Is there general agreement that a windows pc tower can run FSX (my copy is over 5 years old and is not the steam version) better than a laptop?

I would be running either Windows XP with service pack 3 or else Windows 7.

Potentially yes, but it really boils down to the hardware inside.  With a tower PC and good cooling you have the potential to overclock your processor if it is unlocked, which is definitely helpful for FSX.

 

21 minutes ago, audioresearch said:

Is there general agreement that a windows pc tower can run FSX (my copy is over 5 years old and is not the steam version) better than a laptop?

There are now quite good laptops out there (look for MSI laptops for example), that could perform better than a tower PC. My other advice is to move on to another simulator, like P3D or X-Plane, that are running in 64 bits.

Cheers, Ed

If you judge by price per performance, a desktop system will always win out.

I'd only get a laptop if I traveled a bunch and wished to sim a bit on the road.

Not necessarily true that a desktop would do better. Whilst it is true that most desktops would probably outperform the average laptop when running games and simulators, to some extent FSX is a unique exception to this in comparison to contemporary games and sims. Why is that? Well...

Generally speaking a desktop would be a better choice for running FSX, but only because you could put pretty much any hardware component you liked in a desktop PC (assuming it is a tower pc with the room to do so and the necessary hardware slots on the motherboard). Although not impossible, it is the case that most laptops are pretty much sealed units in that it is a lot harder to get at them to add or swap components, and even if one can get inside a laptop case, there isn't likely to be either much room to add or upgrade anything, nor are there likely to be any free slots for such things.

Laptops are usually limited by their ability to circulate air to cool high performance hardware down, and any high performance hardware, such as a powerful graphics processor unit (GPU), is likely to be large too, so might not fit inside a laptop anyway. Because of this, many laptop computers do not even have a dedicated GPU, but instead use on board (i.e. motherboard-based graphics processing. But, in computer gaming terms, the advent of more capable GPUs is a relatively recent development (i.e. in the past 15 years or so), and this has a bearing on why a laptop might run FSX as well as a desktop. Because...

Modern games and sims which rely on a fancy graphics processor to allow them to run well, but because FSX was developed as an evolution of the much earlier versions of Microsoft flight simulator (i.e. circa 2000), this means the sim FSX is based on was developed at a time when it was the Central Processing Unit (CPU) which tended to do all the work for software, even for graphics-intensive programs such as flight sims, as opposed to these days when it is the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) which does that job. So, the upshot of this is that FSX tends to use the CPU to do most of the work, having inherited that trait by virtue of its evolutionary development, and that, to a large extent, negates the advantage a big desktop can have, because even a laptop can have quite a powerful CPU inside it.

Normally the fact that FSX is CPU-dependant would be something that people would complain about, since it means it can't take advantage of modern GPU hardware capabilities, but it does mean FSX runs pretty well on a laptop, in fact I used to run it on a laptop with one of the first dual core CPU's Intel ever made (over ten years ago) running the then-current Windows Vista operating system, and I can tell you that FSX went pretty well on that thing, so I daresay a more modern laptop with a more modern CPU would do even better.

 

On 9/16/2017 at 1:59 PM, audioresearch said:

I would be running either Windows XP with service pack 3 or else Windows 7.

I'd go with Win 7 if I were you. FSX will run fine on XP but some of the newer addons require or are only supported by Win 7 and above.

As for laptop or desktop, I'd go desktop for a reasons, plus they are easier to upgrade components in if you have one built or build yourself.

One of the first questions you have to ask yourself is what are you primarily going to be using the computer for. In most cases, you'd be better off running FSX on a desktop, but if you're like me, you might have reasons for running it off a laptop. Given my job, which involves traveling a lot (that in itself is likely a huge understatement), getting a desktop isn't exactly a viable option, so that would be one reason to consider getting a laptop.

AS I live on a yacht and travel a lot a laptop for me is more viable and as I work on a ship I can take my sim with me, I have an MSI 17" GT72, 64bit, Nvidia GTX970, 32gig ram , 500SSD, 1TB HDD and although it only has a 5700HQ processor, using a 24" Samsung curved screen, it does run P3DV3 and V4 at a constant 30fps with crisp textures, all Orbx, PMDG, FS2Crew , AS16, ATC programs , etc, etc the list goes on, I'm in the process of a laptop upgrade as there are many that will do the job just fine, although they are a little on the expensive side'

Cheers Rod. 

Hi,

I use both laptop and PC. Laptop is Asus with i7 and GTX 960M. It works quite good with FSX, I can get stable 20-25 fps with medium setting. However after longer period of time there's a problem with heating. When temperature is too high the processor speed is being lowered and performance decrease. Don't have this problem with PC, I use box radiator with i7 6700 and GTX960. It's fine for normal flying with medium/medium-high settings. 30-40fps is possible without a problem. :)

Cheers.