New gaming PC (mainly flight sims)

[Taz]

I'm looking to build this for flight sims running at 1080p for now. It'll run FSX Steam Edition and possibly X-Plane too.

CPU: Intel Core i5 6600K (O/C to 4.6GHz) - £0.00
Motherboard: Asus Z170-K - £0.00
CPU Cooler : Be Quiet! Dark Rock 3 - £0.00
Memory: 8GB Corsair Vengeance 3000MHz DDR4 - £454.98 (these four components are a bundle from Scan)

Graphics card: MSI Radeon R9 390 GAMING AMD Graphics Card 8GB - £269.27

PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 550W Modular 80+ GOLD Power Supply - £69.99

HDD 1: Samsung M.2 850 EVO 250GB SATA SSD Solid State Drive - £82.62

HDD 2: Western Digital WD20EZRX 2TB Internal Hard Drive - OEM - £75.00

Case: Fractal Design Define R5 Silent Case - £79.99

Thermal Paste: Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut - £10.99

OS: Windows 10 Pro

TOTAL £1,042.84

I'll re-use my current monitor, keyboard and mouse (as my primary desktop will still be my Mac).

Is there anything on that list that's overkill for 1080p flight sims with everything maxed out or are there bits that are not quite powerful enough?

I've been out of the PC components loop for many years so this week's been a huge learning curve for me.

[EndlessWaves]

FSX is an old game and IIRC X-plane was a little quirky in it's requirements so you're probably best asking somewhere that has specialised knowledge about them.

[herulach]

I'd say you'd be fine, but you might benefit from shuffling stuff around. You won't need thermal paste, and I'd be tempted to run a single big SDD rather than that + a small one. You could get a 500gb SATA III one (m2 has no real advantages beyond fewer cables).

Also, you're paying a premium (usually works out around £20/30) to scan to overclock the CPU, whilst its fine if you want to, I can't help but point out that its probably unneccessary for what you want to do and would get you a way towards extra monitors, a head tracker etc.

I don't play many flight sims, but I do play elite, which I imagine is somewhat similar in terms of displays, and i'd reccomend you plan around a few monitors (unless your mac has one of those awesome cinema thingies)

[kalniel]

FSX is a funny one. As mentioned, it's old, and it's got some odd performance characteristics. High single thread speed and cache seem to be good things from what I remember, but there are all sorts of odd bottlenecks. There used to be some dedicated FSX forums where people rather obsessed over it so might be worth looking at those.

[Taz]

Yeah, FSX is getting on a bit now - almost 10 years since it was released. There's a slightly updated version with online multiplayer capabilities called FSX Steam Edition but it's still pretty much the old FSX at heart.

Dovetail Games will will be releasing a brand new flight simulator in 2016 which will be the first release of a major new flight sim for nearly a decade (excluding X-Plane).

I really loved FSX and it'll keep going for many years due to the add-ons and community support.

I guess the system I've specced is way overkill for FSX. DO I wait for 2016 and build a high-end system or satisfy my FSX itch and build a more humble system just to play FSX. I did try using my Mac Mini and dual booting into Windows 7 to run my retail copy of FSX but the graphics struggled a lot.

At the end of the day a Mac Mini is really just a general-purpose OS X computer and not really a gaming machine.

I'll re-spec the system to have one larger SSD and I might not need such an overlocked system to run a 10-year old game. If I can get FSX running at 1080p at 60fps I'll be very happy indeed.

A kind of second objective is to learn Windows 10 at the same time - hence my question in the Software section about Windows 10.

[herulach]

This video seems to suggest around 70-90 FPS @ 4K with a 390:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69-ZD1FbnTw

Reckon you should be fine. As far as the SSD goes, you ned to know you cna cope with it - I have a separate fileserver so don't need tonnes of space and am fine, you might not be. TBH, since I don't expect load times would be a huge issue for you you mgiht be as well with a rust disk and splurge the rest on a new stick.

[kalniel]

Reckon you should be fine. As far as the SSD goes, you ned to know you cna cope with it - I have a separate fileserver so don't need tonnes of space and am fine, you might not be. TBH, since I don't expect load times would be a huge issue for you you mgiht be as well with a rust disk and splurge the rest on a new stick.

Again FSX is a weird one - I remember suffering from pop in quite badly on a mechanical drive. I guess it might make the case for a ramdrive actually :/ But SSD should be good too.

[herulach]

Again FSX is a weird one - I remember suffering from pop in quite badly on a mechanical drive. I guess it might make the case for a ramdrive actually :/ But SSD should be good too.

I've never played it - but it must have been super shonky when it came out if popin happens on modern machines?

[kalniel]

I've never played it - but it must have been super shonky when it came out if popin happens on modern machines?

Like I said, it's weird and I guess what we'd call unoptimised. Some games scale quite sensibly, others hit weird bottlenecks. FSX is one of the weirdest I've seen.