Computer Upgrade Question

[dscott3984]

Well here is another one of those “what should I get” posts. My system is about 3 years old now and 3 years ago, I knew quite a bit about the PC and could do a lot better than I am doing right now. My specs are below and I have been running XP10 since I built this computer with pretty high settings around 25 FPS. Long story short, I am now running two sims in XP10/11 and P3Dv3. I have been enjoying p3d more and more now so I would like to upgrade my computer with that sim in mind instead of XP.

I am currently running p3d with 2 A2A aircraft (Cherokee & C182), AS16, and WAMA. Nothing else installed except for a FSEconomy plugin for tracking. I would like to add ORBX scenery to the mix since I’m constantly flying low and slow but I am afraid my system will not carry the load. Especially when overcast clouds or thunderstorms pop up.

Any advice here will be appreciated. I have a good stable PC but I would like to upgrade it in the areas needed to run p3dv3, A2A (and one or two Carenado jets), AS16, and ORBX on pretty high settings, 30+FPS. Possible?

I have this on AVSIM too, but I would like to pick the brains of the guys here also since I have spend the majority of my p3d time here in these forums, I value your opinion greatly..

Thanks!

Derrick



Case NZXT Technologies PHANTOM 530 Computer Cabinet - Black

PSU CORSAIR RM Series RM850 850W ATX12V v2.31 and EPS 2.92 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Full Modular Active PFC Power Supply

Mobo Gigabyte Intel LGA 2011-3 X99 4way SLI/CrossFireX ATX Motherboards GA-X99-UD4

CPU Intel Core i7-5820K Haswell-E 6-Core 3.3GHz LGA 2011-v3 140W Desktop Processor
(OC to 4.3)

Cooler NZXT Kraken X61 RL-KRX61-01 280mm All-In-One Water / Liquid CPU Cooling Solution

GPU ASUS R9290X-DC2-4GD5 Radeon R9 290X 4GB 512-Bit GDDR5

RAM G.SKILL Ripjaws 4 series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4

SSD Samsung 850 Pro 512GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-7KE512BW)

HDD Seagate 3TB Desktop HDD SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive

OS Windows 8.1 Pro Full Version 64-Bit

Monitor Dell S2440L 24-Inch Screen LED-lit Monitor

UPS APC BR1500G Back-UPS Pro 1500VA 10-outlet Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)

[crippy]

It seems like a very solid system to me! I know Flight Simulator X and P3D run better on a faster single core, than many slower cores. So that might be something to keep in-mind when looking to upgrade a processor. I'm not sure how X-Plane is coded as I don't use it currently.

The thing that looks "weak" {if anything can be considered in that solid build} is the video card. Granted like I said in FSX and P3D upgrading to a gazillion dollar GPU may only yield small frame-rate improvements given that they are so CPU dependent.

You mentioned that you are wanting 30+ FPS. I am very confident with the right tweaking of the in-game graphic settings and .cfg's you can easily achieve those numbers. I for reference run about 50-62 FPS [capped at 62FPS in FSx] and I only have a i5-4670K not OC'd. upgrading my GPU to have more than 2+ GB of ram did help but not nearly as much as bumping my forgotten under clock from 3.4 to 3.8ghz stock speeds.

Seeing as you are OC'd to 4.3Ghz with a decent 4GB card, you may have to consider in game Looks VS performance if you are dead set on getting higher frame rates.

I hope this may have helped somewhat

[dscott3984]

Thanks for looking into this for me. I've given up on trying to build a system based on X Plane since no matter what I do, it doesn't use my CPU or GPU to full potential. That's one of the reasons I am enjoying P3D, it actually pushes my system and makes it work. I haven't had P3D long and basically what I did to start out was max out everything and then dial it back to a reasonable level and was at 100-120 FPS when I didn't have the frame rate locked. Adding AS16 dropped me down to about 50 FPS with moderate weather and around 30 FPS with heavy thunderstorms and overcast. I'm just worried that if I add ORBX to my current hardware, I'll be down to sub 20s. I can dial the setting back further but I'd rather not do that from where I am now because everything I take away now is very noticeable.

Would the 1080 GPUs be overkill for flight sim? Vs just getting a 1070? I have been looking at both of those and a 7700K CPU but from what I'm fidnding, I'll have to upgrade my motherboard also if I go the CPU route. Not too hot on the idea of a motherboard swap as that has always caused me troubles in the past.

Thanks!

[Lewis - A2A]

Hello,

is there a reason why you have chosen the older x99 and CPU?

For the 1080 question X-plane and P3D would like that, but what setup do you have, ie, mega high res, multiscreens etc?

thanks
Lewis

[dscott3984]

Well 3 years ago they were relevant and nice performing products. Just today's demands are taxing them.

Only monitor I have is the one listed here.

[JJB17463rdBombGroup]

Personally I generally don't upgrade unless the CPU is at least 3 times more powerful.
I look at this website https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php to compare the CPU's.
I'll look at a particular CPU and divide the average CPU mark by the number of cores it has (i ignore the logical cores) to estimate the computing potency of each core (it's a crude estimate though)

In my circumstance having an AMD system from 2008 it was very much time for an upgrade to me so I chose a desktop system already built with a Intel Core i7 7700k CPU and a nVidia Geforce GTX 1080 graphics card.

Even though your system is 3 years old it's still quite potent and up to date.CPU's haven't been getting much faster lately.There use to be a time like back in the 1990 and 2000 decades where processor speeds and performance doubled every year.Take for instance a Core i7 2600K CPU from the year 2011 which is 6 years ago.It has a Passmark score of 8,479 with 4 cores or 2,119.75 per core and my 2017 Core i7 7700K CPU has a Passmark score of 12,290 or 3,072.5 per core.My processor only has about 45% more performance than the i7 2600k well that is according to the Passmark score.

[Lewis - A2A]

Ahh right sorry I thought that was what you where buying hehe. OK well in that case you still have a pretty damn kick ass system, it might be worth just holding off for now as whatever you add will be very low bang for buck value really.

,...apart from your GPU. Picking up a 10series Nvidia card you might find quiet the bump in quality of display rather than frames.

[dscott3984]

So with X Plane, scenery was mainly pulled by the GPU and the aircraft objects by the CPU. Of course other stuff was spread out over the two but that's the way it was in a very simplistic term. Is it the same on P3d?

And just wrapping it all up. Keep my system and wait for better upgrades to come along on everything but the GPU. Put a Nvidia 1070 or 1080 in it now as is and I should be able to run P3d, AS16, ORBX, and my A2A aircraft with decent performance?