5 GHz range it is still slower than the Haswell i5 and i7 stock turbo range. Also the Nvidia video card performs much better with Intel. If your choice is AMD you might want to consider an R9 series AMD video card for best performance.
If your interest is only FSX AMD oc'd to 4.2GHz or better is just fine. I still recommend the AMD R9 series video cards for it and they have a new catalyst software that works great. But the cost for AMD FX anything vs Intel i5 Haswell is almost the same on sale. The i7 Haswell has even more features but does cost more. So depending on your budget if you comparing the FX6300 vs i7 920 you will have to overclock either to get FSX smooth. Neither will run P3d or X-Plane 10.3 at realistic frames per second.
Ted