1 reply to this topic

[SebastienDS]

ello everyone,

This is my first post on this forum.
Have been flying fsx on laptops for 5+ years. Just finished my airline pilot training and now about to order a custom build.
I have lot's of questions...

Right now the build is an I5 4670k, 8GB corsair 1600mhz, (GTX 660 2GB), Asus B85M-e

1. Win7 vs Win8 : I am used to Win7. If Win8 is better for performance, I would consider it. The shop says that the price is the same..

2. P3DV2 vs FSX: Never tried P3D... I just want stability and frame rates. With Opusfsx, PMDG, Carenado and some scenery.

3. SSD??: Do I need this? I have one in my laptop. But if the performance is not really affected in flight sims,
I will take a WD HDD

The last question is related to the P3D vs FSX:

4. GTX660 or better?: Since P3Dv2 uses more GPU, is it worth dropping the SSD and adding better gpu? Or is this fine? I want my pc to be balanced for flight sim.

Any help would be appreciated

Kind regards

[AlexKitch]

My quick opinions:


1. Win7 vs Win8 : I'd go with Windows 7, personally.  I have Windows 8.1 and FSX was, frankly, an absolute pain in the ###### to get running stable and with everything working. Save yourself the hassle, unless you're really bothered about having Windows 8.

2. P3DV2 vs FSX: FSX, if you're interested in everything just working as it should out of the box. Don't forget to run Bojote's Tweaking Tool (http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html) to get the best performance out of FSX.  If you want to be more experimental, give P3DV2 a try. Personally, I found that P3D just wasn't worth the hassle.

3. SSD??: I'm going to say yes, on this one. You'll notice faster load times, faster texture convert times (if you're using anything like REX to provide custom textures), and less framerate spikes caused by loading in of scenery/textures as you fly along.  If you can't afford SSD, consider sticking two traditional disks in a striped RAID configuration.

4. GTX660 or better?: It depends on what kind of resolution you're going to be playing on.  For anything up to 1920x1280, a GTX660 should give you fair performance. FSX isn't particularly GPU intensive unless you start playing around with the Bloom settings, but the aforementioned Tweaking Tool really helps with GPU performance as well as CPU.