Good evening, 

I am a complete newbie to the flight sim world and am currently looking at getting my first gaming PC. Would much appreciate some advice on what kind of specs I need to be looking for to be able to run flight sim at a decent standard. I am looking at a budget of about £500-£600. 

Thank you in advance for your help :) 

 

Welcome to the AVSIM Forums.  I've moved you into the appropriate forum for your question about PC Specs.

£500-£600?  That should buy you a great desk to put your new computer on  You will need a fairly powerful CPU for your flightsim computer.  In the range of 3.5-4.0 GHZ with good hi-speed RAM of, at least, 8GB.

If you do enough shopping around, you may be able to find something in your price range.

You need to up your budget.. 

Aim for an 8600K or 8700K CPU on a quality motherboard

coupled with a 1070GTX video card.

Edited September 8, 20187 yr by Bert Pieke

Pretty much what Bert said, I would recommend not buying one of the Nvidia GTX 1080 or 1080TI's , as they are overpriced and do not perform much better than a 1070 or 1070TI. Userbenchmark is a good reference for picking which parts will be the best for the money.

On ‎9‎/‎8‎/‎2018 at 4:05 PM, Hotwheels1211 said:

Good evening, 

I am a complete newbie to the flight sim world and am currently looking at getting my first gaming PC. Would much appreciate some advice on what kind of specs I need to be looking for to be able to run flight sim at a decent standard. I am looking at a budget of about £500-£600. 

Thank you in advance for your help 🙂

 

It's tough to be on a limited budget.

However, I think you will find an AMD based system easier on the buck's (sorry, pounds?).

I put together the following system;

1: Asus Crosshair Hero VII mobo,

2: AMD Ryzen 2700x CPU.

3: Skill 3466 memory.

4: EVGA 1200 Watt PSU.

5: Cooler master Case, had it on hand.

6: Samsung EVO 1TB NVME ssd.

The CPU comes with a Prisime cooler, works very well and in almost silent!

With AMD you have an upgrade path the don't require a new motherboard every time they come up with a new CPU like Intel does. They are coming out with a 7nm form factor CPU shortly, sampling now! You may save a few pounds buying a mobo with an x370 chipset rather that an x470 chipset, I don't see all THAT much difference, I have both. The BIOS on the ASUS mobo's have game overclock presets for easy over clocks, they work great!

I'm running @ 3.4Ghz and 3400 memory.

Also running Active Sky, Soft Clouds. GSX for the kids, they love it!

Using FSX-SE from steam, no need to worry about user control and FSX_SE, Steam improved memory control big time. 

If, at a later date you run PMDG, the best!!! on PV3Dv4 they extra cores come into play at 64 bit.

LM X-11 is 64 bit, Multi core CPU's are better.

With FSX-SE only I get within 3-4 FPS at high density airports of INTELS best. I cannot justify those extra buck's for a few more FPS's! Much less a reduced upgrade path. Love doing flights with PMDG's 747-400F aircraft. PMDG is worth the price!!! 

I have a few 2TB Western Digital Black 7200 ZEK HD;s and like strong PSU's, you cane allway's add more capacity later on the cheap.

I also network 2 machines and run Aivlasofts EFB v2. I also have a few sites on YouTube.

Good luck over in the UK

Best wishes

BaldyB

 

 

Edited September 10, 20187 yr by BaldyB

On 9/8/2018 at 9:05 PM, Hotwheels1211 said:

I am looking at a budget of about £500-£600.

The cheapest system that you could build to run a flight sim at decent speed would cost you around £680 - see: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/yBFrpG. This assumes that you already have a monitor, keyboard, mouse and a copy of Windows you can use. Some compromises are inevitable at this price point but you'd get a pretty good basic gaming system. The i3 8350k (https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-core-i3-8350k-cpu,review-34095.html) should overclock to between 4.5 and 5GHz and, unlike previous i3 CPUs, has 4 physical cores. You'd have to aim to run at 1920x1080 and probably trade some eye-candy for performance but most add-ons should run.

13 hours ago, BaldyB said:

With FSX-SE only I get within 3-4 FPS at high density airports of INTELS best.

How do you know this? Do you have and high-end Intel system to compare it with directly?

Edited September 10, 20187 yr by vortex681

18 hours ago, zanehuston777 said:

Pretty much what Bert said, I would recommend not buying one of the Nvidia GTX 1080 or 1080TI's , as they are overpriced and do not perform much better than a 1070 or 1070TI. Userbenchmark is a good reference for picking which parts will be the best for the money.

Lol what?

Overpriced and do not perform much better?  Really?  What happens when you run P3D with 4k resolution and texture_size_exp=10 on a graphics card with 8GB VRAM?  

2 hours ago, TechguyMaxC said:

Lol what?

Overpriced and do not perform much better?  Really?  What happens when you run P3D with 4k resolution and texture_size_exp=10 on a graphics card with 8GB VRAM?  

Then you realize your mistake and go back to texture_size_exp=9 

6 hours ago, TechguyMaxC said:

Lol what?

Overpriced and do not perform much better?  Really?  What happens when you run P3D with 4k resolution and texture_size_exp=10 on a graphics card with 8GB VRAM?  

For price, I mean. I just don't think it's worth the extra $200

19 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

Then you realize your mistake and go back to texture_size_exp=9 

Maxed out settings is only a "mistake" if your hardware can't provide enough performance with those settings.  

Everyone has a goal in mind for their flight sim rig.  For some people that's as simple as "does it let me fly" and for others it's a far more complex matter.  I tend to fall into the latter crowd.  

15 hours ago, zanehuston777 said:

For price, I mean. I just don't think it's worth the extra $200

It's worth it if you care about achieving fluid FPS with maximum settings.  Maybe its not worth it to you, but it sure is to me and plenty of others on this forum.

9 hours ago, TechguyMaxC said:

Maxed out settings is only a "mistake" if your hardware can't provide enough performance with those settings. 

Agreed, that was my point, exactly..