Hi all

First of all sorry if this in the wrong place.  I’ve currently got a 4790k 4.0Ghz, 16 GB and 1070.  I’m holding off until release to see what mileage I can get out of my current PC but I know I’m due an upgrade.  I was waiting in particular for the release of MSFS to gauge the requirements.  I don’t for one minute believe the recommended or ideal specs.

I am in a fortunate position that I can shell out up to £2500 on a new PC just for the base unit, no monitors etc.  I will be using a 1080P resolution and I'm not a graphics junkie, I would like to fly HIGH settings with all the bells and whistles turned on - if my new rig allows ULTRA with 30FPS or higher that’s a bonus.  I’ve been on some sites like overclockers customising builds but be honest I’m a little wet behind the ears in the hardware market.  I know I need a good CPU, 32GB and a good graphics card, SSD etc with probably decent cooling preferably liquid if I want to push the CPU.

So my question is if you had £2500 to spend to get the optimal sim experience what would you go for based on my posted requirements?

Many thanks

 

Edited July 31, 20205 yr by sidfadc

I actually have the same system as you except I have the i7 4770k and I have a 4k monitor. That system @ 1080p on high is no problem at all. I get around 55 fps on high @ 1080p. 

I've just spent about 2500 for a new build. 

I7 10700k, 64gb ram, 2x 1tb nvme ssd, 2x 1tb regular ssd, 280mm aio cooler. Gonna wait for the 30 series gtx 

 

Get the highest cpu you can afford with 32GB 3200mhz ram. For the GPU, you may want to keep your 1070 until the 3000 series are out.

Thanks guys, I was looking at exactly the option of replacing everything else but my 1070 then opting for the 3000 series later.  From a cpu point of view what’s the difference between the high end i7 and i9, should I just look for highest clock speed??  The price on chips can vary widely but I don’t want to buy a potato when for a few hundred quid more could get something much better.

Here's something I learned from my own mistake: choose the processor with the highest single-core performance, not the largest number of cores. The reality is that multi-threading only goes so far, and in the your sim performance will be bottlenecked by some process hitting the limit of a single core. 

The mistake I made was to spec my system with a Core i9 processor that had a ton of processors but had a single-core speed that was less than some Core i7's. I should have gone with the latter because my sim performance is limited by CPU, not GPU.

1 minute ago, andradef said:

Here's something I learned from my own mistake: choose the processor with the highest single-core performance, not the largest number of cores. The reality is that multi-threading only goes so far, and in the your sim performance will be bottlenecked by some process hitting the limit of a single core. 

The mistake I made was to spec my system with a Core i9 processor that had a ton of processors but had a single-core speed that was less than some Core i7's. I should have gone with the latter because my sim performance is limited by CPU, not GPU.

Thanks mate so what is the best CPU with highest single core performance or how do I find this info in the myriad of options out there? 😀

The as-yet unanswered questions that are most likely to drive a hardware decision specific to Simzilla (aka MSFS 2020) are:

1.  How well does Simzilla scale up with additional cores?  How many minimum and optimum?
2.  Will SImzilla load the CPU (or one or more critical cores) so heavily that faster-than-stock (or the absolute fastest possible) speeds are needed or advantageous?
3.  How much will Simzilla leverage additional GPU horsepower, and at what resolutions//AA levels is that most effective?

Of course if you go for the bestest fastest CPU, GPU, and memory then that's all you can do.  If you want to prioritize which components to beef up at the expense of the others, then you need to wait and see what the answers to those questions are.

 

15 minutes ago, sidfadc said:

Thanks mate so what is the best CPU with highest single core performance or how do I find this info in the myriad of options out there? 😀

 Went with the i9-10900k.  Here is why..I watched about a dozen YouTube videos of this chip as compared to all of the high end ryzen chips as players were playing and showing the FPS of numerous high cpu intensive games.  The intel chip offered higher FPS in every video and every game played.  This even included thread ripper variations from Ryzen.  Ironically, the i9 cost less as well. 

i9-10900k is the fastest cpu for games right now.