Howellerman

As a confirmed fanboi of ORBX scenery, my PayPal account is twitching in anticipation. That being said, I am still exploring PNW, NRM, and CRM and will be happy to do so for the summer. Hell, I haven't even gone north of KORS to explore Pacific Fjords yet! Unless of course the FTS Global reviews upon release are fantabulous...

Panda comes into a bar, eats shoots and leaves. Panda comes into a bar, eats, shoots, and leaves. Bless the English language!

Having enjoyed ORBX products quite a bit, I found the linked article with a "discouraging word" to be very interesting. First things first: ORBX does make you jump through some hoops to get joined up, but once you have the "secret handshake" I have found them to be really great at support. Responsive, respectful, and thoughtful when provided new information that they perhaps did not have before. Now, on to the linked article. The final arbiter of what is "correct" is Google Maps, and this is where I have pointed out issues to the ORBX crew and they listened and took notes for future updates. When the link author Dain Arnes compared UTX (which I also have and admired) with ORBX, however, he only used Google Maps once, for a sloping mountain shot where we all know FSX has problems with vertical gradients. However, when you compare the Florence MT view he presented to that of Google Maps, where the straight road going North is the old US 93 and the new interstate curves around on the right side, Google Maps indicates that, yes, that is mostly open land and ORBX is almost spot-on. Same for the Missoula view north of KMSO: that "view" can only be found at one place, and again, ORBX nails it much better than UTX. There is a small industrial park that both miss, but other than that, the ORBX view is accurate: lots and lots of nothing. I have to go back to work right now, but will take a look at the other ones later today. JKH

And keep in mind that if you buy a hard drive (or SSD) you are eligible to get the OEM version of Windows 7 (my preference). Comes sans support of any kind, but you know where we live... OEM price is half of Retail.

My Dad was part owner of a Luscombe semi-aerobatic (load rated, but no inverted flight): High-wing, fore and aft seating, stick and rudders. Used to take me up (teenager) and have me turn, fly the horizon (i.e., level flight). Surprisingly easy to control, but maintaining altitude, etc was remarkably difficult. I guess that is the difference between flying and farting around. He used to take my brother and I rabbit hunting down in Hollister. Land on a dirt road out in the middle of absolutely NOWHERE, and at the end of the day, pick up the tail, turn her around, and off we went. I always used to wonder where a TWA pilot learned stuff like that... not to mention barrel rolls, inverted (kill the engine, point her to the ground to restart), etc. Great fun, based out of Watsonville.

Man o' man! Those are terrific shots! The gradients of sediment (especially in the first shot) are huge improvements over FSX, and the color saturation is amazing. First thing I did was search for FS Global, and near the top is the AVSIM review. Didn't read it in detail, but the summary was pretty concise: no "con" comes to mind. What is an ORBX boy to do????

Wait. What? Was that a female? Whooooaaaa.... Is this bad? Is this good?

Heya John, I don't think you can get a good rig out of the OEM vendors such as Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. They will not have the power supply you want, nor the ability to overclock. The exception that comes to mind is Alienware (a division of Dell), but I believe their systems are going to bust your budget. If you have a Fry's Electronics close by (I see you are near Olympia, WA - there is a Fry's in Renton) they might be able to build you one. The ones here in the Santa Clara area will assemble your system based upon your selected components (case, PSU, CPU, etc), and I believe the price is reasonable. I spent $1200 on my rig, and am very satisfied. Good luck!

I have the Orbx North America suite, and have not seen anything detrimental when I fly outside their coverage with FTX enabled. In fact, things seem to be better looking, although I admit I have not done an A/B comparison for validation.

