Specs before I buy

Wife has bought the Quest 2 just as i was about to buy/build a gaming PC to play FS amongst others.

Will this spec be ok for playing the game and in VR with Q2.

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
32GB 3200 DDR4

thanks in advance - PS Newbie and I couldn’t find anything on the forum re that combo.

What’s your maximum budget?
Is this just gaming or any other specific tasks (i.e. editing)

Happy to propose a spec for your budget if that’s useful, hard to say if a given CPU GPU combo is best bang for your buck without knowing what other parts you’re spending your cash on.

Best,
G

ASUS PRIME B550M-A motherboard
1TB Intel 665p NVMe M.2 SSD
with casing and basic addtional fans - £1300 GBP

at this minute it will be purely for gaming/VR though I do stream on other laptop so that shouldn’t be a problem if i choose to stream (highly unlikely)

Any editing I do I use my laptop and its not heavy editing tbh, the odd clip

It’ll work! It wont have much overhead, but if you’re working to an absolute budget then you’ve got things balanced pretty sensibly. VR will run on it.

My thoughts in terms of changes and first upgrades if you decided to up the budget:

Ditch the Intel m.2 for a Sabrent Q, or even better a samsung 970 evo plus. Intel isn’t the drive to go for at that price range IMO just looking at R/W speeds.

If you can find a good price for an X570 board, worth going for as it’ll take full advantage of the PCIe 4 on the 5000 series chips. B550 is fine and does have basic PCIE 4 support though.

First big upgrade, and do this if you can stretch to it - get a 5800x.
FS2020 VR is CPU hungry as much as GPU hungry and every FPS counts in VR!

Second upgrade would be to an RTX 3070. The 3060 TI will be fine, a 3070 will be good, 3080 will be great etc. etc. its just an endless pit of money. Get the best 30xx you can afford and you’ll be happy, there’ll be new cards out in a year anyway.

If it helps, I was in exactly your shoes with exactly your budget in November. After much research I decided it was worth saving for a few more months and last week I finally built the PC with this spec:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800x
GPU: MSI RTX 3070 Gaming X Trio
Mem: 32GB (2x16GB) Corsair 3200 MHz
Storage: 500GB Samsung 970 Evo NVME M.2
MoBo: Asus X570 Tuf Gaming Plus
Cooler: Corsair H100x
PSU: Corsair RM750x
Case: NZXT H510

It cost me £1750, but I’m glad I spent the extra. I’m still CPU limited but the GPU is running at 80-90% so its all stretching its legs nicely.

I now only play FS2020 in VR, very happy. Just finished a 2 hour flight in the Citation Longitude!

Hope that helps. Its a tricky business this VR malarkey!

Edited to correct what I paid (initially said £1700) and suggest an X570 MoBo

Hi there,

Any particular reason you went with the 5800x and not an intel chip such as 10850k?

I’m also looking to upgrade but in stages… first mono cpu ram, later gpu.

I have the exact same specs. It runs well in VR on High! BUT not with Efis planes. Its currently a Bottleneck that we all have. Asobo needs to work on it.

For me it’s simply that AMD supports PCIe 4.0.

In the future I will want to take advantage of the higher speeds it offers with a super fast M.2.

Plus the 30xx GPU’s are PCIe 4.0, not that it appears to make a huge difference right now. But nice to know I have the full bandwidth.

If that wasn’t a priority I might choose differently of course, but I wanted support for latest technology.

You’ve also reminded me to nudge the OP towards an X570 motherboard to take full advantage of that PCIe 4.

Disclaimer: I’m not an AMD or Intel fanboy! Simply came down to what I wanted to prioritise and AMD had the goods.

Hiya, interested to know are you on 5600x + 3060 Ti or 5800x + 3070?

