I’ve always used Alienware desktops and laptops before and primarily game in FS2020 or XP11 in VR. I also do a few driving games and space sims.
My Alienware Aurora R6 with I7-7700 recently died so it seemed the best option was to salvage the graphics card, ram and HD/SSD’s from that and build something new.
My old rig gave around 30fps on the Reverb G2 with mid to high settings at 70% render resolution. I’m very excited to see how my new rig performs in VR. My local computer shop are building it up for me using Windows 11 and aren’t charging for the build as they couldn’t fix my old one. I popped in to check all the bits had arrived earlier today so I saw the lovely Lian-Li case and motherboard - I’m off to Devon for a week tomorrow so they’re supposed to have it ready for my return. I can’t wait…
Spec is:
Lian-Li Lancool II mesh with USB C
MSI Z790 Tomahawk DDR4 motherboard
Intel I7-13700K CPU
Lian-Li Galahad 240mm ARGB CPU liquid cooler
Gigabyte Radeon RX6800XT (from Alienware)
2x 16GB HyperX FURY Black Memory 2666MHz DDR4 CL16 (from Alienware)
3x Lian-Li 120mm ARGB cooling fans (in addition to the 3 already in the case)
256Mb M.2 boot drive (from Alienware)
1TB Crucial SSD for simulators (from Alienware)
2TB 7200rpm 3.5 storage drives (from Alienware)
MSI MPG A850G PCIe5 Fully modular power supply 850W
I was susprised ho much bigger the Lian-Li midi tower case is compared to my Alienware Aurora!! I guess the biggest impact will come from the new CPU and motherboard so I hope to see higher FPS in VR and greater smoothness as I was nearly always main thread limited before.
The RX6800XT will I’m sure be the limiting factor with the new build but I’m hoping for some nice improvements as I’ve blown around £1000 on this and have no more money for a 4090 etc!! To be honest most of the time I was fairly happy even with the Aurora and wouldn’t have changed right now if it hadn’t broken down irreperably (suspected main board or CPU fault)
I guess no pre-built could compete for the £1006 this has cost, I was lucky I managed to catch some Amazon prime day deals on the motherboard and CPU.
Curious if people think I will see much of a performance difference?
Looks pretty good for the money.
Make sure you or the guy building the system enables XMP in the system BIOS.
Seems obvious, but plenty of people either don’t know, or forget this.
For a long time I thought RGB lighting was silly. Since I got my computer with all its blingy fans and lighting I’m loving it.
One cool thing I do with iCue (which controls my RGB and most of my fans) is to set one of the fan’s color dependent on CPU core temp, and another fan’s on GPU temp. Green is good, yellow is getting pretty warm, and red means it’s approaching thermal limits. It’s a super easy way to keep an eye on things.
My rig is the first one I’ve ever had with RGB fans too. It doesn’t have the option to indicate temps, but their speed does that anyway. When things start to warm up, it gets a bit noisy - even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen temps on either the CPU or GPU get over ~150°F. My previous gaming rig (still have it) was a gaming laptop. It would often reach close to 190° with both fans running full-tilt.
Good to hear there are other old-uns here enjoying their gaming rigs! I guess there’s a bit of treating yourself to something you couldn’t afford when younger! I always dreamt of an Amiga (I had a Commodore 64) but I had friends with Amiga’s and remember being blown away by the quality of the graphics and sound.
I’m still young compared to a lot of the guys that hang out over at Sim-Outhouse. Most of the users in the FS2020 subforum (that I moderate - shameless plug…) there are in their 60’s-80’s.
tclayton - good to hear, I will check out your site. I return home tomorrow and hopefully my rig should be waiting for me.
I ordered a very fast brand new 2TB M.2 drive for Windows and my sims. On my old machine the sims were all on a 1TB SSD which is now mounted as a D drive in the new machine. Should I do a complete new reinstall of FS2020 or should I just use Steam’s function to move the existing installation to my new M.2?
I’m around the same age and built a reasonably high-end machine for msfs. It’s intel-nvidia however. I did delete steam since I find it a bit of a resource hog. Personally I would do a fresh install of msfs via Xbox app.
Let me know if any questions about machine building or msfs performance. Getting max FPS is most definitely not a plug-and-play situation, even with a 4070ti.
I would keep Windows on the 1TB drive and move the games to the new 2TB drive.
I understand that the new M.2 drive is faster, so Windows would load faster on it.
But drive space is the most important thing for programs and data.
I have a 512GB system drive and a 2TB data drive, and I’ve already used well over 1TB of the latter for the sim and other data.
