Athlon II X2 2.9GHz vs Phenom II X2 3.2GHz

I'm playing a flight simulator (Black Shark) that is severely bottle necked by my CPU. I currently have an Athlon II X2 245 2.9GHz overclocked to 3.19 GHz. If I were to upgrade to a Phenom II X2 555 3.2GHz (I would assume I could overclock it to at least 3.52GHz), do you supposed I would notice much difference.

Does the Phenom II X2 really have anything over the Athlon II X2 for gaming to make it worth the switch?

For the record, the game is not coded to be multi-threaded, so 3 or 4 cores shouldn't really change anything.

I don't think you would notice much of an improvement unless you get to about 4GHz. 400MHz wouldn't really make much of a difference. Can you overclock the athlon II any higher? Are you heat limited? What cooler are you running? Motherboard limited? What motherboard are you running? 3+ cores -MIGHT- make a difference if you have quite a few background programs running but in all honesty, I don't think you would see much of a difference.

L3 cache will make more of a differnce than the clock speed, but yes. The 555BE is an awesome chip.

If it unlocks on your board (dunno what you have might have to flash bios first) thats just bonus.

Athlon II chips are great performance for the value... but you really cant touch the phenom II arch on performance. You can get a ath II x4 for the price of a phenom II x2... but I guarantee you will be happier with the phenom II x2 (as a dual core) for almost everything. If black shark is anything like FSX you might do better with extra cores but 555 might unlock to a trike or a quad. Its a gamble.. so an ath x4 might be better for you...but if not, just clock it to 4+ gHz depending on your cooler and call it a day

I would go for it. The added L3 as well as the speed will make a nice improvement.

I would think you could get more overclock out of the AII X2 245 than you presently have. Even the AII X2 240 will usually go 3.4ghz on stock volts and stock cooling if you adjust the HT and the CPU NB to keep them both around 2000 mhz as you turn up the bus speed. What are you setting your RAM speed to start with? You may need to set the baseline RAM speed to a lower notch to start with and then clock the bus up toward what the RAM is rated at. For instance, if you have DDR2 800 set it at DDR2 666 to begin with in bios and then start clocking the bus (labled "CPU frequency" in many bioses) upward from its 200 mhz basline . As you increase the bus (i.e. the "CPU frequency") you will note the RAM speed, the CPU speed, the HT speed and the CPU NB speed all increase in lockstep. Keep an eye on the HT and CPU NB speeds as you increase the CPU frequency and reduce their multipliers (or frequencies) to keep them around 2000 mhz. You may also need to give the CPU and the CPU NB a little more volts to keep things stable. These are the basics of how you overclock a CPU that is has a locked multiplier. All this is assuming you have a motherboard bios capable of manipulating these individual parameters. Can you give us more detail about your motherboard, memory and your cooling?