I have been sort of an Xbox apologist ever since the game was released on the platform, with over 1000 flight hours logged and a growing collection of peripherals. I’ve been a very vocal and largely optimistic advocate for the Xbox experience and it’s been very easy to applaud all of the mountains being moved to allow for Xbox simmers to have a great experience.
Anytime I considered the idea of abandoning Xbox in favor of PC, I’d talk myself out of it almost right away: with WASM support things are only going to get more exciting, with MSFS2024 things are only going to get better and more stable, more hardware will be coming out with Xbox support, and the ease of a pick-up-and play experience without obsessing over FPS made it so that I never really gave much thought to absorbing the HUGE cost of entry over my $500 beast of a console.
A week ago, I attempted KMKE > KSTL in the PMDG 737-800 and was realizing as I was setting the flight plan up in SimBrief that I’m purposely choosing non-enhanced airport scenery solely out of fear for the game crashing. I’d also made concessions in not using live weather or live traffic; both elements that I enjoy and would rather use if possible. I just wanted to get a full flight in so I treated this one very cautiously. And even as I was going through startup procedures and cockpit setup, I became aware of the lack of excitement I had for my upcoming flight - replaced instead by this nervous and cautious and bummed-out feeling that something’s probably not going to work right (black avionics, CTD, freezing, blah blah).
Sure enough, approaching my STAR the cockpit froze, the flight was over, and for the first time ever I started to feel a VERY strong urge to roll up my sleeves and dive into the pros and cons of what moving to PC would look like.
With Xbox’s memory limitations (I assume this is the bottleneck here), the process of troubleshooting CTDs, black avionics and failed flights has now become an exercise in omitting things that are integral to my personal enjoyment of the sim. Deliberately turning off traffic and purposely flying out of ugly default airfields is not the way that I want to enjoy a game this deep and with this much potential (and third party devs are getting SO clever with what they’re putting out there) - I want to experience the sim for all it has to offer, and the idea of being able to play with that sense of freedom (and relief) became very exciting to me literally overnight.
I didn’t really have any idea where to begin, and I know barely any more now than I did a week ago, but I thought maybe this thread might end up eventually being helpful to others considering the same move; I’d like to chronicle my build and setup experience and I’m sure at some point down the road it’ll end up being a retrospective on whether or not I feel like it was all worth it.
Big thanks to Razortek, sound, Mort, and some others who were helping me out with a lot of VERY basic and dumb questions that I had in the Discord - I basically just started firing off as many hardware compatibility questions and personal experience-type questions as I could think of. I had one eye on all the time off of work I have coming up at the end of the year, and I knew that if I used PC Part Picker to come up with a reasonably nice build and if I could get everything ordered in time, I’d be able to use my time off to build it up, get my desk set up, and get the game configured the way I want.
Also had to get my wife’s blessing on the whole thing 
So on December 9th, I gave almost $2000 dollars to Amazon.com for:
Fractal North case
Ryzen 7 7800x3d CPU
Thermalright CPU cooler
Pure Power 1000watt power supply
2x16GB G.SKILL Ripjaws DDR5 memory
3 Thermalright 120mm fans
GALAX GeForce RTX 4080 GPU
and I gave another $500 to Newegg for a 4TB SSD and MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk motherboard.
I’ve probably watched a dozen hours or so of YouTube videos explaining in detail the process by which these components are installed, the experience I can expect to have in MSFS when running with this setup, and DEFINITELY a lot of videos on 4080 vs 4090 comparisons; this was the hardest decision of the entire build, by far, and I hope I made the right decision here in saving almost $1000 to use the less powerful 4080. I still expect I’ll be blown away, as long as I can find my way around the newly-expanded Graphics Settings menu.
Question I kept getting when asking for graphics advice was what kind of monitor I plan to use, and I’m opting to keep using my same Samsung 4k monitor. I’ll certainly play around with VR maybe, in the future, but I’m targeting a smooth 4k experience.
When I started thinking of money I could save by NOT buying a new monitor, I also started thinking of all the things that I can sell once this is set up: my Honeycomb Xbox Hub, my Xbox headset, certainly my Series X and my expansion SSD card, all my physical games. Realized I can just run my Bravo right through to my PC now, meaning I can have a clean throttle and stick setup for Airbuses without the Alpha in my way, since that’s how you need to do it on Xbox. I’m beginning to feel lighter and more excited with every thought of these new doors opening to me on PC.
So I’m spending the last week or so waiting for parts to arrive and coming to grips with all these new things to look forward to that before, I could only read about: Vatsim, VR, headtracking, Neofly, SPAD.neXt, FSLTL, the Fenix A320…it’s really staggering the list of things that I’m excited to try and wrap my head around and see how they fit into my enjoyment of this sim. It is SUCH an awesome feeling and it’s this feeling that kind of led to my idea to make this thread.
Anyway, the first parts to show up were my fans, the power supply, CPU cooler and RAM. Not enough stuff to make for a cool social media picture yet 
also got some thermal paste, an anti-static wrist strap (probably completely unnecessary) and a nifty screwdriver set.
7800X3D showed up the next day. Starting to get excited again.
Yesterday, the case shows up. MUCH bigger than I expected! That Fractal North case is SO sweet looking and I kinda built a lot of my other components around it, certainly for space considerations but also in kind of a mature-looking, anti-RGB type of setup. Clean. A bit later on yesterday, the RTX 4080 shows up, and this stupid thing is almost as big as the computer case (at least the packaging) - haven’t opened it yet, but I understand why people are so excited to upgrade these components. It’s all a very premium feeling experience and definitely a dopamine rush to look forward to these parts in the mail.
Got nothing coming today, but tomorrow my last components show up - the motherboard and the SSD. I should be able to start assembly tomorrow night. I’m expecting it maybe not to go very well, but there’s a lot of info out there and so I’m just going to try and be as careful as I can. I hope it all works and fits the way I’m expecting. Big advantage to console here: these were things I never had to worry about when starting up a game console to sim.
So, without being able to get started on my build until tomorrow, I took what I think will probably be my last flight on my Xbox last night. And I figured it’d go one of two ways, either it would be a good experience and I’d go to bed feeling a little regretful at all the money I just spent to squeeze more performance out of the sim, or something would go wrong again and I’d feel…vindicated I guess? Or like this is all gonna be worth it? Yeah, black screens on final. All done.
I LOVE the Xbox MSFS community, and I will never ever join in the chorus of gatekeeping that you read on here and elsewhere sometimes. I’ll still look forward to Marketplace drops on Thursdays with everyone else. But I feel so excited for the first time in a long time on all the new things I’ll get to tinker with, all while not looking with a suspicious eye at the game if I didn’t do the delicate little dance just right to get it to run well start-to-finish.
Will be updating this thread with information and pictures on how the build is going, what my impressions are like, and how overwhelmed/nervous/frustrated/excited I’m feeling at given points through the process; hope it ends up being interesting to some of you who may be considering the same thing. A beginning-to-end, “if I can do it anyone can” type of thread has been something I’ve been searching for on here and I can’t really find any good examples of that, so maybe this will end up filling some kind of a gap or foster some good discussions.
I too hope they figure out the memory spikes for everybody’s sake.
