@Snoopy: my son in law made the PC for me. the Sim components I bought at http://flightsimwebshop.com.
Snoopy wrote:
Care to share where, what and how much? Thanks
If it helps, I ordered a custom made PC for flight simulation in May 2020, here are the specs. Price was 2300 GBP aprox.
Today I would use an RTX of the 3rd generation and possibly an AMD CPU as they are getting very good. Traditionally Intel has been the go-to CPUs for simulation, they have been performing much better, but AMD has been catching up recently.
Case COOLERMASTER MASTERCASE H500 GAMING CASE
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™ i9 Eight Core Processor i9-9900K (3.6GHz) 16MB Cache
Motherboard ASUS® ROG STRIX Z390-F GAMING: ATX, LGA1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs – RGB Ready
Memory (RAM) 32GB Corsair VENGEANCE RGB PRO DDR4 3200MHz (2 × 16GB)
Graphics Card 8GB NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2080 SUPER – HDMI, 3x DP GeForce – RTX VR Ready!
1st Storage Drive 2TB Samsung 860 QVO 2.5" SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
1st M.2 SSD Drive 500GB SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3500MB/R, 3200MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply CORSAIR 750W RMx SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable 1 × 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling Noctua NH-U14S Ultra Quiet Performance CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Sound Card ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless Network Card WIRELESS INTEL® Wi-Fi 6 AX200 2,400Mbps/5GHz, 300Mbps/2.4GHz PCI-E CARD + BT 5.0
USB/Thunderbolt Options MIN. 2 × USB 3.0 & 2 × USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Operating System NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
Operating System Language United Kingdom – English Language
Windows Recovery Media NO RECOVERY MEDIA REQUIRED
Office Software FREE 30 Day Trial of Microsoft® Office® 365 (Operating System Required)
Anti-Virus NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
I wonder if one of the old sims e.g. FS2004 or an old FSX would work well. They worked fine on a PC of a much lower spec than this laptop. Old software tends to run lightning fast on today’s hardware.
Peter wrote:
I wonder if one of the old sims e.g. FS2004 or an old FSX would work well. They worked fine on a PC of a much lower spec than this laptop. Old software tends to run lightning fast on today’s hardware.
You could get them to run but both FS2004 and FSX won’t really do it for VFR flying today.
And for IFR flying, you need to update their navaid databases, airarcs, airport layouts, runway numberings etc. It could be possible as I believe there is still a very small community of people hanging on to those, but a hassle in any case.
If the laptop has a 4k display, I assume it will have to resize the resolution. Also, FS9 and FSX are 32-bit which means they are limited to 4GB of memory, they used to constantly run out of memory back in the day.
My best advice is to get XP-11 and just be realistic with the rendering settings. The good thing about XP is that if all the sliders are turned way down it will run on almost anything.
More advice on here: https://www.avsim.com/forums/forum/326-mobo-ram-cpu-hdd-ssd-desktops-laptops/
You can run X-Plane on the tablet and phone also, but why? 
Didn’t see it mentioned, but one can try XPlane for free and see how it works with their setup. They have a demo license just for that purpose.
Upgraded X-Plane to the newest version
Turned on Vulkan
Restarted
Default Scenery ENVA, day, nice weather
FPS : 95-130
This is on a laptop, Lenovo Legion, core i7, RTX graphics
Then pumped all graphics to max
FPS 40-90 varying depending on POV
This is good I think. I will however “pump” it a bit down again, so I get consistently above 60-70 FPS. As I remember the FPS gets incredible slow in clouds. I have no idea which slider has most effect on FPS though.
LeSving wrote:
Where does “VFR” actually enter here ? Better graphics is better (it’s better to look good that to look bad), no doubt about that, but it’s very blurry to me why it improves “VFR”.
In MSFS2020 you get a modified world wide photographic map, in many cases with 3d photographic buildings. In other words, what you see out of the window in 2020 is unlike anything ever before. Perfect? Not quite, but damn near enough.
VFR enters here, as in many parts of Europe you are expected to fly fixed and very strictly monitored VFR inbound/outbound routes into airports, as well as quite precise circuits to avoid miffing local residents with cams and so on. The conventional way of doing this is by identifying landmarks on the ground. For this kind of thing, the way I’ve seen it in the case of Zurich for instance, MSFS is totally outstanding and a complete new dimension of scenery.
I personally will not change to it soon because I lack a PC which can do it and because I, just like yourself, have other priorities in Simulators, such as Flightmodel (which I hear is typical MS) and so on. On the contrary, I’ve actually gone back to FS2004 recently because I want to fly a couple of airplanes which never made it into FSX and later. But that is pure gameplay and maybe another book out of that.
But for people who explicitly want to rehearse and check out VFR out of the window flying, MSFS2020 is probably the best thing yet out there. By far.
I haven’t tried, maybe it is photorealistic, but … I mean, VFR today is Sky Demon (or whatever your favorite nav app is). That’s what VFR navigation is all about. So training VFR means hooking up Sky Demon to X-Plane Seriously
Then VFR is acro. You couldn’t care less what the outside looks like. You just want the plane to behave as close to reality as possible, you have to be able to turn your head and look around you and so on. TheYak-52 in DCS is the best I know of. DCS also have a nice Huey, all VFR, but with helicopters it certainly is all flight behavior (I have no idea if the Huey in DCS is anything close to reality, but it somehow feels like it )
Then there are these “geeks” or anoraks that compete in old school VFR nav, map and compass, no GPS. For them, maybe, but then then the photorealistic part has to be incredible accurate, ridiculously accurate. Maybe it is good enough, I don’t know, but very few compete in that stuff anyway.
I get it is much nicer with nice and realistic graphics. Everything is. Buzzing your home, flying through the streets in the cities, under the local bridges and doing all crazy stuff. But that isn’t exactly VFR training according to EASA rules and regulations
