Building my own PC isn't something I want to attempt. I was looking at purchasing one through "PCSPECIALIST" mainly because they will sort everything out and provide a warranty.

They do customised overclocked bundles, but the cost skyrockets..

 

Please read the second paragraph of my post (I edited after you quoted me).

 

I really would not buy a PC, everyone is different obviously and I don't know you and you may not be a very tech person, but trust me, if you spend 1 week reading forums spending an hour a day, you will be able to build one just fine. You do not need warranty from anyone, all parts you buy have either lifetime warranty or at least 3 to 5 years of warranty. If something fails, you replace the part, simple as that. If you buy the PC from someone and they give you warranty, guess what, you will have to ship the entire PC to them everytime something happens and it will cost you hundreds of dollars to do it with insurance. Why make someone else rich when you can use the extra cash for yourself?

 

Building an air cooled PC from ground up takes about 30-45 minutes once you get the hang of it, for first time builders, I'd say 2-3 hours. That's nothing.

If something fails, you replace the part, simple as that.

 

Money doesn't grow on trees...

Money doesn't grow on trees...

 

Then why waste it on someone else to do something you can do it yourself?

 

If a part, say a hard disk, fails, it will fail regardless of you or that company installs it. Building a computer is not that hard, you really have to try extra hard to screw things up.

 

They are going to charge you at least $200-300 for building your computer and selling you the warranty. That's the price of a CPU or a video card and yes you are right, what you pay for it with certainly does not grown on trees;)

Yes i suppose that's fair enough.. Is it worth getting one of the pre-overclocked motherboard/CPU bundles, for example, from http://www.scan.co.uk ?

I have gone to them before (they're a fairly local company) and know they do good value over here in the UK.

How does this sound:

 

Case: Corsair Carbide 300R

MOBO: Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H

CPU: i5-3570K overclocked to 4.4GHz (or even 4.6GHz)

Thermalright Macho performance cpu cooler

RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengance

GPU: GTX 660Ti

600W Corsair PSU

500GB 7200rpm 16MB Cache hard drive.

 

 

Any thoughts?

There are three main publicized approaches to tweaking FSX: Bojote's automated tweaking tool, Word Not Allowed's guide, and NickN's guide.

 

I'm trying Word Not Allowed's Guide now. Only one problem, I can't find my FSX.cfg file...???

 

NEVERMIND haha sorry i went to the wrong folder. found it, found it

Just completed the tweaks, FSX seems to be running a little more stable now.

I'll try a long NGX flight and see what happens.

thanks

How does this sound:

 

Case: Corsair Carbide 300R

MOBO: Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H

CPU: i5-3570K overclocked to 4.4GHz (or even 4.6GHz)

Thermalright Macho performance cpu cooler

RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengance

GPU: GTX 660Ti

600W Corsair PSU

500GB 7200rpm 16MB Cache hard drive.

 

 

Any thoughts?

 

It's a decent system, but I'd steer clear from 7200 rpm drives unless you are really tight on the budget. You should get an SSD just for O/S and FSX and if that's too expensive for you try a 10k RPM raptor drive. A good SSD makes a big difference in FSX (and with pretty much everything).

Hmm. Yes I think that's a good point.. Would a 240GB (550 Mb/s Read, 520 Mb/s Write) SSD be okay for the OS and FSX? I don't have a particularly large FSX installation, I have many aircraft addon's, but as far as scenery goes, I've only got around 5-10 addon airports, REX Essentials +, and I'm thinking of getting UTX Europe and GEX Europe.

 

They are rather expensive!

Yes the IB memory spec only supports 1600ghz. That said you can still run 2133-2400 on it no problem. The issue boils down to voltages because IB only supports 1.5v for memory but I am currently running 1.65v no problem. In regards to Overclocking you want and need to do it because FSX WANTS a higher clock speed. Any good Z77 board will suffice but I have and lean toward MSI because they just make it easier to OC IMO. An SSD is a must also. If you dedicate your machine to FSX then 256gb would suffice. Don't discount a good soundcard as they have a lot to do with how efficient they utilize the CPU. In this case an onboard soundcard solution will kill you (besides not sounding very good).

 

Anyway target 4.9ghz for your overclock with an 3770k chipset. You can get it to run sub 60c under load if you have a closed loop cooler like the Corsair 1050i and delid the chip. (not hard to do but takes some patience). Finally get a good diamond blend paste like the Antec Formula 7 (available at Best Buy). It is the key to a successful installation IMO.

 

BTW Asus sucks - get an MSI MPower LOL

 

Cheers

jja

Supports is not same as works with. The faster RAM is overclocked RAM that requires more voltage than intel certifies the CPUs with, so you have to run the CPU outside of the spec. Everyone does it, and its been that way since overclocked RAMs hit the market years ago.

 

Thanks.

Regards