After 4 years of tripping on my old desktop, I decided to change things up completely and go to a mITX system.  This was done mostly to downsize the amount of space my "office" was using and give more desk space to the wife for quilting (or at least that's what she thinks    )

 

The old rig: AMD 965BE (Not OC'd) running on a Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H with 8GB RAM (Ripsaws, I think?) and an XFX Radeon HD 6870 (twin fan).  Storage was a couple of Toshiba 2GB drives (probably not 7200RPM, but I don't remember).

 

This setup ran FSX, and now FSX: SE, surprisingly well.  I don't run any scenery and pretty minimal traffic.  It would usually average around 20FPS running anything PMDG or the Majestic Dash.

 

After a few years of running the supplemental heater (Man do those AMD chips pump out the heat!) I decided to switch things up for an Intel system.  Keep in mind this is being done on a budget, and it doesn't have to be the latest or greatest.

 

So far I have a Thermaltake Core V1 mITX case, a Corsair 430W modular PS, a Crucial MX100 256BG SSD, and the 2 Toshiba drives as storage. The sim and OS will be on the SSD.  The short term plan is to keep using the XFX card with a SATA-PCIe plug until I find a decent nVidia card for the right price.

 

I'm just about to grab the motherboard and processor. I'm thinking of the Gigabyte GA-B85N Phoenix Wifi or the GA-H81N for the board, and the Core i3 4170 for the processor. I also have an Arctic Freezer 11LP cooler coming for the CPU.

 

Thoughts on this setup? Does anyone have any experience simming on an i3 platform?  Ultimately I just want something that will run the sim smoothly and use a buttload less power than the old AMD rig.

 

Thanks!

 

Personally, I'd change the motherboard for an ASUS H81-Plus or an MSI H81-E33 and a pentium 3258K Cpu at half the price of the i3.

 

The Cpu will clock to at least 4.2ghz on either of these boards

Oh wow. Apparently AVSIM didn't email me that a reply was sent on this.

 

I ended up changing the mobo for an ASUS H97i Plus. Although the clock on the Pentium looks sweet, I'd rather avoid overclocking. Also, I don't buy into the "Anti-Hyperthreading" hoopla.  But that price sure is nice.

 

I also ended up grabbing a Gigabyte 750ti 2GB card.  It seems like the Intel/nVidia combo is much better when it comes to FSX.

 

Thanks for the feedback though Eddy!