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[Tharwen]

I used to play with 500fps, but I stopped because my dwarves would always starve to death before I realised.

[FearfulJesuit]

Can somebody give me a list of really good processors?

[[NO_THOUGHT]]

Well... because you haven't given us an idea of what 'good' is, then I am going to have to make some assumptions:

Let "good" = Anything recent capable of running DF @ >100 logic frames per second.

And for the safety of my soul, I am going to limit the search to commercially viable desktop processors from Intel and AMD (no VIA or ARM love for you today )

You are looking for Core i7, i5 (sans the 'M' moniker at the end), Phenom II's or some Athlon II's, 4 core versions are preferable, AMD has higher avg performance per dollar, Intel has higher avg performance. The higher end i7's are untouchable, really.

The study of processors and which is 'better' is a highly complex and physically taxing process requiring time and effort. As such, no place will be able to tell you anything other than simple benchmarking scores.

Expect to pay > 100$, but < 250$ for a performance and dollar conscious processor capable of doing most anything you would want it to do. Except run Crysis.

If anyone has anything to add please do, I just look at processors for a minor time waster so that is the sum total of my knowledge off the top of my head. I do believe all those ones I listed would run DF without any serious problems. Even Core 2 Duo would be fine for 100fps DF in a small starting location.

[Ghills]

To be more specific for the non-techs out there:

Processor should be: Intel i3, i5 or i7 2nd Gen (a.k.a. Sandy Bridge)
Motherboard: That's tricky, find a reliable person who does this for a living and ask them to pick one.  Or, got to a large chain that lets you customize the PC.
Memory: DDR3, 4+ GB of RAM
Harddrive: Unless you get SSD, does not matter for speed.  The other components are much more important.

Going to Dell/HP and customizing a PC works just fine.

[FearfulJesuit]

Hmmhmm!

I don't know what I have, but I find that it'll start dropping once I have about 45 dwarves. So, if any of you know of a processor that would run a 150-dwarf, decade-old fort at 100 fps...that's really what I'm looking for.

EDIT: I seem to be possessor of an Intel® Pentium® Processor T4500.

[Putnam]

Hmmhmm!

I don't know what I have, but I find that it'll start dropping once I have about 45 dwarves. So, if any of you know of a processor that would run a 150-dwarf, decade-old fort at 100 fps...that's really what I'm looking for.

EDIT: I seem to be possessor of an Intel® Pentium® Processor T4500.

Well, there's your problem

[Miuramir]

I don't know what I have, but I find that it'll start dropping once I have about 45 dwarves. So, if any of you know of a processor that would run a 150-dwarf, decade-old fort at 100 fps...that's really what I'm looking for.

EDIT: I seem to be possessor of an Intel® Pentium® Processor T4500.

That's a mobile (laptop) processor; "Penryn" (first-gen 45nm process, die-shrunk from 65nm as "Tick"), dual core, 2.3 GHz base clock, no turbo, 35W.  While that particular chip was introduced Jan. 2010, the underlying design is from Jan. 2009, and the micro architecture dates back to mid-2006. 

There's considerable room for improvement, but it sounds like you want something more than three times as powerful.  That's basically not going to happen yet on a reasonable budget if you need it to be a laptop.  If you wanted to upgrade very soon, I'd probably start looking for a laptop based on the Core i7 2640M with good cooling; "Sandy Bridge" based (second-gen 32nm process "Tock"), dual core, 2.8 GHz base clock, stock turbo to 3.3 GHz (2 cores running) or 3.5 GHz (single core), 35W.  That should be very roughly twice as powerful as you have now, maybe up to two and a half times if you have good enough cooling to get the full turbo continuously (most laptops don't).  If you've got some more time, waiting until April/May (perhaps June) 2012 would be good; by then the new Ivy Bridge mobile processors should theoretically be out (first-gen 22 nm process, die-shrunk from 32nm as "Tick").  You could either buy a laptop featuring one of the new chips (such as the i7-3520M), or take advantage of likely sales on laptops with the current generation. 

