vortex681

Sorry to repeat your good advice - I must avoid posting when I'm too tired to read everything carefully! I actually used the Noctua NT-H1 in my recent build as I couldn't find anywhere with the Thermal Grizzly in stock. It was easy to apply and seems to be working well.

If you want the best (excluding liquid metals - tricky to use), go for Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut thermal paste. For a very comprehensive comparison, see http://overclocking.guide/thermal-paste-roundup-2015-47-products-tested-with-air-cooling-and-liquid-nitrogen-ln2/. It's a year old but covers all of the current best pastes.

Also, try checking the calibration in Windows without FSX running - if it's a hardware problem, this will highlight it.

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Bill, it's worth downloading MSI Afterburner to monitor your CPU and GPU to see how much they're being used - https://gaming.msi.com/features/afterburner. Although described as a graphics card overclocking utility, it's also a great monitoring app which can give you lots of information about your system and should work with any NVIDIA card. If there's a bottleneck somewhere, it should be easy to trace. FSX and P3D are very CPU-intensive and overclocking your processor will give you a free performance boost and may even resolve your problems. You should be able to get to 3.6-3.8 GHz out of an i7-920 with just an air cooler. As far as a new GPU is concerned, my experience is that upgrading your graphics card will allow better antialiasing and higher screen resolution but doesn't improve performance significantly in FSX. Try overclocking, it costs nothing and, as long as you monitor the CPU temperature, it's safe.

It would seem that it's not difficult to overclock a Dell XPS 730X - see http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2008/12/18/overclocking-the-xps-730x-explained. Also, whilst it obviously won't be as fast as a similarly-clocked Skylake processor, it will still give significantly better performance than he's getting at the moment. I would be very surprised to see a 100% performance improvement from a Skylake system compared to a similarly-clocked i7-920. My new i7-6700k running at stock speeds is certainly much faster than my old i7-920 running at 4 GHz but twice as fast? I'm not sure - it is considerably cooler, though!

The first thing to do is overclock your CPU. My old system had an i7-920 running comfortably at 4.0GHz with Corsair liquid cooling. The performance improvement in FSX compared to the CPU at stock speed was significant. I had no problems running FSX with 6Gb RAM so would probably consider upgrading the GPU rather than memory.

Start Steam. Open the Steam menu, top left of box, and goto Settings. Select Downloads and click on Steam Library Folders. Click on Add Library Folder and select the folder you want to add (or click on New Folder...). You will then be able to select from the Library Folders when installing a Steam game.

Couldn't edit my post above for some reason! As Steve said, make sure that you have SP1 installed as this addressed problems with the canopy in DX10 amongst other things.

Bryan, I have the Milviz F86 running in DX10 with the fixer and the canopy appears normal (with reflections) in the external view so I don't think it's a general problem with DX10. Similarly, I don't think that it's a problem with the model or I would be getting the same problem as you and I'm not. Not sure if it's significant but I'm running FSX in Windows 10 Pro, 64bit with a GTX 970 (at 2560x1440) and the 368.81 NVIDIA drivers.

Sounds like there's something fundamentally wrong with FSX. Could be time for a full uninstall/reinstall!

Does your joystick test normally in Windows without FSX running? If so, if you have the paid version of FSUIPC, try deleting the axis assignments in FSX and set them up in FSUIPC.

The 6850 with 32Gb RAM is great choice if you also intend to do a lot of video editing, rendering or such like. If not, then the 6700k with 16Gb RAM is more than enough and would save you quite a bit of money. The 6700k has a higher base clock speed and seems to overclock slightly better but, at a similar clock speed, you're unlikely to notice much difference between the two.

Resolution is 1080x1200 per eye, so lower than you currently have. Also worth noting, according to Oculus, is that if you want to stay in virtual reality for more than a few minutes, you'll probably need to build a tolerance to it with quite a few users saying that it either makes them feel sick or gives them a headache with prolonged use. Try before you buy would be a good idea.

You don't need any drivers to use the MS FF2 joystick in Windows 10 - it's simply plug & play. You say that the forces are working outside of FSX so it would appear not to be a hardware problem. However, just to confirm, you may want to download a small program to test the forces - http://fs-force.com/support.htm#ForceTest. While you're on the site, take a look at FS Force. If you don't already use FS Force in FSX you're really not experiencing your joystick at its best. I would highly recommend it, particularly as the default FSX forces are so bad (I have no affiliations to the author). You can download a trial version which only works in the Seattle area but would be enough to establish whether or not it would get your joystick working again in FSX - http://fs-force.com/index.htm.