Machine spec?

[djrisc]

Hey Keith,
In watching your X-Plane videos I've noticed your framerate is very nice. I know that you've mentioned you have recently purchased a new system. Any chance we can get the system specs?

It seems like a lot of people have been discussing x-plane and framerates lately, so I was curious what you were using as it seems to run very well.

Thanks!

Brett

[Keith Smith]

I7-3930k, OC'd to around 4.5GHz
Radeon 7970 3GB GPU
16GB ram,
3TB 7200 rpm hard drive (for the video work),
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!!

Vid capture is doing using DXTory, an OpenGL capture tool from Japan capable of capturing multiple audio devices simultaneously. Each audio device is captures to a separate audio track which yields terrific flexibility in post production.

[djrisc]

Very nice.

I'm actually running an 8-core Mac Pro dual booted in to Windows 7 at the moment. lol (I use MacOS for music.)

I'm thinking about building a nice PC to keep it all separate.

Thanks again for the specs!

Brett

[Calvin Waterbury]

I7-3930k, OC'd to around 4.5GHz
Radeon 7970 3GB GPU
16GB ram,
3TB 7200 rpm hard drive (for the video work),
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!!
...

Jake, are you listening?

[Keith Smith]

If you plan on doing video capture and editing, then I'd recommend buying a similar configuration. However, if you don't need to do the video work, I'd actually recommend a quad core CPU rather than the hex core. That's because XP10 on PE sees diminishing returns from the extra 2 cores and you can achieve better overclocking with a quad core (less heat) than the CPU I got.

I needed as many cores as I could afford so that I could capture HD video while running the sim (takes a truckload of I/O capability and cpu), and I have a video editing suite which will use every core to the max when rendering video. This translates to lower video rendering time, which is important to me.

Otherwise, for a fast XP10 rig, the goal should be to get the fastest vid card you can afford with the best OpenGL drivers, the fastest RAM and the fastest CPU with 4 cores you can get. It is NOT the case that XP10 scales linearly across an infinite number of cores. Some of the load-time processes will indeed use all the cores, but once you're up and running, 4, 6, 8 or 12 cores will probably perform about the same. I've spoken to Ben and there are no plans to spread the rendering of each frame across multiple cores any time soon. The reasons for that were fascinating from a technical standpoint, but not of interest to a wide audience. The short version is, I'd go for a quad core and clock it as close to 5Ghz if I could with a good after market cooler.