Heya Noel, Um, no. I am afeared of trying XPlane - I finally got FSX to run right, and got the right airplanes, scenery, and utilities. I originally flew freeware aircraft, but the payware stuff is soooo nice, and made me aware of the concept of "flying an aircraft" - flight planning, starting cold and dark, and basically running a flight from takeoff to landing in real time. [Note: Mister Cattaneo, Craig Richardson, and other freeware aircraft are in a class by themselves]. And now I have UTX, and GEX, and REX, and a serious (I mean SERIOUS) addiction for Orbx stuff... I can say that the crash analysis guys that created and perfected LSDyna (used by pretty much every auto manufacturer) and the HPC community have gotten multicore/multisystem parallel programming down cold, so maybe the folks at Prepar3D or Xplane can learn to exploit these new Haswell multicore systems (FSX, alas, is at a dead-end). The main challenge is realizing what can run in parallel (I would say weather and terrain, since that is well established in the scientific community), what is strictly scalar (the aircraft), and creating a good maitre'd to synchronize them all. I am optimistic, and as people like Orbx and other sim vendors create Prepar3D offerings in parallel (pun totally intended), things will only get better. JKH

Parallelism is indeed the direction things have been going. Intel is to be commended for providing 5+ generations (Pentium, Netburst, Core2, Nehalem, and most recently Sandy Bridge) of new architectures while maintaining the same thermal design point (TDP). On the server side, where I live and breath, this is 60W, 90W,and 130W of thermal loads. This consistency, despite going from single core (Pentium) to 8-core (Sandy Bridge) and now 12 core (Ivy Bridge), is remarkable and allows server vendors to maintain air cooling up to 95F ambient environments. Remember, these are SERVER numbers, not PC numbers, where multiple cores have long been acknowledged as good, and have allowed Moore's Law to continue to progress with transistor density, which is basically the combination of cores and cache. The upcoming (again on the server side) jump from Sandy Bridge (the architecture, the 'toc' in Intel design cadence) to Ivy Bridge (the feature shrink, or the 'tic') is taking an architecture implemented on 28 nm technology and shrinking it to 22 nm technology, increasing the core counts (from 8 to 12) and the "last level cache" size (from 24MB to 30, perhaps larger). I have a number of friends at Intel who have told me "yeah, we could have clocked NetBurst to 5+ GHz, but it would have required liquid cooling." In a server environment, this is not a good alternative, where hot-aisle/cold-aisle airflow is the dominant cooling model. Moving forward, I think that Intel will maintain their existing TDP, continue to increase the core density, and make multiprocessor design disciplines a moot point. I come from the age of absolutely EXQUISITE engineering required to create multiprocessor systems (mainframes on down), and now? All on a single piece of silicon. So, parallelism is the new goal. That being said, there are very few applications that scale well with increased parallelism (HPC being an notable exception, but that is a very different discipline). Not to get too technical, there is a multi-processor curve that most applications hit and when it hits, gains in performance can turn to losses with increased core counts. That is why (again, on the server side) virtual machine technology is so pervasive: chop up all those big symmetrical multi-processing systems into discrete 1-2 core virtual machines where things run more efficiently. When I record what FSX is doing on my system I see the primary CPU (1, in my case, as I have affinity mask set to 14) totally maxed, while the other two cores are dipping up and down in cadence. The "cadence" is what I find worrisome about FSX on multiprocessor systems. Cadence typically indicates that if core 2 is "bored" it will steal work from the process queues on core 3. Core 3, being bored, will steal them back from core 2, and the lockstep goes back and forth. All the while, core 1 is doing all the heavy lifting. This lack of intrinsic parallelism in FSX is the limiting factor going forward on new Intel designs, including Haswell (the new architecture, or "toc") and beyond. Anyway, I hope I haven't stripped too many syncros here, and I welcome input from the "PC" side of the house. JKH

There is an Orbx library component that you are supposed to install LAST. Did you install it? Link: http://myftx.com/orbxfreeware/FTXORBXLIBS_130416.zip They periodically update this library (hence the date: 2013-04-06) but it may be what you need.

Oh, man - I am so envious of your water settings - beautiful! Mine are the suck - I just can't get them right anymore in my UTX/GEX/REX/FSWC labyrinth...

I agree with the other comments - once you go payware you never go back. However, a personal favorite of mine is the Blue Angels mods to the bog-stock F-18 - it turns into a really nice flying arrow/dart/weapon with tremendous flight dynamics. Others have noted Dino Cataneo's machines - flat out amazing quality for freeware. And Piglet's Meyers 200D is a really nice flying sim. I only have a half-dozen payware aircraft in my hanger, but everyone one of them is an "aircraft" compared to the standard FSX stuff.

