Hi all, just looking some advice about getting a gaming PC since my old gaming laptop is about ready to pack in. Been playing the Xbox version of flight simulator but decided it’s time to upgrade to a gaming PC. I know next to nothing about PC hardware, I know roughly what each bit of hardware does but I wouldn’t know if one graphics card is better than another for example. I’ve found a couple of PC’s that I like just wondering if you lot would know which would be the better one. I’ve been using PC benchmark to look at PC’s but I can’t find anything on it for PC’s 1 and 2. The 3rd PC got rated at 98% on PC benchmark, which I personally do like, plus you can upgrade the RAM of it to 128GB
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Just one thing to keep in the back of your mind when looking at systems that use an older CPU architecture is that an upgrade (depending on path) will require a new motherboard.
For the Ryzen option which is a Ryzen 7, that uses the AM4 socket, the good thing with AMD is that they use the same socket for a few generations. So you could upgrade down the road to a Ryzen 8 or Ryzen 9 and use the same Motherboard.
However, AMD is getting ready to launch their next gen CPU which will use the AM5 socket, so you would require a new motherboard if you wanted to go that route.
The Intel option you have (i7) is in the same boat, you would need a motherboard upgrade to use their newer CPU’s.
You did mention upgrading to 128GB of memory, this is what I have in my system as I just maxed out everything however, the sim and it’s related components don’t come anywhere near utilizing that much memory. So, if you wanted to you could cut that in half (64GB) and still do everything sim related, stream, etc… and have plenty of memory left over.
Those are dollars you could put elsewhere in the system.
I am by no means a hardware guru these are just things I learned when doing research on my system and talking with guys who are more involved in it then I.
I hope that helps.
I’ve had a few customers use Novatech, so if you’re in the UK I would give them a shout, Custom Built Gaming PCs by Reign Gaming | Prebuilt Gaming PC (novatech.co.uk) . They’ve always been very helpful in the past and are knowledgeable about gaming rigs.
Unless you’re planning on 1080p maximum you don’t want the 3060, memory bus is too slow.
As for using old motherboards with new processors being a good thing, sure if you want a crippled unit.
AMD’s party piece is it’s memory interface with it’s CPU and that’s the major improvement with a newer main board.
For MSFS it is always the most expensive PC and with nill (0) guarantee that PC would actually perform stutter free.
Because delivering a finished product is a profit under optimized, under performing business model, going against freedom and the free market.
Why not go to PCSpecialist direct and have them build it to your spec? I got my PC custom built by them and I’m very happy with it, I would highly recommend them. Aside from the excellent customer service, the build quality is very good & it’s extremely neat inside the case.
FWIW I would say that all 3 of the links you posted have pretty underwhelming CPU’s. There’s some good gen already in this thread about that side of things. You will need a large (read minimum 1TB) NvMe 2 SSD which is an absolute must for Flight Sim. I would say you don’t need more than 32GB RAM, but 16GB is not enough. Anything more than 32GB is money better spent elsewhere. Even in the most taxing situations I’ve never seen more than 26GB of my 32GB of system ram committed.
As it stands (it might change but I’m not sure), FS needs the every bit of CPU power that you can afford. That really is not the place to try and save money.
Thanks for all the advice, went to the shops and spoke to the sales assistant. He was brilliant and recommended that I use the ESL Tournament Gaming PC - Intel® Core™ i7, RTX 3070, 2 TB HDD & 512 GB SSD. He said you won’t get the ultra settings but you’ll get good graphics and performance, since the next one up would have been too expensive
RAM
- 16 GB DDR4 (3000 MHz) - 128 GB maximum installable RAM
Processor
- Intel® Core™ i7-11700K Processor - Octa-core - 3.6 GHz / 5.0 GHz - 16 MB cache
Storage
- 2 TB HDD (7200 rpm) - 512 GB SSD
Motherboard
Z590 chipset
Seriously, before you buy it speak to PC Specialist direct. You’ll almost certainly be paying over the odds buying it from Currys.