CPU and GPU advice

[Benjamin J 751]

Hello all,

Historically I've always played Flight Simulator, and then P3D, on a Macbook Pro of some sort, simply because I did not have the money to buy both a work laptop and simming computer, and naturally work always won out when it came to priorities. However, I've gotten to a point where I really do want to invest in a simming computer. I intend it to run both P3D v4 as well as the DCS series.

I'm not a total novice when it comes to picking parts, and I have an idea of my budget as well as my particular needs. That said, given how finicky sims such as FS and P3D typically are, I wanted to run it down with you guys. Given my tight-ish budget, I'm opting for:

• CPU: i5 8600k, as it seems to be a better deal for the price.
• GPU: either GTX 1060 or GTX 1070. I'd prefer the 1070, but the higher price tag makes me a little squeamish.

What are your thoughts on these particular parts for use with P3D and, if you have experience with it, DCS?

Thanks!

[G-RFRY 1,712]

This may be a good idea at the moment .

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/why-buy-custom-shop-pc,news-57800.html

They can factor in the build cost to the lower unit cost they pay and likely better able to get parts.

[MDFlier 2,031]

I'm running an i5-8600K. I am currently OCing it to 4.8Ghz, and she runs FSX extremely well. I'm actually getting smooth, stutter free flights locked at 31 FPS at the moment (I have seen 150+ FPS in some instances when I set target frame rate to unlimited). Some areas in FSX, like between KLGA and KJFK still bring the FPS down to around 20, but that area is extremely packed with scenery and I have all of the sliders set to far right. 

I chose an EVGA GTX 1060 6GB card to complete my build. IMO, this card is all you need for FSX. I've got it set to 16x CSAA with 4x SGSS and there are no jaggies or shimmering at all. She looks beautiful. I've pushed the AA higher, but it didn't seem to have any benefit, so I lowered it back down. I'm running it on a 27" monitor set to 1920x1080. I apparently had great timing. I bought it on 12/27 for $269. Today, they are $369 where I bought it, and last week, they were over $500. 

I put 16Gb of ram on a Gigabyte Z370 Gaming 7 MB, and for the first time inmy life, I am satisfied with how Flight Simulator (FSX & FSW at the moment) runs. 

I would absolutely recommend this setup to a friend. 

[Benjamin J 751]

Thanks for the posts so far! MDFlier, that's some great advice. I was hoping the 1060 would be good enough, and I'm glad to hear the i5-8600k works so well for you. I have never OC-ed a CPU in my life though, so how would you expect the this CPU to drive P3D at the normal clock of 3.6 GHz? Its turbo boost goes up to 4.3 GHz as well, do you think that leaving the CPU at its factory clock would be good enough to run P3D well?

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

For P3Dv4, I would recommend getting the 1070 (try to find it at a reasonable price!)..

For FSX, the 1060 is plenty good enough..

[Benjamin J 751]

So the situation now is that a friend of me found this card at retail price and managed to buy it: https://www.amazon.com/GeForce-Dual-fan-Gaming-Graphics-DUAL-GTX1060-O6G/dp/B01JHQT1SE

At this point it's already sold out at that price, and you make a good point: finding graphics cards for appropriate prices seems very hard these days! What do you think? Would this card be powerful enough for P3D4? I should add that my objective is primarily low and slow flying over OrbX territory, and an occasional AS Airbus or Majestic Q400 flight. For these, I always enjoyed KLAX-KLAS, or perhaps EHAM-ESSA. Just to give an idea of the places I'd like to fly into... If possible I'd like to set my settings to "high" at least.

[PaulGR 168]

You can fly with a GTX 970 if you want but with flight sim just buy the best you can afford. That's my approach.

I'm running 5.0GHz with 1080 now and I'm already dreaming about stable 5.4GHz+ CPUs.

 

[MDFlier 2,031]

I would NEVER pay $500+ for a 1060. Not in a million years. I wouldn't pay that for a 1080 either. In about a year or so, 1080s will be $200 or so. THEN, I'll upgrade. Nvidia and AMD are going to keep battling it out and it will be a good thing for us. 

