I am wanting to upgrade my CPU & Motherboard as they are the current bottleneck in my system, and I’d really love your suggestions or inputs, because I am lost in a sea of numbers and acronyms when it comes to PC hardware!
The pertinent facts are these:
Budget: £7-800
To be replaced:
CPU: i7-6700K
Motherboard: Asus Z170-Pro S1151
New components must be compatible with:
GPU: RTX3080
RAM: 2x16GB Corsair DDR4 2666MHz
M.2 hard drive
I do have a Noctua NH-D15 air cooler, however I am fed up of skinning my knuckles on the enormous beast anytime my hands are inside the case, so I might also be interested in one of those closed-loop liquid cooler jobbies if I can squeeze one into my budget.
I should also add my PC is used for gaming, but it’s also my primary workstation, and I do a lot of heavy-lifting when it comes to data, so there is no such thing as overkill if you think this rig is only going to be used for MSFS2020
(Edit to add: I’m not bothered about RGB either, my PC isn’t on show)
Many thanks in advance, advice and suggestions welcome!
Looks like that Motherboard only supports up to i7-7700. A more modern CPU like the i7-9400 series would be a step up, but you will need a new motherboard for that. Since you will need a new motherboard, you might as well get the most CPU you can afford. You can also do better on the memory speed if you are going for a new motherboard. You can likely put off the memory upgrade to put your money towards the CPU and Motherboard, but be sure to check compatibility of the old memory with the new board.
£660 from Currys. It’s a bit of a stretch but looking at the used prices on ebay I should be able to get a few hundred back from selling these and some other components I have lying about
I got myself a i9 10900k, Asus Hero Maximus motherboard, 32Gb 3600 mem, plus some NvMe drives and AIO cooler a few months ago.
Again I was upgrading from a 6700k - very pleased with the improvements over the old PC that had served me very well for several years. Even though it’s bit long in the tooth the 6700k was still pretty good for most things, just not flights sims with VR.
Best suggestion is that the MB needs to be at least a B.550 to support a sim dedicated PCI-e 4.0 M.2 NVme with preferably a 2nd M.2 NVme slot (can be PCIe-3 which is fine for Windows) … a guaranteed killer setup once DX12 and direct storage are fully implemented.
This MB I’m planning to get (MSI X570 Plus) has a 1xPCIe 3.0 M.2 and 1xPCIe 4.0 M.2 slots.
My current set up uses a (5 year old!) 500gb M.2 drive for the boot drive. Are you suggesting I should put that one in the PCIe 3.0 slot and then look to get a dedicated flight sim PCIe 4.0 M.2 drive?
If it’s that old I imagine it’s NAND not NVme and probably not compatible but if it is supported then sure, why not? for Direct Storage it’s really only important to have the sim on NVme and even then possibly just the Community, Official and Rolling/Manual Cache files. Basically Direct Storage data can bypass ram and go straight into v-ram saving a whole layer of processing. With a high end GPU the rolling cache could even be placed in v-ram and probably wouldn’t even need to be that big.
I was also thinking SSD’s in RAID-0 might be a possibility but even then it’s nowhere near as quick as NVme and they will likely wear out pretty quickly.
I upgraded from i5 7600K + Z190 to an i5 11600K +Asus Z590 TUF plus WIFI wich runs with an RTX3080TI and my CPU still has plenty of headroom on MSFS at near maxed out VR settings with an HP reverb G2.
I upgraded a couple of months ago from I7 7700K@5Ghz.
I had RTX3080 and 32Gb 3200Mhz Ram since earlier?
I am mostly using my PC for MSFS and racing sims in VR Reverb G2
I went for MSI Mag Z590 Tomahawk WIFI and I9 11900K.
I cant tell enough how well it performs. :))
I think 11700K would perform very good too.
I had a msi z170 board and a i56600k. Went with an Aorus z390 pro wifi board and an i7 9700k. Huge increase in performance and running the sim with high settings and very happy. Gtx 1070ti gpu and 32gig ddr4 ram…couldn’t be happier. Will upgrade gpu if I ever find one and feel the need!
