new machine, new media for PE

[Keith Smith]

After limping along with some fairly ancient hardware for the last couple of years (my machine was 6 years old), I pulled the trigger on Black Friday and purchased the required components for a fast machine, capable of running XP10 they way it's supposed to run, while hopefully being able to support live broadcasting, and video archiving.

My intention is to start regularly broadcasting flights from the sim and to put together additional video training material for the ratings, including cockpit video for all of the ratings. This will be a mix of sim video and video from real world flights.

For those that are curious, the box is a I7-3930k, OC'd to around 4.5GHz (still working on finalizing that configuration), Radeon 7970 3GB GPU, 16GB ram, 3TB 7200 rpm hard drive (for the video work), and 2 128GB SSD's (one for the OS and one for X-Plane), Corsair H100 water cooling system, ASUS P9X79 Pro mobo. It's about time!!

I'm also pumped to have a desktop machine at home for the first time in quite a few years. This means I'll be able to do some late night sim flights and even some development work from home. I look forward to flying with everyone else in the evenings! Time to get back into FSEconomy, too!

[gavink42]

Nice new setup! Thanks for sharing the details with us. Looking forward to watching over your shoulder on those vids!

Gavin

[Alex Stjepanovic]

X-Plane 10 multiplayer!!!

[Vincent Meier]

Keith,
Was this an off the shelf purchase? If so, where?
Was it O/C'd from factory or are you doing that?

Vince

[Keith Smith]

I bought the components individually on Friday and assembled over the weekend. I overclocked manually to 4.5GHz. RAM and video card are still at stock speeds. Having the 6 cores has been very helpful. The CRJ has multithreaded plugins. Between that, XP10 and the video encoding, all 6 cores were doing some work (although not fully loaded). Frame rates in the sim are pretty much unaffected by the 1080p video capture, which is great news.

The only issue is that I haven't gotten XSplit to do high def encoding, based on the results above. However, I can do local video capture at 1080p and the video looks great.

[gavink42]

It's been some time since your upgrade... Would you share some of your thoughts on how your new system is performing?

Been having some major system stability problems with my 3-year old AMD dual core system, and looking at upgrading to an i7 motherboard/proc.

Thanks!

Gavin

EDIT: Since work requires very lengthy travel periods, I'm also considering an i7 laptop solution with something like an nVidia 670m. Anyone have any thoughts on how FSX might perform on that sort of platform?

[Keith Smith]

Gavin,

Very happy with it, but should've bought faster RAM. My guess is that it's somewhat mismatched right now and the bus is running slower than it could, resulting in an unnecessary bottleneck.

The SSD's are stupidly fast....very happy with them. My XP10 load times are fast enough that I can do restarts for development purposes without it being a huge delay.

I needed a 6 core solution for all my video rendering, but it's not needed for a FSX system because FSX barely makes use of additional cores (to the best of my knowledge). Some of the payware aircraft may have some of their subsystems running in other threads, in which case the cores will be utilized, but stock aircraft and stock FSX don't utilize the additional cores very well.

X-Plane runs scenery loading, object building/teardown, texture loading, AI traffic and vehicle traffic in other threads, so it can utilize the cores quite well. Between that and the video rendering (which hits all 6 cores 100%), I'm glad I bought what I bought. I had very specific requirements, and the system was spec'd accordingly.

A quad-core is actually easier to overclock and has more headroom, I'm told, because of the extra heat from the additional 2 cores. So, for straight single CPU clock speed, I5 or I7-2600 might be the right way to go.

[Alex Stjepanovic]

Stay away from laptops as gaming devices. I made that mistake when FSX came out. The system should have been more than able to take it.....but it didn't. Since then, I've had plenty of knowledgeable computer people tell me that laptops just aren't desktops

[Ryan B]

It's been some time since your upgrade... Would you share some of your thoughts on how your new system is performing?

Been having some major system stability problems with my 3-year old AMD dual core system, and looking at upgrading to an i7 motherboard/proc.

Thanks!

Gavin

EDIT: Since work requires very lengthy travel periods, I'm also considering an i7 laptop solution with something like an nVidia 670m. Anyone have any thoughts on how FSX might perform on that sort of platform?

I've looked at some Asus laptop's... one of my coworkers was looking to have a powerful PC but wanted to be mobile. If you're prepared to pay the cash Asus has the best product's in my opinion.

Here's what I'd get if I NEEDED to be mobile:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834230590 - I'd also format it and install Win7 x64 - but that's just me.

The highlights of this one are the GTX670M, the newer 3630QM cpu, and the SSD. FSX should do pretty well... it will choke with lots of addons like NGX, Orbx, FSDT airports and weather all at the same time. To combat that you need to overclock (NOT RECOMMENDED with laptop lol)... however the turbo should boost to 3.4GHz with this laptop.

Oh, and congrats Keith on your upgrade! Overclocking is the key and I wish FSX was multithreaded like XP10. I love that Corsair cooler... I've got their older H60... What kind of case and power supply did you get?