I'm in the market for a new flight sim PC. Budget of £2,000, clean sheet, no recyclable components from the current rig (2013 i7-3770k) except the 1TB HDD.

I'll be running P3D and probably MSFS2020 on it. What's the best options?

In the U.K. I would recommend PC Specialist 

https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/

Select your parts, add an overclock, get the 3 yr warranty.

 

they put mine together, with a warrantied overclock, for an extra £100 - £150.

i could of saved that money, but what if I accidentally bent a pin on the processor, or had a leak in the cooling system? Ect ect
It would of cost more than £150 to rectify so it was a no brainer.

and when it arrived, I installed a graphics card, plugged it in and was away...no mountain of boxes to open, no installing anything, no messing about with bios for the overclock..

They will put it through stress testing before sending it out. 

If your existing PC is running OK, I'd hang on personally.  Aug/Sept will see the Ryzen 4000 series and the Nvidia 30xx series cards released.

 

Graphics cards have never been so expensive, with a 2080 Super costing about £900, which is only marginally faster than a 3 year old 1080ti which was only about £600 when new.

The graphics card I put in my new system was more than the previous system altogether !

44 minutes ago, Charlatan said:

If your existing PC is running OK, I'd hang on personally.  Aug/Sept will see the Ryzen 4000 series and the Nvidia 30xx series cards released.

And hopefully soon thereafter MSFS 2020.  

I feel his pain.  (OP)

I'm stuck right now. My nearly five year old PC (specs in my signature) is now giving me fits with FSX. And only with FSX I cannot seem to finish a flight of any length without a crash.  I suspect hardware, but I also have not been able to get Windows 10 to update since April a year ago (2019).  It fails on one update and cannot get past it to do subsequent updates. The update has much to do with something about Net Framework.  Windows Defender by-the-way does update. 

After way too many hours of fruitless research it appears the update failure may be because I cloned my primary system drive and inadvertently changed partition types (MBR vs GPT or vice-versa). And I have not succeeded in reversing that.  So my remedy will be a new system, and that has to wait right now.  Because of the pandemic, and because of the next advance in simulators and the wait for info about system specs.

Meanwhile I am pretty much grounded.

Edited April 10, 20206 yr by fppilot

On 4/10/2020 at 3:23 AM, lambourne said:

I'm in the market for a new flight sim PC. Budget of £2,000, clean sheet, no recyclable components from the current rig (2013 i7-3770k) except the 1TB HDD.

I'll be running P3D and probably MSFS2020 on it. What's the best options?

Buy the fastest CPU and GPU you can afford.  

Currently, those are the 9900KS and 2080 Ti (not counting Titan RTX which itself costs $2500 and is a few % faster than 2080 Ti).  

As a side note, I bought a 3770k when it came out, de-lidded it, overclocked to 4.9GHz on water, and then made the following upgrades in the time you have been using this one PC for flight sim, all in an effort to get the best flight sim performance.  I feel like we're finally there with the current generation.  

4770k (4.8GHz)

4790k (5.0GHz)

5960x (4.5GHz)

7700k (5.2GHz)

9900k (5.0GHz)

 

Thanks folks, if there is a glut of new hardware due to hit the market in the next couple of months I might hold off a while.

The current rig is functional, gives about 18-23fps in P3D with the graphics settings all at minimal. But I'd like to enjoy some of the eye candy and get some decent framerates for my landings!

I've been tempted to delid this CPU and see how fast and stable I can get it but by the time I've spent money buying a decent cooling system I may as well put that money towards the new machine.

The i9 10900K is due out soon (rumored paper launch end of April, availability in May) featuring 10 cores and slightly higher clocks than 9900KS, but good luck getting one.  Basically, if you don't pull the trigger the second they come in stock on Newegg or Amazon you won't be getting one for the first month or two unless you buy from a scalper on Ebay.  Next-gen GPUs from Nvidia are also due out sometime later this year, though details there are less concrete.

Any specs for the i9-10900K? Will they fit LGA1151 socket motherboards? and any idea on what it'll cost? The current i9-9900K run around the $430-$500 range.

The new chips are reported to have issues with heat, they have a new socket, and the leaked prices are the same as for the 9th generation of CPUs. I am thinking of getting 9900k since the prices will drop, and is compatible with my current mobo. 

Edited April 14, 20206 yr by Johnny19

8 hours ago, captain420 said:

Any specs for the i9-10900K? Will they fit LGA1151 socket motherboards? and any idea on what it'll cost? The current i9-9900K run around the $430-$500 range.

10 cores, up to 5.3GHz turbo (single core, short periods) up to 5.2GHz under most conditions.

7 hours ago, Johnny19 said:

The new chips are reported to have issues with heat, they have a new socket, and the leaked prices are the same as for the 9th generation of CPUs. I am thinking of getting 9900k since the prices will drop, and is compatible with my current mobo. 

Correction: they are *rumored* to have issues with heat.  People love to speculate and spread rumors, don't believe everything you read on the internet.

Here is information from a more reliable source:

 

Thanks! I'll wait on the CPU and see whether or not I should get the 10900k or 9900k.