I just purchased and installed TrackIR. And WOW what a difference it makes. Its' also made me re-evaluate my entire setup. I've been getting by the last few months with an older rig:
- Intel G860 3.0 Ghz Pentium
- GTX 750ti GPU combo.
- 8Gb

Performance has been decent using medium settings, with the big exception of low altitude dogfights (ie. airfield attack missions, balloon busting, etc.). In those settings, FPS can really bottom out in the mid-teens.

Budget is limited so I'm looking at a couple of options:

1) High End Intel i3-3.7 or 3.8Ghz versus a low end i5 3.2Ghz. 2 Cores vs 4 Cores / Higher Clock vs Lower Clock.
2) For a Board its: LGA 1150 vs LGA 1151. Board prices are comparable but 1151 would require new memory.
a) DDR4 in 1151 has higher memory speeds but will WOFF really benefit from the faster memory?
b) 1151 has an additional benefit of being Intel's latest so future upgrade path is potentially better. However,
since I upgrade my system maybe every 3-4 years, 1151 will probably be extinct before my next upgrade.

WOFF is the only game I have that puts any kind of stress on my system. And since I'm not a big gamer I doubt that will change.

Obviously I'm not looking to build a killer gaming rig, but I'd like to be able to push WOFF close to the max. I'm looking for input on processor selection and benefits on faster vs just having more memory. Also if there are any other benefits to Intels latest chipset - Skylake (1151) vs Haswell (1150).

I've been doing alot of reading on systems and components and benchmarks and it all starts to get overwhelming. I'm hoping there are some folks here who can share some real life insight into how to get the most bang for my buck on an upgrade targeted solely for WOFF.

Thank you in advance.

There is no clear cut answer unless you buy top of the line PC equipment that can do it all. As a result, it now depends on what you want to do with your PC because everything has a trade-off.

WOFF/CFS3 uses only one CPU core to play and the faster the core, the better the FPS, so the i3 is best.

Modern PC programs are using more and more CPU multi-cores to get the job done, so the i5 is best.

Unless you overclock your CPU (high end CPU), you will not notice the difference in RAM speed.

There is no such thing as "future proofing" your PC because tech is always improving. If you buy the best you can afford PC items now, your PC will last you longer than if you buy lower PC items because software is always advancing. Thus the choice of (1) buy better, but less often, or (2) go with the idea of buy less, but more often.

Once you figure out just what YOU want to do with your PC and how much you are willing to spend/sacrifice, you can decide what you really want, but only you can decide that.

Have you thought about going to a place like Amazon and buying one of their "refurbished" PC's ??? You can get a whole lot more PC for about 50% than brand new.

Hey Panama; Thanks. I think I'm going with the i3 and the 1150/DDR3. My reading of your response is, processor speed matters most, not more cores, so buy the fastest you can get. And that memory speed is not a real factor (I won't be overclocking). So unless WOFF X is going to be re-coded and optimized to utilize 4 cores, there's no need for the i5/i7 + 1151.

One question, is there any benefit to increasing memory from 8Gb to 16. Its a cheap upgrade, but if there's no payback why bother. Rudder pedals might be the better investment.

Just FYI. WOFF is the ONLY game I run that makes any demands on my system.

I'm not that sure, because it seems a modern OS can spread the CPU load. PR do me a favour use the WTM [select all users] and use 3 cores exclusief for CFS3.exe Do the same but now using only one core for CFS3.exe

I know it is a lott of work setting all the affinity but then you should notice that when the load will be going to 70% it will be spread spread among the 3 cores, it is not going to max when using only 1 core.
So there must be some kind of spreading CPU load action going on, that I never noticed in OFF3 on XP86.

Another point, higher RAM speed despite overclocking your CPU will not bring you much benefits, I suspect you will not notice anything in WoFF, I see no results btw. But DDR4 is the future. Only plain CPU GHz will bring that extra.

I would go for a new Intel i5-6600k or i7-6700k, a DDR4 mobo, nVidia GTX970/980, 27" or more Gsync monitor that does 2560x1440.
I do not think any new Combat fly sim based on a new game engine, will be released next 5 years. So you can play all actual combat fly game engines on a high level now and in the future.
And if not so the Intel k made you an easy overclock CPU and the DDR4 is much better available for filling an extra slot.

8GB is good for WoFF, if not then you have another problem.

dutch:
Make sure you are not confusing game "multi-threading" with:

(1) the CPU having to use other cores to constantly run the other background services.

(2) modern CPU's ability to shift the work load between other cores to keep the heat down on any single core and prevent overall CPU throttling.

Either one of the above still means that the game is still using a single core at any one instance even though it bounces from core to core as the game plays.

A true "multi-core" game uses multiple cores to process the game and thus reduces to work load for all the cores at once, which did not exist back in 2002's CFS3 creation and is still not completely used today.

