Upgrade for Flight Simulator. Advice wanted

[Alex of Smeg]

I have a low end PC and recently bought Flight Simulator. As expected it doesn't run great. It's playable on low settings but the scenery etc is dreadful and the GPU is running at close to 100% most of the time, CPU around 80%. I have very limited knowledge so excuse me if any of these terms/names are wrong, but this is what I understand I have:

Vig800s Motherboard
2 x 4gb RAM DDR3 (Fury HyperX)
Geforce GTX 960 (not sure if 2gb/4gb)
i5 4670K @ 3.4GHz
250gb SSD (on which I managed to squeeze MSFS)
500gb and 1tb HDD's
In terms of cooling I couldn't tell you. It has a few fans, and some big radiator type thing over the CPU that says Cooler Master on it

I am on a budget so I don't expect to achieve the spectacular images you see on trailers and youtube but I'd like to be able to run on medium/high settings so it is fairly pleasant to look at! I'm also not bothered about mental FPS numbers. As long as it's smooth motion to the eye then I'm happy.

I was hoping to keep below £300 - 400. I had scoped out a 1660 Ti GPU for £200 and then maybe find a second hand i7 CPU for £100ish. And also get another 8gb of RAM. Maybe I can do some kind of overclocking?

Like I said I am no expert, that's why I'm here looking for advice!

 

[mickyflinn]

If you can get a 1660 ti for £200 new grab it.

Getting an I 7 is only going to give you 4 threads more, not worth it.

Adding another 8gb of ram will certainly help.

 

[dfour]

Which model/year flight simulator?? The later versions love as many cores as you can throw at it so the i7 would make a difference as well.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x Team Group Vulcan Z T-Force 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit - Grey= £53.99
• 1 x ASUS PRIME A520M-K (Socket AM4) DDR4 mATX Motherboard= £61.99

Total: £126.48 (includes shipping: £10.50)
​

You can get a new 2600x from a differnt popular retailer (as OC doesnt have any any more) for £134. Would be £260 leaving you £140 for a second hand gpu.

Much more powerful than your old rig with an easy upgrade path when you want to

 

[Joxeon]

Which model/year flight simulator?? The later versions love as many cores as you can throw at it so the i7 would make a difference as well.

Pretty sure the new MSFS2020 only utilises 4 cores at the minute.

 

[dfour]

The minimum specifications are sensible enough, calling for a Ryzen 3 1200 or Intel Core i5-4460 CPU, a Radeon RX 570 or GTX 770 GPU, 8GB of RAM and 150GB of HDD space.

The recommended specification bumps that up to a Ryzen 5 1500X or Intel Core i5-8400, 16GB of RAM and a Radeon RX 590 or GTX 970 GPU.

The ‘ideal’ specification is a significant jump, calling for the following:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X or Intel Core i7-9800X
• GPU: Radeon VII or Nvidia RTX 2080
• RAM: 32GB
• HDD: 150GB (SSD recommended)

The i5 8400 is 6 core and the 2700x and i7-9880x are 8/16 so it would suggest to me it can use more than 4 cores

 

[Joxeon]

would suggest to me it can use more than 4 cores

That's not what the benchmarks are showing.

https://www.techspot.com/article/2085-microsoft-flight-simulator-2020/

 

[dfour]

@Joxeon not quite correct. It seems to hit 4 cores hard for the most part but uses all the rest of your cores as well but it doesnt stress them all equally.

https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pag..._graphics_performance_benchmark_review,4.html

Last graphs

 

[Alex of Smeg]

Which model/year flight simulator?? The later versions love as many cores as you can throw at it so the i7 would make a difference as well.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x Team Group Vulcan Z T-Force 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit - Grey= £53.99
• 1 x ASUS PRIME A520M-K (Socket AM4) DDR4 mATX Motherboard= £61.99

Total: £126.48 (includes shipping: £10.50)
​

You can get a new 2600x from a differnt popular retailer (as OC doesnt have any any more) for £134. Would be £260 leaving you £140 for a second hand gpu.

Much more powerful than your old rig with an easy upgrade path when you want to

Arrrgh! So you're saying build and entirely new pc basically! Why do I need a new motherboard? I guess mine is a bit dated but if I pack it with 16gb DDR3 RAM, will it be much different to this set up you have spec'd above? When you say "much more powerful" how MUCH????

Flight Sim 2020 of course!

 

[Joxeon]

4 vs 8 cores is looking like 5fps at most on a rtx 2080ti and probably because the OS still to needs to use resources which eat into the 4 cores.

For OP it's probably worth doing the Gpu upgrade first and seeing how it goes.

 

[Alex of Smeg]

"But don’t go thinking, "great, I can stick with my old Core i5 or Core i7 processor, if the game only uses 4 cores." And that’s because the game uses an enormous amount of system memory, and as a result memory bandwidth is also very important. CPUs using DDR3 memory are going to struggle"....