My New Rig

[Shawn Goldsworthy]

Well the time has come, my ancient I7 950/GTX 660 system has served me well, but just isn't cutting it anymore so I took advantage of some Cyber Monday/Black Friday deals and ordered all the parts for a new system build tonight. Here is what I have coming (I'm a little excited):

CPU - Intel Core I7 6700K
Cooler - Corsair 115i
GPU - Zotac GTX 1070 AMP! Edition (8GB) - Faster stock clock speed than the EVGA FTW card.
MOBO - Gigabyte G1 GA-Z170X Gaming 7
SSD - ADATA Ultimate SU800 512GB
HDD - WD Black edition 2TB X2. Planning on RAID 0 - Thanks to the Black Friday sales, 2 2TB drives were cheaper than 1 4TB drive.
RAM - G.SKILL TridentZ DDR4 3200 (32GB) - Overkill, yes but it was actually cheaper than the same ram in 2800 or 3000.
Power - EVGA SuperNOVA 850w
Case - Thermaltake Chaser MK1
OS - Windows 10 Pro 64bit


Now to watch the tracking for the next few days. Looking forward to putting this together.

[Kyle.Sanders]

Congrats!
Where all did you buy from?

[Shawn Goldsworthy]

Congrats!
Where all did you buy from?

The video card, processor, and SSD are from NCIX and the rest is from Newegg.

[Ryan B]

Oh man that will be a powerful rig. Plan on overclocking?

[Shawn Goldsworthy]

Plan on overclocking?

Definitely!

[Kyle.Sanders]

Why? With those specs- I see no reason to... OC'ing can lower the life span of the components.

[Matthias Geiss]

As long as the temperatures are within a safe margin, the lifespan should not be affected. I have OCed my 4790K about 10%, which gives a bit of safety in CPU-heavy situations, but of course it doesn't catapult the sim's performance to new heights.

Of course you should never compromise stability for performance.

[Shawn Goldsworthy]

Why? With those specs- I see no reason to... OC'ing can lower the life span of the components.

If I didn't plan on overclocking, I wouldn't have spent the extra $$$$ on the K processor, PC3200 RAM and a big liquid cooler. I could have bought a locked CPU and a decent air cooler and PC2400 RAM for less. The 6700k can be brought up to 4.5 or 4.6ghz with pretty much zero effort. 10-15% performance increase with temperatures that barely crack 80 degrees under stress tests. The 6700k is even warrantied for OC. The last 3 systems I've built (going back to a core 2 duo system with an 8800 GT) have all been overclocked and have all lasted 3+ years with no hardware failures.

[Kyle.Sanders]

I see. Im a bit new to the computer building world. During my most stressful times, I can't get more than 70% usage out of my CPU... so I can't see the benefit of OCing mine.

[Keith Smith]

I see. Im a bit new to the computer building world. During my most stressful times, I can't get more than 70% usage out of my CPU... so I can't see the benefit of OCing mine.

My guess is that you're misinterpreting what that number actually means.

"70%" likely means that one or more of your cores is maxed out and that other cores are not being used (or are lightly tasked). X-Plane is largely single threaded when it comes to the most intensive things it does during normal flight (not counting initial loading and scenery loads enroute). That means the speed of a SINGLE CORE is actually very, very important. As an extreme example, if you had 100 cores in your CPU all running at 1/10th the speed they do now, your frame rates would drop to about 1/10th of what they are now, simply because X-Plane is reliant upon the processing ability of a single core.

As a result, max core speed is king for standalone X-Plane performance. Now, if you're tasking the machine with OTHER things at the same time (real time video capture, encoding and streaming), then having other cores available is great. However, throwing more cores at X-Plane doesn't generally improve frames (everything else being equal). A quad core 4.5Ghz system is going to yield more FPS than a hex-core 3.5Ghz system. This is why OC'ing is still helpful.