I’m about to attempt my first sim-pit and need some technical advice on my planned setup. I’m intending to use a 42” LED tv 

as my ‘windscreen’, two 22” monitors as my left and right ‘windows’ and a 22” touchscreen as my MIP. I want to include some

scenery add-ons and have a couple of the Saitek instrument panels I can use as well.I only use my computer for flight sim however 

may look at using Xplane in the future. 

 

What I need to know is what GPU and CPU I should be looking at for this set-up to work? I’ve been recommended a GTX 960/970, 

will this be strong enough? My current CPU is an i7 860 2.8Ghz quad core, will this handle running 4 monitors and flight-sim at once? 

Will 8GB of RAM be enough  or should I go up to 16GB?

I would say you need to rethink the configuration - you will not get acceptable performance with three separate 3D views, regardless of your CPU. Your present CPU will in any case barely be capable of running FSX well with a single view. I am assuming you want to run other than fine weather with default aircraft and scenery.

 

A lot of people with fancy modern hardware make a lot of dubious claims about their performance. Perhaps a mega-GPU makes a real difference these days but bear in mind that FSX has not changed at all since the days when the received wisdom was that the GPU made little difference. Just maintain the right amount of scepticism. What follows reflects my own experience.

 

You will need a better CPU. I am not up to date, but you need something that clocks higher than 2.8GHz.  I started with a 2.8GHz Core2 Quad Q8200, which was rubbish. I used a Core2 Duo E8600 clocked at 4GHz for a long time, which was much better. Now I run an i5-2550K at 4.6GHz and a GTX670 GPU. With one view and a 4 megapixel display. I use a ton of add-ons and it's okay, but I still need to make a lots of compromises. 

 

Assuming a good CPU, in my experience your options for the display are (1) run a single 3D view across all three monitors; most modern nvidia cards will do this using 2D Surround. (2) Use Wideview to run separate 3D windows on different computers. With Wideview, you would ideally run one computer per view.

 

There are some caveats. For (1), you will need to run your three monitors at the same resolution and as they aren't the same size it will look odd. I have never tried this combination so I can only speculate. For (2) if you want to use the virtual cockpit you will be very limited as the instruments will not function on the slave PCs and you will not be able to pan the view (it goes without saying you will not be able to use TrackIR). You will also need copies of everything (FSX, aircraft, scenery, REX, etc.) installed on each PC, which may have licensing implications as well as hassle implications. Last time I looked, FS Global Real Weather was the only weather system that supported weather propagation with wideview.