The overclocking part is easy. Change a couple of UEFI settings and she works. I found an 8700K Overclocking Guide on Gigabyte's site an used the exact same settings. Worked like a charm. 

[martin-w 3,235]

11 hours ago, MDFlier said:

I would NEVER pay $500+ for a 1060. Not in a million years. I wouldn't pay that for a 1080 either. In about a year or so, 1080s will be $200 or so. THEN, I'll upgrade. Nvidia and AMD are going to keep battling it out and it will be a good thing for us. 

 

 

You can thank all these bitcoin miners that are buying up graphics cards by the dozen, for the crazy price of graphics cards now. 

[vortex681 806]

12 hours ago, MDFlier said:

I would NEVER pay $500+ for a 1060. Not in a million years. I wouldn't pay that for a 1080 either. In about a year or so, 1080s will be $200 or so.

In the UK we'd see that as a real bargain for a 1080 (even before the Bitcoin issues)! Historically, the price of older generation cards doesn't seem to drop dramatically when new ones come out so I'd be surprised if you were able to buy a 1080 new for $200 even a year from now.

[787flyer 633]

On ‎1‎/‎30‎/‎2018 at 8:30 PM, Benjamin J said:

Thanks for the posts so far! MDFlier, that's some great advice. I was hoping the 1060 would be good enough, and I'm glad to hear the i5-8600k works so well for you. I have never OC-ed a CPU in my life though, so how would you expect the this CPU to drive P3D at the normal clock of 3.6 GHz? Its turbo boost goes up to 4.3 GHz as well, do you think that leaving the CPU at its factory clock would be good enough to run P3D well?

Hi Benjamin,

A couple of points to consider:

For P3D, the GTX1070 is going to be the better option as with the 64bit sim and detailed scenery, more emphasis/workload will be on the GPU than with FSX. More VRAM is also going to be better so opting for the 8GB 1070 as opposed to the 6GB 1060 could make a difference.

The other aspect to consider, which you didn't mention, is your planned monitor. If you plan to run 4K, then again the 1070 is going to be better able to handle it with the higher settings you mentioned. If you're running a 2K monitor, then the 1060 will be enough horsepower I believe.

 

Regards
Mark

 

[Benjamin J 751]

Quick update to start with: After the comments here and reading a bunch of user as well as "expert" reviews, I've decided to stick with the i5-8600k. For the price it seems to deliver great performance, and from what I've gathered it's easy to OC.

 

Hi Mark, thank you for your input!

29 minutes ago, aldridgem said:

The other aspect to consider, which you didn't mention, is your planned monitor. If you plan to run 4K, then again the 1070 is going to be better able to handle it with the higher settings you mentioned. If you're running a 2K monitor, then the 1060 will be enough horsepower I believe.

Your point regarding the higher usage of the GPU vs CPU in P3D is something I'm frankly a little worried about. You say the 1070 will be able to "better handle" the workload imposed by P3D4. This leads me to two questions: (1) what "base" FPS might I expect with a 1060, and (2) I was wondering what sort of FPS increase we are talking about considering the 1070 vs the 1060? single digits, tens, tweens...? From MDFlier's testimonial it sounds like I can expect some solid performance out of the 1060.

Though I will say that at this point I'm inclined to stay with the 1060 linked too, just because getting a graphics card for a normal price in the current market seems nigh impossible... But, just in case a 1070 becomes available to me, it'd be good to know whether to go for it or not.

 

Quote

For P3D, the GTX1070 is going to be the better option as with the 64bit sim and detailed scenery, more emphasis/workload will be on the GPU than with FSX. More VRAM is also going to be better so opting for the 8GB 1070 as opposed to the 6GB 1060 could make a difference.

I have a pretty standard 27" monitor at a resolution of 1920x1080. I on purpose didn't go any higher realizing that the higher resolution would increase the load on the computer as well. Ultimately, the lower res is absolutely fine for me anyhow.

 

Quote

You can fly with a GTX 970 if you want but with flight sim just buy the best you can afford. That's my approach.

