Hello,

I have a six year old desktop, running FSX. which is beginning to show its age, although I also have P3D v3 on another on another desktop, I would like

to update the FSX system, which is;- Motherboard Gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3, CPU Intel i7 2600K Sandybridge 3.40Ghz, GPU NVidia GTX 580 DDR5 1536 Mb,

Memory Corsair 8Gb Vengeance 1600Mhz, Hard Disc Seagate 1TB 32Mb Cache.

I suspect the main improvements could be made with updated CPU & Graphics, but not being a hardware buff, I would appreciated other simmers comments.

Thanks

Mike

 

Do you have a budget in mind?  What add-ons do you run?  Resolution?

I run the scenery configurator, so my scenery selection is  grouped to aid both frame rates and VAS performance, Orbx, Vector, Open Plan Europe & N America,

as well  as UK, Ireland,  Norway and USA , OZ and NZ regions, UK 2000 sceneries,I was considering initially updating the graphics card to maybe a NVidia 1060 GTX.

Would it provide a noticeable performance improvement, or is a better CPU  required as well?

Thanks

 

 

Oh, monitor 27" IIyama, 1920x1080

What aircraft do you fly?  At this point you probably should be replacing your motherboard, ram, and CPU in addition to the graphics card.  For 1080p a GTX 1060 should be fine, but if you think you may get a higher resolution monitor at some point a 1070 would be a better choice.  

I fly a mixed selection of aircraft, A2A  172.182,Comanche,  PMDG MD11, 747v1,NGX 737, but I draw the line at aircraft such as PMDG 777, FSL 320

and the new 747v3, as I know they would be too demanding for my system. I'm slowly coming round to thinking  a complete new build is the only answer

if  I am continue  with the FSX .

With your current setup, to really see the benefit you'd need to upgrade both the CPU and the GPU. Changing one would just cause the other to become the bottleneck. To upgrade to a good CPU, you'd have to change the whole ecosystem - CPU, MB, RAM. Just fitting a better, compatible, old-tech CPU in your existing system would just be wasting money in the long term for only a modest improvement in performance. What's your budget (we can make better suggestions then)?

Ok, that's a pretty easy recommendation then.  Get a 7700k, whichever Z270 board strikes your fancy, and 16GB of DDR4 spec'd at 3000 or higher speed.  Don't try to save money on the RAM by going with 2400 or 2667 junk, you'll save maybe $10-20 and end up bottlenecking the CPU.  As for graphics card, if all you're going to use it for is flight sim and you don't intend to get a 4k screen any time soon then something like a 1060 6GB should be fine.  

Thank you everyone for constructive comments, guess I'll bite the bullet.

Mike

Just bought one of these for my Kaby build: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/samsung-ssd-960-pro-evo-price-specs-release-date/

It's like 100x a HD and my Z270 board has a slot for it.  Amazing boards.

 

Cheers

jja