CPU not maxing out?

Got my 9700K up and running (no OC yet), now if i understood everyone the cpu speed is rather important in dcs.

Just put up a flight of 4 of AI over some big towns, cpu usage is only 50-60%, after 3 min of flying the most i saw was 4.6GHZ, is this correct or am i missing something?

No, that sounds about right if you are looking at total usage for an 8 core single threaded CPU with background apps like TrackIR, etc. You need to look at per core usage to see bottlenecks for DCS. It only uses 3 cores simultaneously.

Either in Task Manager or even better with MSI Afterburner set to per core usage in an on screen display it should show one core hitting 90%+. If not, you can turn up visib range, shadows, and anisotropic filtering if you are still able to maintain 60 fps.

If you look at core 15 (which corresponds to core 8 on a 9700K) you will see it's at 97%. That's the bottleneck. Note, I usually keep Hyperthreading off when I play DCS as it provides no benefit for DCS and most games on an 8 core CPU. This screenshot was taken while doing some benchmarks. Keeping Hyperthreading off on a 9900K essentially makes it a 9700K with more cache and a very small difference in single core performance which would likely be unnoticeable in normal game play unless taking FPS benchmarks.

In general, you want to adjust graphic settings so that you see 90%+ on both CPU (single core) and GPU assuming you have adequate cooling to stay in thermal limits.