My upgrade journey for the newer generation of flight sims has been incremental - the 'GPU/CPU upgrade shuffle'.  In both MSFS and X-plane 11 in VR, even a large upgrade in one of those two elements usually quickly hits the next restriction with the other one.

This particular step was the Ryzen 7 5800X to the new AM5 socketed 7700X.  And that meant a new motherboard - and ASUS X670.  And that motherboard needing DDR5, meant new RAM, etc, etc.  Familiar story?

  

Against the sound advice and words of caution from most sensible and knowledgeable folks, I decided to see if I could succeed in the undoubted risky way of keeping the present M.2 SSD boot drive and Windows copy. 

I did the recommended backups, downloaded the latest Windows 10 onto a USB drive (which, as it happens, I never needed), ditto the ASUS BIOS and checked that I did indeed have my Windows 10 Licence number readily available.

 

I studied the motherboard manuals of both the X670 and the present X470 and identified each of the connector blocks on each board.  Thankfully, ASUS to ASUS, the terminology was similar.

 

First power-on was with none of the other drives connected - just the boot M.2 SSD - and using [Del] to get me into the BIOS.  All good.  The M2 identified as the boot drive, the RAM chips (to my surprise) were already running at their design speed rather than the default speed.

 

Next power on was still just the M.2 SSD connected but allowing Windows to try to boot from its original source.  And, other than a couple of warning messages about some remote procedure calls failing, it booted up!

 

So power down again and then the rest of the drives reconnected.  Boot up - again a couple of warning messages but all booted up with all drives and contents visible on Explorer and keeping their original drive designations!!

 

I installed the latest AMD Ryzen Master to check temperatures,  speeds, etc and everything good.  Temperatures were OK (cooler than before) and running a few programs, even saw speeds of up to 5.5GHz (the 5800X for me was 4.6 max) with temperatures still well in the green.  X-plane 12 booted up fine.  For MSFS, I had to re-activate Windows (good job I found the licence code) before it would boot up but, after that, ran fine.

 

 

So, to MSFS and X-plane 12.  Bearing in mind that this change is more to do with being able to get the best out of any future GPU upgrade, a few early observations:

- MSFS is running fine.  The Developer Mode shows the limiting factor almost always GPU now (no surprise there) though FPS not significantly changed.  However, there are less micro-stalls showing on the graphs and it does - with unchanged settings - feel just a touch smoother.

- I will be scouring the info here and elsewhere to pin down which MSFS graphics settings are mainly CPU-related and see if I can wind those up a bit.  Probably no point in raising anything that is directly GPU-related as I suspect that will simply overload it and result in lower visual performance

- In MSFS, the CPU is running significantly cooler than before even though the clock speed is tangibly higher.

 

-X-plane 12 is tangibly smoother in 2D...but still unusable for me, even at quite low settings, in VR.  Maybe there are things I could do to make it at least usable, but I am reluctant to mess with anything other than X-plane's own settings as I have no desire to mess up the pretty impressive MSFS VR experience.  I will wait until Laminar have had their promised development focus on VR before I try again.

 

- And a bit of a surprise.  Both MSFS and X-plane 12 get short bursts at over 5.4GHz at boot up and some headset or flight management actions.  However, even at the same clock speed, X-plane is running the chip much hotter than MSFS.  MSFS never goes out of the Ryzen Master 'green' zone ref temperature even though it hits max clock speeds at times.  On the other hand, X-plan gets into orange and red quite frequently - up to 93 degrees with a design max of 95.  At similar clock speed variation across the two sims, I'm not sure I understand why that is.

 

Anyway, even though this is just a stepping stone to a faster GPU, I will carry on experimenting.  I can't believe that a 19% gain in clock speed can't give me some benefit in the meantime.  If I find some, I'll let you all know what and where 🙂

   

 

 

 

 

Edited December 20, 20223 yr by AJZip

just picked up a 7900x w x670e MB 32gb 6000 cl30 ram.  Hopefully can just swap the m2 drives into the new motherboard without having to reinstall everything. 

On 1/3/2023 at 4:42 AM, wiler said:

just picked up a 7900x w x670e MB 32gb 6000 cl30 ram.  Hopefully can just swap the m2 drives into the new motherboard without having to reinstall everything. 

How'd this work out?