Is newer much better?

[pwjoy]

What improvements can I expect from upgrading to the i7 and Nvidia 295 as compared to my system that was built in 2007.

[Brett_Henderson]

I have no i7 experience.. so we'll wait for the experts to chime in..

Mean time.. Your running a quad-core CPU at well over 3Ghz teamed with plenty of RAM, and a good video-card.

I recently upgraded from an Q6600 @ 3.0Ghz to a Q9550 @ 3.6Ghz

[SubZer0]

i7 achieves more smoothness than anything. you may be getting 15-20fps in dense areas, but if it's smooth then an upgrade would be unnecessary at this point. remember, you can throw the sliders down while flying above areas that are too dense... we i7 users still have to do that as well, especially around areas with so many trees you can't even see the ground textures. i7 is the best so far, but it's not perfect

[jwenham]

I agree with the comment about the trees. I have just added UTX USA and Canada and find that in areas that were showing poor performance with trees at a very dense setting I now dont have a problem. It seems to me that UTX has reduced the number of trees compared to using only GEX. My overall opinion on my i7 can be summed up in one word.... AWSOME! I came from a Pentium D so that may explain my reaction. One thing that does seem to be common with all the i7 users is that we cant fly with the FPS unlimited. If I do I get bad stutters so I stay locked at 30. The lowest I ever have gone is 16FPS but even that flys nice.