Hello my name is mike and i am trying to make a decision on equipment to start flight siming. i need help to determine if i should use a desktop or a laptop and the best flight stick to get.
First things first… what’s your budget? Under $2 or over 2k might be the decision point. I spent $1.7k on laptop with 2070 max q and works great. I have 16g ram. I use two external monitors and one with 4k. Res. I use DLSS and sim looks great. If I would have spent more than $2k or close to $3k you can get 4090 card with 32 g ram and use TAA with 4k. The for equipment I use the airbus TCA joystick and throttle. It works well for all aircraft I fly. I fly 737 to 172 to pc-12 to H145 helicopters.
Hello @OrangeBasket243,
Welcome to the forums!
I have created this topic for you from another post.
I have an Asus laptop
Roig Strick I7 9550 32 GB Ram graphics RTX 2070 almost everything in ultra. Perfect.
With virtual reality and the Oculus Rift S perfect.
@ OrangeBasket243:
Welcome, Mike!
Can you give us an idea of any types of flying that you think you would enjoy - e.g. flying jet aircraft, or propeller planes, or helicopters or gliders; fast planes or slow planes… or all of the above? 
Any areas that you would prefer to fly in: over cities or in rural areas; flying airliners into big airports or crop-dusters into small rural fields?
You can do all this and more in MSFS! The reason I ask is that your purchase decisions should be based on what type of flying you think you want to do. For example, w.r.t joysticks, you can fly any aircraft with one, but some are designed primarily for flying military jets rather than airliners. Some have add-on throttle quadrants and switch panels designed for specific types of aircraft. You might not want to buy these add-ons now, but getting the right joystick could save you $$ later. If you prefer flying general aviation aircraft such the Cessna, then perhaps a yoke would be better than a joystick.
W.r.t. PC or laptops specs, in general, flying into & out of major airports like London’s Heathrow or New York’s JFK or Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport uses more PC resources & so requires more powerful hardware, particularly when it comes to the graphics card (GPU).
Obviously, if you need your MSFS rig to be portable, then a laptop is preferable to a desktop PC. However, desktop PCs give you more ability to upgrade individual components later on.
So, the more information you can give the community about what you want to do with MSFS, the better we will be able to help! 
Hi Mike!
As mentioned above, budget will inform a lot of your choices, but there are other considerations too.
Do you absolutely need a laptop for this? If you need to take it places with you, then a laptop is your choice. If you can possibly go with a desktop, you will most likely get better performance from one of those, and at less cost than a similarly specced laptop.
In terms of flight sticks, budget plays a part again, but there is a stand-out product here - the VKB Gladiator NXT. It costs a little more than the entry level products from Thrustmaster and Logitech like the Hotas X or 3D Pro, but is less expensive than the Warthog or X-56, and it is miles better than all of them in every way.
You can choose left or right handed and standard or premium versions (the premium comes with a second trigger and some 8-way hats in place of plain buttons), but the fundamentals are the same.
Logitech and Thrustmaster use the same cheap plastic ball and socket gimbal on all their products, whereas the VKB comes with a proper spring and cam gimbal that also has adjustable damping. The build quality and flying feel (and hence your flight performance) are in a completely different league.
It has a slider axis in the base you can use as a throttle and it twists to control the rudder, so in stand alone form it has everything you need to fly anything in the sim.
VKB also offer separate modules for throttles, additional switching and an autopilot panel, which you can add later as time and budget allows. These can be attached to the Gladiator to form a super-hotas, or mounted separately as you prefer.
I have traded mine in and moved on to another VKB stick now, but I did over 1,000 hours in MSFS with my Gladiator, and it looked and felt exactly the same as on the day I unboxed it. Very highly recommended.
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