Hi all

I am currently having a broadband outage whilst BT Openreach decides when they're going to connect my new home to the telecom infrastructure! (Order placed December 2017, what fun). This seems like a good time to consider a system re-build to enable an upgrade from FSX:SE to P3Dv4 as that seems to be where the future of Flight Sim is heading. I want to be able to run the FSLabs Airbus (and upcoming Concorde) comfortably, with weather addons, scenery and all the mod cons you'd expect along with VATSIM event traffic AI.

Currently I have an i5 3570k 3.40GHz processor with a liquid cooling system, 12gb RAM, an SSD hard drive and a Nvidia GTX 760. What do I need to spend to get myself to a comfortable position and could somebody inform me of compatible parts for ordering?

Thank you!

Hi,

first off I’ll tell you what I’m using for P3D V4 as I have just switched recently from FSX SE DX 10

System:

ASUS P8z77 vpro/thunderbolt MOBO

i7-2700k @ 4.8 cooled with H80i

GTX 1070ti

16gb ddr3 gskill 1866mhz cl10

samsumg 1tb ssd for P3D V4 

corsair 250gb ssd for OS win 7 64bit

850w Corsair PSU

my P3D settings are considered “Medium/High” and I am absolutely blown away by how well it performs on this old beast of mine (average FPS is 45 almost everywhere and smooth, I love it!)

The following would be the Top end of What “I” would suggest if you can afford it and what I will most likely upgrade to myself,

MOBO: any ASUS Maximus LGA1151 board (Hero or Formula are great over clocking boards)

PROC:  Intel i7 8700k (your choice but you need something extremely fast to get the best performance from P3D V4)

Cooler: Corsair makes good ones, but many are available

GPU: GTX 1080 or a Higher or equal GPU

RAM: At least 16gb (important) of the fastest memory compatible with MOBO of your choice ( speed (MHz) not super important, but it may help) Kingston, Corsair, Gskill and Crucial are great brands

PSU: high end, do not cheap out on this piece, get at least a 800w to 1000w, sounds like overkill but it’s worth it, Corsair makes fantastic PSU

SSD: your choice, but I would say, something with a lot of space for the sim and Mabey a separate ssd for the OS

and of course a CASE with good airflow to fit it all in, there are to many to choose from

This would be a “High end” starting point for you to do your research on cost to figure out if you just want to upgrade your system or do a full build for P3D

My final advice, if you are a serious simmer, do not cheap out on your system, if not a serious simmer, do not cheap out on your system!

Hope this helped, have a great day!