Sure. I used to run P3D3 on my MacBook Pro with a GT750M, and it worked, just not very well... The point being that, considering that the 1070 is the upper, upper, maximum, fear-of-heights limit of what I can afford, the question is whether, for my purposes outlined above, I might not better save my money by getting a 1060 instead. So far, it sounds like the answer to that is: "Yes, I can save some money by getting a 1060 instead."

[787flyer 633]

19 hours ago, Benjamin J said:

Hi Mark, thank you for your input!

Your point regarding the higher usage of the GPU vs CPU in P3D is something I'm frankly a little worried about. You say the 1070 will be able to "better handle" the workload imposed by P3D4. This leads me to two questions: (1) what "base" FPS might I expect with a 1060, and (2) I was wondering what sort of FPS increase we are talking about considering the 1070 vs the 1060? single digits, tens, tweens...? From MDFlier's testimonial it sounds like I can expect some solid performance out of the 1060.

Though I will say that at this point I'm inclined to stay with the 1060 linked too, just because getting a graphics card for a normal price in the current market seems nigh impossible... But, just in case a 1070 becomes available to me, it'd be good to know whether to go for it or not.

Hi Benjamin,

To clarify my comments further...

It's not necessarily that a GTX 1070 would directly translate into more FPS, but what I found when I moved from a GTX 550 to a GTX970, (similar jump), my FPS didn't necessarily increase. However the number of dips in FPS weren't as frequent (aka smoother experience in the sim).

The main thing I found in FSX was with the higher power graphics card, I could set the scenery complexity and texture details, the water etc to higher levels and retain the FPS I had. With P3D, given there is more work being done by the GPU (compared to FSX), if you going to fly at those higher P3D settings you mentioned above, then the GTX 1070 will serve you better. I also had an eye on what resolution my monitor would be running (I have a 1440p) which requires more GPU compute power than a 1080p display.

On the other hand if you leave the scenery /detail settings to medium your 1060 is going to be solid enough I believe for P3D.

Re FPS, ultimately its going to depend on a number of factors in your specific simming environment including if you are:

• flying complex aircraft add-ons,
• you have a fair amount of photoscenery installed
• and AI aircraft flying around.

All of these will eat FPS. Since you mentioned Orbx scenery, you should be OK with a 1060.Since you mentioned a std 1080p monitor a 1060 you should be OK.

 

Tip!:

One other piece of advice if I may offer, since you are considering a new build PC and (as you mentioned) graphic card prices are through the roof.

If you try and source PC components separately today, as I would normally, you are going to be fighting with the myriad of bitcoin miners buying up the GPUs. I was in the US last week and both Best Buy and Frys Electronics shelves were completely bare!

I did find that going to a reputable PC builder for a custom configuration to your liking was still a way to get a reasonable price on a graphics card, at least here in Europe.

BTW: I also read an article today that also made note that PC component prices for new kit are not decreasing in price over the same time period as they once were, so picking up bargains is getting tougher.

Regards
Mark

 

[Benjamin J 751]

Hey Mark, thank you for the additional explanations! This kind of discussion is extremely useful.

Reading your comments, I was especially struck by the following sentence: 

Quote

if you leave the scenery /detail settings to medium your 1060 is going to be solid enough I believe for P3D

That was a little disappointing to me, as I'd like to have this new machine run P3D at higher settings, particularly because I'm already spending all this money on getting a new machine in the first place. With that in mind, I decided that if the 1070 would serve me better, I might just spend the extra money now rather than buy the 1060 and upgrade later at a much higher cost.

And then I suddenly got a text from a friend who found a GTX1070 available on Amazon for retail price, so I jumped at the occasion and bought it (which, for as far as I've seen, is an extremely rare thing in the current GPU market).

So, I think this settles the question. Thanks to all for contributing and helping in the process!

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

2 hours ago, Benjamin J said:

And then I suddenly got a text from a friend who found a GTX1070 available on Amazon for retail price, so I jumped at the occasion and bought it (which, for as far as I've seen, is an extremely rare thing in the current GPU market).

So, I think this settles the question. Thanks to all for contributing and helping in the process!

Excellent decision... you will be happy you did it..

ps. I love mine...