Once the basic cockpit concept was selected, I moved on to building a PC to run the simulator. After reading the UGTAFS and other sources, I decided to use either FSX or Prepar3D over X-Plane, FS9, or anything else, mainly because:
- Various sources recommend FSX for low level VFR flight because of its improved visuals, whereas FS9 is great for high level IFR (in very general terms).
- FSX is now basically Prepar3D, so that means continued support and improvement (hopefully).
- I already had a copy of FSX, so I could use to begin with, and upgrade to Prepar3D later if it seemed worth while.
This helped narrow down some of the hardware choices: this was going to be a dedicated flight sim PC so it didn’t need to have features that FSX would not be able to utilize. It took lots of searching on sites such as newegg and TigerDirect but I finally narrowed the shopping list down to following. (Since I ended up ordering from newegg, I’m including links to their listings for each item).
Motherboard:
This motherboard was looked like it had plenty of PCI expansion space, plenty of room for memory modules, and lots of stuff (like WiFi) built right in. I also liked the look of the little control panel that shows overclock speed, CPU temp, fan speeds, etc. I figured I could run that to the instrument panel in the cockpit for extra geek points. The BIOS also looked very advanced and would help a newbie like me experiment with overclocking the CPU and RAM, if needed.
CPU:
Choosing a CPU seemed like a very important choice; there are lots of web sites that will tell you that adding more cores will make no difference to FSX (since it was written before multi core CPUs were common), so a quad core seemed perfectly fine. And, although there are newer CPUs than this now, this one had the best basic clock speed – the all-important factor for FSX.
Memory:
Fast memory apparently helps. I went with these modules, because it again seemed like a good balance between speed and price. Also, although 16GB seems like not much these days, for FSX it would be more than enough.
Graphics:
OK, so I admit to knowning very little about graphics cards; I’m not a PC gamer and it has been many years since I had to select a graphics card. So I based my decision on a few factors: Avoiding models known to be slow with FSX; Skipping anything like SLI, which is also known to make things worse, not better; Not overspending on GPU power, since FSX is almost always limited by CPU power. I also wanted something a little “more” than FSX could handle, since if I actually went with Prepar3D, then future releases might use more of the GPU than it does today (but that’s total speculation on my part).
Case:
I wanted a case that would let me add tons of fans, LED lighting, be easy to carry (since I may have to shuttle between the garage and the house), and have a cool clear side just for the looks (yeah, I know it will be mostly out of sight when in use, but sometimes you want just a little style!). It also needed to have lots of space inside for a big GPU card. I also addedtwo additional fans for the top of the case, with red LED lighting. These matched the one rear and two front fans already in the case.
Note: I considered the pros and cons of water cooling, but in the end it looked like regular air cooling would be just fine; we’ll see if that’s true in practice later on. With five fans and a temperature display on the case, I felt pretty safe for the time being.
Storage:
- Samsung 840 EVO 500GB SSD
- Seagate 1TB HDD
I went with an SSD over HDD for installing both Windows and the simulator itself purely for the performance benefits, there seemed no point going with a hybrid solution, mucking about with disk partition layout, etc, when SSDs are so cheap these days. 500GB sounded like way more than enough for that. And if ever I needed extra space, I added the HDD as a second drive just in case: unlikely, but it seemed easier to just throw it in now rather than open the case again later.
Power supply:
- Antec High Current Pro 1300W
I picked a power supply by asking someone at Fry’s what I would need. There are plenty of “calculators” on the web that would tell me what to buy, but they all came out with slightly different answers, so it just seemed easier to go to retail and pick. I wanted something big enough I would not have to worry about power issues.
Display:
At this point, the choice of display was still open: plug multiple monitors to the graphics card? use a Matrox Triplehead? Use a projector for the scenery? For the time being, attaching a small 15″ monitor was enough to prove everything was working, so I left it like that.
Putting it all together:
This was the first PC I had actually built from components, so it was a bit of a learning game. Just getting the CPU and motherboard working was a little trickier than I had assumed, but the motherboard had a great little two-digit LED display built in which would show an error code if anything was wired up wrong. I also found it important to read the manual from start to finish before doing anything, since it was not laid out very logically, and important information about any of the steps would appear in different chapters. But after a little trial and error, it booted up to the BIOS. After that, I installed Windows 7 Pro x64, and then added the rest of the components, one by one, with plenty of reboots, driver updates, etc.
By the time I had finished, I had spent about $2000; a little more than I originally guestimated but less than buying something prebuilt . The end result looked pretty awesome, and gives a great “Windows Performance Index”, but the real test was still to come: FSX frames per second! That would prove whether or not the hardware choices were the right ones or not.
flightsimathome 