Novice building a flight sim machine

conork93

Hi Guys, I’m Conor,

First post on this forum, so nice to meet you all. I’m wondering if any of you can provide a bit of guidance.

I’m looking to get back into flight simming. I was big into it years ago and was mainly running FSX with a bunch of lovely addons on an old Dell dimension C521 Desktop PC. It ran FS2004 really well (back in the day) but wasn’t ideal for running FSX with the spectrum of addons I had. Nonetheless, I’m looking to get back into it. I currently run X-Plane 10 on a MacBook Pro I use as my main computer currently, but they’re not really ideal for running this kind of stuff are they.

Looking around at PC options, This is where you guys hopefully come in. I’d be looking to get something off the shelf to run either P3D V4 (specs: https://www.prepar3d.com/system-requirements/ ) or the older Flight Simulator X ( https://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/requirements/microsoft-flight-simulator-x/10510 )

In terms of budget, I’d be hoping to spent perhaps €500-750 and get a decent performance with medium settings/sliders but can go to 1000 max if the performance would be worth it. (As you can tell, I really haven’t a clue)

Looking on the gaming section of currys.ie, there seems to be many options within my budget. https://www.currys.ie/ieen/gaming-pc...-criteria.html

Anyone got any suggestions on where to start/and of course where to buy in Ireland? Any tips and or suggestions at all would be much appreciated. Apologies if I’m being way too optimistic or Ill informed.

Hoping to hear from you,
Regards,
Conor.

Samuel T. Cogley

Bumping this for you - but for goodness sake don't buy from Curry's.

K.O.Kiki

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1400 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor (£101.99 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: MSI - B450 TOMAHAWK ATX AM4 Motherboard (£91.96 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2666 Memory (£143.86 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Kingston - A400 240GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£39.95 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: PowerColor - Radeon RX 570 4GB Red Devil Video Card (£209.99 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Cooler Master - MasterBox MB600L ATX Mid Tower Case (£40.96 @ Scan.co.uk)
Power Supply: Cooler Master - MWE Bronze 450W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (£41.47 @ Scan.co.uk)
Total: £670.18
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2018-09-04 14:47 BST+0100

RX 570 finally back in a sub-€750 build.
There's a few RX 570/580 8Gb & GTX 1060 6Gb for similar money on Adverts.ie

Nibs05

I would recommend using intel chips as IPC is better in P3D 4.3. Also I’ve had AMD GPU’s give me grief in P3D so I would recommend Nvidia.

I’m running a I5 2500k at 4.4ghz, GTX 1080, 16gb ddr3, average 30 ish frames in both xplane and P3D but that’s with loads of addons, my cpu is holding me back so upgrading soon.

conork93

Wow guys these comments are really fantastic stuff.

In terms of putting together the actual machine, is there a company that anyone can recommend that would put it together or builds flight sim based machines? I have of course googled this but am bombarded with lots of different sites claiming to be Irish builders but all looking very similar in site design etc. It made me a bit suspicious if I’m honest. Thanks again for all help and suggestions.

One more thing. P3D V4 is what I’d prefer to run but I’ve checked the specs compared to V3 and there is quite some difference. Seems you’d need a far more powerful machine to run it well from where I’m standing. Any truth to this? Anyone got any experience running V4 smoothly and how that would effect the price of the machine?

Thanks again guys

TerrorFirmer

Wouldn't be an expert either but I believe Intel and Nvidia is the way to go. P3D has a heavy pref for IPC in which Intel excels. I would imagine an Intel CPU as high clocked as you can get it would be the best option. Something like an 8600K with an overclock probably ideal, after that, GTX1060 6GB most likely.