I know what Multi threading is, only my statement is not a Google finding but from what I did tested myself.
As I did wrote down try it by your self and you will noticed that when one core is going to 70% load the load will be spread to the other two cores. So it seems that either the Windows or Intel is spreading the load.
So if the game engine is spreading or the OS/hardware, I do not know, is this not multi threading I do not care, I only notice that something is regulating the cores, like a multi core game engine. So this " multi core game engine" can be simulated, not equally from start on, but it avoids that only one core is going to its max and that is what you will notice to exclude only one core to CFS3.exe. In this case at the same mission the core is reaching 100%.

So whit this knowledge I would prefer a quad and adjust the affinity. But as I did wrote earlier for WoFF, CPU-Ghz is its best friend.

dutch:
To quote OBD: "To run WOFF at high settings, a good CPU Mhz speed is very recommended. Multi-core will only help speed slightly as it will help only background processes."

Thats what I did write: WoFF loves the Ghz, so why repeating here?
About Multi core, I suppose that OBD is explaining multi core in WoFF, without the affinity tweak, as I did wrote down. That affinity tweak is the whole trick to get a better use of the cores for the single threat CFS3.exe. I'm not writing perfect English so I can not explain this better. It is working at my rig and if members need more info or a explanation, please send a pm to me. I will always help WW1 fans.

dutch:
Setting Affinity aids in efficiency, it does not make it use multi-core:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Processor affinity, or CPU pinning enables the binding and unbinding of a process or a thread to a central processing unit (CPU) or a range of CPUs, so that the process or thread will execute only on the designated CPU or CPUs rather than any CPU. This can be viewed as a modification of the native central queue scheduling algorithm in a symmetric multiprocessing operating system. Each item in the queue has a tag indicating its kin processor. At the time of resource allocation, each task is allocated to its kin processor in preference to others.

Processor affinity takes advantage of the fact that some remnants of a process that was run on a given processor may remain in that processor's memory state (for example, data in the CPU cache) after another process is run on that CPU. Scheduling that process to execute on the same processor could result in an efficient use of process by reducing performance-degrading situations such as cache misses. A practical example of processor affinity is executing multiple instances of a non-threaded application, such as some graphics-rendering software.

Scheduling-algorithm implementations vary in adherence to processor affinity. Under certain circumstances, some implementations will allow a task to change to another processor if it results in higher efficiency. For example, when two processor-intensive tasks (A and B) have affinity to one processor while another processor remains unused, many schedulers will shift task B to the second processor in order to maximize processor use. Task B will then acquire affinity with the second processor, while task A will continue to have affinity with the original processor.

Usage
Processor affinity can effectively reduce cache problems, but it does not reduce the persistent load-balancing problem.[1] Also note that processor affinity becomes more complicated in systems with non-uniform architectures. For example, a system with two dual-core hyper-threaded CPUs presents a challenge to a scheduling algorithm.

There is complete affinity between two virtual CPUs implemented on the same core via hyper-threading, partial affinity between two cores on the same physical processor (as the cores share some, but not all, cache), and no affinity between separate physical processors. As other resources are also shared, processor affinity alone cannot be used as the basis for CPU dispatching. If a process has recently run on one virtual hyper-threaded CPU in a given core, and that virtual CPU is currently busy but its partner CPU is not, cache affinity would suggest that the process should be dispatched to the idle partner CPU. However, the two virtual CPUs compete for essentially all computing, cache, and memory resources. In this situation, it would typically be more efficient to dispatch the process to a different core or CPU, if one is available. This could incur a penalty when process repopulates the cache, but overall performance could be higher as the process would not have to compete for resources within the CPU.

Specific operating systems
On Linux, the CPU affinity of a process can be altered with the taskset(1) program[2] and the sched_setaffinity(2) system call. The affinity of a thread can be altered with one of the library functions: pthread_setaffinity_np(3) or pthread_attr_setaffinity_np(3).

On SGI systems, dplace binds a process to a set of CPUs.[3]

NetBSD 5.0, FreeBSD 7.2 and later versions can use pthread_setaffinity_np and pthread_getaffinity_np.[4] In NetBSD, the psrset utility[5] to set a thread's affinity to a certain CPU set. In FreeBSD, cpuset[6] utility is used to create CPU sets and to assign processes to these sets.

On Windows NT and its successors, thread and process CPU affinities can be set separately by using SetThreadAffinityMask[7] and SetProcessAffinityMask[8] API calls or via the Task Manager interface (for process affinity only).

OS X exposes an affinity API[9] that provides hints to the kernel how to schedule threads according to affinity sets.

On Solaris it is possible to control bindings of processes and LWPs to processor using the pbind(1) [10] program. To control the affinity programmatically processor_bind(2) [11] can be used. There are more generic interfaces available such as pset_bind(2) [12] or lgrp_affinity_get(3LGRP) [13] using processor set and locality groups concepts

I'm not saying it will turn in CFS3.exe to a MultiCore, it is pure a tweak that is spreading the load on the selected cores
That's all, no Google findings, just plain testing and looking at the results in the onscreen display provided by Afterburner.
Setting affinity is a well proved method that has been proved in lots of games. My finding inhere was that if you set not only one core to CFS3.exe but more, you will never get a bigger load than 70%, because it appears that after 70% the CFS3 load will be spread to other for CFS3.exe selected cores.
In this case a quad could be prefered to a dual core.