Old question of upgrading for games - processor or HDD

So i flick through most of the posts here. and 99%, infact 100% of what i have seen is people saying is when it comes to games, upgrade your HDD to a faster rpm - this counts more than processor speed as processors mainly deal with physics and HDD speed increase will increase the speed of retrival from files and such, therefore running the game better.

Here's my deal
I run an Acer Aspire5920G with a Intel core 2 duo 1.66ghz.
yeah it's fine for most games and i like it, however, I'm a flight simmer!
FSX utilises only one core though - thus acting like i have a 1.66ghz processor.
Also as you may of guessed, Physics and calculations etc are a big thing when it comes to flight sims, but i'm a little unsure of wether the actual processor would handle that, or if coding and such within the FSX files and folders would take care of that (thereby making an HDD upgrade easier). And then comes probably the question that makes this whole discussion relevant or not - is the processor upgradeable anyway? I have NFI how to tell that. I have no quams with opening up the case and having a look - is there anything i should look for or what?

Thanks for your time guys.

Regards.
Friendy.

 

If i were you and had only one choice , i would upgrade the processor.. having a faster and new hard drive only speeds up load times of games but a new processor will help speeding up day to day tasks and increase FPS by a few.. but if i were you , i'd try to upgrade both.

 

Why don't you check the processor usage while you're playing, see if you are ever hitting 100%.

For raw FPS, the HDD is not going to help unless you do not have enough VRAM or RAM that you are constantly having to access files from the hard drive. Otherwise, a drive upgrade will only decrease loading times. But if you're using up all your RAM, consider upgrading that first.

A processor upgrade will help ONLY when it is the bottleneck for the game. That has been happening a lot more than it used to with GPUs getting more powerful, so like I said check your own performance and see what you think.