PC Build for X-Plane 11

[FSX meistro 0]

I'm looking to upgrade from FSX to X Plane 11, would these system specs be good enough to run XP11 with 30+ fps with;

- Ortho scenery for most of Europe and some of the USA

- Payware scenery such as True earth GB and a range of global airports

- Addon aircraft such as FF757, FF767, FFA320, Zibo 737 etc

 

The specs are:

CPU : Intel Core i7 8700K Six Core Socket 1151 (3.7GHz, 12MB Cache, Hyperthreading, Overclockable)

CPU Cooler : Cooler Master MasterLiquid 240 CPU Water Cooler

CPU Thermal Paste :Standard Thermal Paste

Graphics Card : nVidia GeForce RTX 2070 8GB GDDR6 Graphics Card

Memory : 16GB Standard DDR4 2400MHz Dual Channel Memory Kit (2 x 8GB)

Motherboard : Asus TUF Z390-Pro Gaming Motherboard

System Drive : Samsung 500GB 860 Evo Series SATA III 6Gb/s Solid-State Drive

Storage Drive 1 : Seagate 4TB Barracuda 5900 64MB Cache SATA III Hard Disk Drive

Storage Drive 2 : Seagate 4TB Barracuda 5900 64MB Cache SATA III Hard Disk Drive

Optical Drive (Check Case) : DVD-RW 22x

Power Supply : Cooler Master MasterWatt 750 750W ATX Power Supply (Bronze 80 Plus)

 

 

Thanks

[mjrhealth 820]

Now if we all just had crystal balls. Its a good start, no promises, its more than just your pc, the more stuff you add the slower it gets. The more plugins running the higher the complexity of the aircraft the greater the detail of the scenery it all adds up. Dont expect teh 2070 to add wonders, many have bough thinking they where going to blow the competition away and where severely disappointed, as all te h2000 series did was add ray tracing as they needed to sell cards, and xplane doesnt do ray tracing which is a FPS killer anyway., you really should avoid teh hype you wont be so disappointed. GPUS like CPUS have seemingly hit a brick wall, wonder what the next thing they will add to try sell cards.

[Colonel X 1,430]

This is really the only benchmark you need when it comes to CPU, get the best one you can afford.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

GPU is fine, I'd get more than 8GB if you can, even if it's a 10 series (I am regularly pushing more than 8GB VRAM).

Ram is fine, my X-Plane never uses more than 10GB for now and you can always add RAM later. Some people in this forum will tell you that you need 32GB to be safe. That's not true.

Of course it's a matter of budget, but I wouldn't bother with regular hard drives anymore and go full SSD. Waiting for orthos to load from regular HD's (and listening to that) is a pain. But yeah, for your desired coverage you'd need A LOT of SSD storage. I only have a 512 GB SSD and it fits California, Nevada, Arizona and that's about it.

[Paraffin 2,197]

Yeah, I'm one of those people recommending more RAM. And it's not just me, it's Laminar, the X-Plane developer. On their system requirements page, the recommended spec for XP11 is "Memory: 16-24 GB RAM or more." Notice the "or more" part.

If you can afford it, I'd suggest increasing the RAM to 32 GB. We don't know what the future holds for X-Plane, but Laminar has a history of pushing the limits on RAM use.

For one thing, you can easily get past the 16GB threshold if you use something like the free UHD terrain mesh. For another thing, Windows systems are happier with plenty of RAM overhead. Especially if you're running other things in the background. I always have ActiveSkyX, LittleNavMap, and a Chrome browser running alongside X-Plane. I often do things like watch YouTube videos and have a bunch of tabs open in Chrome on long flights in cruise. 

You can't go wrong with 32 GB in a modern flight sim or "gaming" rig, and RAM is pretty cheap these days. 

[Bjoern 1,157]

The memory is a bit slow for the CPU. I'd at least go for DDR4-2933.

[w9nwrwi 26]

Keep in mind that if multiple monitors might be in your future mix they will gobble up frame rate quickly.

[olderndirt 2,295]

I,m on the ragged edge of upgrading and would sure like to have a peek at what the optimum requirements will become with Vulcan.

Edited May 28, 2019 by olderndirt

[Paraffin 2,197]

1 hour ago, olderndirt said:

I,m on the ragged edge of upgrading and would sure like to have a peek at what the optimum requirements will become with Vulcan.

Based on what I've read in the Laminar dev blogs, I don't think an optimum spec for running X-Plane (or any AAA Windows game) will change when Vulkan arrives.

We might get a skosh more performance from existing recommended hardware specs if we're lucky. But it shouldn't require more CPU, GPU, or RAM grunt than what's needed now, to run your preferred spec of single monitor 1080p, 4k, multi-monitors, or VR with lots of eye candy.

At least for vanilla X-Plane. If the add-on developers decide to take advantage of any slight increased performance in Vulkan, then of course the sky's the limit. When has a flight sim ever not needed a beast of a machine to run at full options with all add-ons? 🤣

.

[ryanbatc 12,836]

Your proposed machine will be excellent.  I do agree if you have a little extra cash to increase the ram speed to say 3400 or 3600 mhz.  And then if able, 32GB of RAM is what I'd do if I were building a XP rig right now.

Other comment:  I'd go with a M2 1TB SSD if possible...for Windows and all my games etc.  If you're going to use ortho (it sounds like it) then I'd use mlink and put all the ortho on the HDD's

[turnandbank 243]

18 hours ago, Colonel X said:

GPU is fine, I'd get more than 8GB if you can, even if it's a 10 series (I am regularly pushing more than 8GB VRAM).

Ram is fine, my X-Plane never uses more than 10GB for now and you can always add RAM later. Some people in this forum will tell you that you need 32GB to be safe. That's not true.

+1.  8GB VRAM is easy to exceed on X-Plane if you fly in detailed scenery generated with W2XP or Orbx True Earth scenery AND  you want to set texture quality to high. They are doable on 8GB VRAM, but only with texture quality set to medium (2 notches from the right), not a big issue as the visual difference between medium and high is not that noticeable. This is the sweet spot for me with a GTX1070TI 8GB.

[strider1 575]

On 5/27/2019 at 4:22 AM, Colonel X said:

This is really the only benchmark you need when it comes to CPU, get the best one you can afford.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

GPU is fine, I'd get more than 8GB if you can, even if it's a 10 series (I am regularly pushing more than 8GB VRAM).

Ram is fine, my X-Plane never uses more than 10GB for now and you can always add RAM later. Some people in this forum will tell you that you need 32GB to be safe. That's not true.

Of course it's a matter of budget, but I wouldn't bother with regular hard drives anymore and go full SSD. Waiting for orthos to load from regular HD's (and listening to that) is a pain. But yeah, for your desired coverage you'd need A LOT of SSD storage. I only have a 512 GB SSD and it fits California, Nevada, Arizona and that's about it.

Depends on eye candy and resolution settings. I use to get massive stutters when panning my view in XP. Solved when upgrading from 16gb to 32gb of ram! Ryzen CPUs like fast ram, so maybe that was it.    

[strider1 575]

The new Ryzen CPUs look really promising! Especially with Vulcan around the corner. Vulcan should hopefully be more multicore friendly! I am looking at 30FPS+ with the first gen Ryzen.