5600x 3060 Ti. Honestly dont buy the 3070 its a waste of Money. just Overclock the 3060 a little and youll get the same Performance.

priced up your spec - just shy of £1200 without the graphics card which i cant get any supplier to quote…(knew GPU’s were hard to come by) cheapest I could find one x trio was 850 quid.

that’s half your build price…

Yep graphics cards are like gold dust. I got mine from eBuyer for £629.99, committed a whole day to checking websites and it paid off but I’m not sure if prices are that low any more…

I don’t think it’s fair to say the 3070 is a waste of money… it should be around £100 more than a 3060 Ti and gives you more performance… sure, a Silicon lottery winning 3060 Ti might overclock to give you 3070 stock performance… a lucky 3070 will still be better. That’s the game we play. Anyway I feel like this is moot, if a 3070 is outside your budget get a 3060 Ti and you’ll be happy knowing you’ve got a cracking GPU. Get the best you can afford.

Ultimately, it’s a really ****y time to buy pc parts, prices are all over the place… We have to decide if any stock that pops up is worth jumping on with at the inflated prices.

Just did my maths properly, apologies i was under by £52.52 which is annoying, sorry didn’t mean to mislead you.

Also I already had a windows 10 Pro license so that might need factoring in at £20.

Anyway. Your original spec is perfect for your budget (I’d just change the SSD if it were me), but I wanted to share the advice I was given.

£2k Scan have quoted me for that build…
individually reckon could do it cheaper but will i get 3 year warranty …don’t think so.

wish they would have given me the bits at their cost…cos it’s not filling me with hope.

so the original spec i had will not play VR? FS2020?

It is totally a waste of money Overclock the 3060 ti and youll get the same Performance. The gab between the 3060 and 3070 is simply too small.

U wont feel the 7-8 Frames Difference. If you really want power you should get the 3080 in my Opinion.

Are you sure of this in 4K? Even in FS2020? And what about in VR?

And if you overclock the 3060TI, how does it compare with an overclocked 3070 then? Is the $100 still worth it?

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Well i had both Gpus and i didnt feel a difference at all. Maybe a couple Frames more but thats about it. And yes i am a FPS Junky. Check the Video above. i just bought the 3080 now.

Thanks for reply, I was thinking of going down Ryzen route when msfs 20 came out but recently drawn back to higher overclock on intel, difficult one given ryzen is closing the gap on clock speed and also difficult to ascertain Ryzen being more efficient in terms of processing vs intel higher over locks.

I have been able to sit back up to now, pleasantly surprised my 2012 ivybridge set up with some modest mods could still cut it at 1080p however virtual reality has opened my eyes to pardon the pun!

So back looking at upgrade bundles

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Need to be patient prices have been driven way too high given supply issues, hopefully this will be resolved.

I’m considering two stage approach, sort out the mobo cpu and ram and sort the graphics card out when supply’s are sorted… gives me chance to save up

Pc specialist, I have always found competitive on price but admittedly haven’t used them.

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Just revisiting this with some context, having tweaked more NVIDIA settings and unlocked some more performance today.

My 5800x is sat at 4850 Mhz (no overclocking)
My overclocked 3070 is sitting at 2145 Mhz core and 8000 Mhz memory, max temperature 56 deg.

My benchmarking flight is TBM 930 Bristol > Heathrow at 4:30pm to get some day and night lighting, I’m getting solid 30fps in the quest 2, boosts to 40 in the sky.

This is with Volumetric clouds and glass cockpit refresh rate on HIGH. Just about to update my thread with current settings here:

I’m super happy.

P.S. only issue i’ve found is Paris CDG which slows me right down to 9fps, but it’s eaten all 8GB of my VRAM by that point!

Very good video. Here were my takeaways:

The 3070 isn’t worth it for 1080P or 1440P gaming, the 3060 Ti is very capable and matches or betters the 2080 Super.

Go for the 3060 TI unless you’re going for high resolution gaming or 4K and have the budget.

You could argue the 3070 has better power efficiency, and hey if you’re smashing the GPU for hours and pay a lot for power, then over a long period of time it may be worth it.

VR is definitely high deffinition gaming, and I pay my power bill and play a lot of FS2020 (plus CAD for work). I couldn’t stretch my budget to a 3080.

The 3070 was the right choice for me.