If you're thinking desktop, waiting a couple of months for LGA 2011 motherboards to be readily available and the  i7 3820 CPU to be available may be a good idea; based on Intel's pre-release numbers it looks to be at a sweet spot for excellent performance on older apps like DF, pretty good performance on multi-core apps, and sub-$300 chip price.  For DF, it will probably perform as well as current CPUs costing two to three times that much.  I'd guess that with aggressive cooling (to maintain full turbo under heavy continuous load) it should be capable of the performance you're looking to have; but this sort of thing is very hard to estimate. 

[FearfulJesuit]

I can't just pop out my old processor out of my laptop and put in a new one, can I?

[[NO_THOUGHT]]

No, every motherboard has a specific shaped slot to hold your processor. SOME motherboards can have more than one shape and SOME shapes can have more than one processor type put in, but that depends on your motherboard's slot type.

Looking up your processor on wikipedia told me that you have "Socket P" and the list of processors that it takes are on the right side:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_P
But as Miuramir said, it's probably best to wait for the value processors from the new Intel lineup to comeout. All those processors are old and they don't discount old processors like they do other electronics. A 1000$ processor from 2008 is a 1000$ processor today even though a 600$ processor from 2010 does the same job.

TL;DR You need a new laptop entirely

[Caldfir]

~900 on a 2x2 embark with all 7 dwarves sent to quarry the mountain.  That's with temperature on etc.

Running a PhenomII @3.4GHz, and honestly I can't imagine going to the expense of a new i7.  You're going to get at most ~2x perfomance boost out of it, and that's with some serious overclocking etc.  The coolness factor is appreciated, but high-end intel processors just seem like too much money for me. 

There have been benchmark threads in the past where someone uploads an embark and everyone tries to see how high they can get their FPS on said embark on various machines.  In the end, what probably kills forts is memory accesses for pathfinding (informed discussion), so processor power becomes less important as the game goes on. 

[Dwarf]

As far as a DF rig goes, all you need is an i3-2100, i5-2500K or i7-2600K, really. The motherboard, GPU or RAM will barely matter.

[MAurelius]

I have an intel core i7 920 overclocked to 3.2ghz (originally at 2.67).
6 gigs high end gaming ram (it's been awhile...corsair I think)
I also built my rig myself about two years ago. Just my heatsinks and chip fans are the size of a football.

I have a decade old (in game that is) fort with 209 dwarves and everything else standard. I pasture all my animals save a few cats for vermin patrol.

I'm averaging 40fps. I want to pull my hair our that my comp can handle Skyrim (granted, I also have a top of the line video card, which DF doesn't even use I don't think) but can't get at least 100fps at this stage of my fortress.

Is the solution just waiting for better computers, or is there some way the code can be optimized to run better? What's the fun of turning off weather, water, embarking on 2x2, etc. I really want to embark on like 3x5 (perfect to zoom out with on a widescreen monitor) but I can only imagine how slow that would be. Sigh.

[Silophant]

The solution's pretty much just waiting for better computers. The code could no doubt be optimized, but there's little point in doing that when few (none) of the systems are in their final form.

[Crux]

I have an intel core i7 920 overclocked to 3.2ghz (originally at 2.67).
6 gigs high end gaming ram (it's been awhile...corsair I think)
I also built my rig myself about two years ago. Just my heatsinks and chip fans are the size of a football.

I have a decade old (in game that is) fort with 209 dwarves and everything else standard. I pasture all my animals save a few cats for vermin patrol.

I'm averaging 40fps. I want to pull my hair our that my comp can handle Skyrim (granted, I also have a top of the line video card, which DF doesn't even use I don't think) but can't get at least 100fps at this stage of my fortress.

Is the solution just waiting for better computers, or is there some way the code can be optimized to run better? What's the fun of turning off weather, water, embarking on 2x2, etc. I really want to embark on like 3x5 (perfect to zoom out with on a widescreen monitor) but I can only imagine how slow that would be. Sigh.

You could try to enable VBO graphics mode, that gave me a huge boost with my E6700 and HD5770.

[Untelligent]

edit: nevermind