Heya James, A good starting point is going over to Simviation.com and entering p51 into the search field. There are a number of pretty good models, particularly the AF Scrub versions. I could tell you which one I like best, but after building my new hot-rod PC I only installed the A2A P51. I can tell you the freeware versions are easier to fly!!!

+1 on this one, but I would like backwards compatibility! Maybe the good people over at Prepar3d have an aircraft skunk works for a 64-bit engine...

Heya Jose, All I can provide is my limited experience, but I have not had any problems with my i7 3770K on an MSI Z77A-65G with a Corsair H80 water cooler (water cooling is mandatory!). I have been creeping up the clock speed, currently @ 4.4Ghz and still running less than 40C CPU temperature. I feel pretty comfortable going to 4.6GHz given these parameters. And 4.4 relative to the default 3.5 is *definitely* noticeable! FSX is one big hack-fest, both on the software and hardware side. Part of the enjoyment! JKH

Hi MJL, I too have noticed the jumpy behavior of the C-172 and Baron on takeoff. Lot's of stick to get off the ground, even at a pretty high runway speed where you would think the plane would start to float a bit, and then, boom, up we go. In my limited knowledge/experience with FSX, I have to go with the other comment's to your thread: it may be specific to the Microsoft models. I had originally thought Microsoft aircraft would be pretty sophisticated, but the more I see good freeware (the Blue Angels mods to the F-18 make a FANTASTIC flyer, and Dino Cattaneo's F-14 is a stunning freeware package), and the limited payware aircraft I have (I highly recommend the Lancair Legacy from SWREG), it does appear that MSFT did not expend as many resources on these two aircraft (at least) as they could. JKH

Now you tell me! I installed the Canon disk and it froze-up FSX solid - entered a Not Responding state and stayed there. Could not End Task either! So, I uninstalled all of the Canon stuff and rebooted - even Shutdown had a hard time killing FSX and the system was dodgy until the second reboot. However, on the second reboot the Windows 7 drivers (not the CD) were automagically installed because I left the printer on and connected and now FSX works. And my printer works as well - I kept on getting printer code -20 errors. So, I recommending uninstalling all of the Canon drivers, rebooting, and letting the OS load the default drivers. Hope this helps! JKH

Hmmm. Being new to the FSX arena, but being familiar with Intel computer systems since 94... Intel is to be commended for keeping all of the advances in its architecture (Pentium, Core, Nehalem, Sandy Bridge) to a defined TDP (Thermal Design Point). Upper range is always 130W, which if you think about it is damn hot. That being said, the clock speed has not changed that much. Density has, yes, but not clock speed. I recall a conversation I had with one of the architects of NetBurst architectures (pre-dated Core) that they could have revved that system to 5GHz, but only with water cooling. That was a single core! Now you have 4 + hyperthreading cores in an i7, 10 cores + hyperthreading in a commercial chip like the new Xeon systems, but still within the "hot light bulb" limit of 130W. What we are missing, according to FSX, is sheer cycle speed. Ain't going to happen. Intel will retain the TDP of 130W (or less for lesser core machines). That being said, I just built a hot-rod PC with i7 3770K (unlocked) processors - may the struggle continue!!!

I am a newbie by any stretch of the imagination, just having purchased FSX in November. However, in that time I have... well, let's just say I have done the full Monte, from zero to Mach 1, to the point that I just assembled (from this post) a hot-rod PC to fly FSX aircraft. Why? Because forums like this and others turned me on to UTX... GEX... REX... FSGenesis... Addit Pro, FSWC, all in the interest of improving my "fly fast and low" addiction. My wife thinks I am nuts, at least until I remind her of the new Samsung Galaxy 3S I bought her... When it is right, it is glorious, amazingly glorious. When it is not, it needs a tweak.

My first post - perhaps it will help! I upgraded my Dell PSU to an HX650, and similar to your situation, I was able to fly for about 90 minutes and then wasa greeted with the sounds and smell of a fried power supply. The fan *never* came on, out of the box. I remember when I first powered it up thinking "that is the quietest power supply I have ever heard". No fan, that's why. Oddly enough, I came home from work and my son was on the computer, but after a while, down she went again. Have Corsair RMA the unit. They can turn it around very quickly. JKH