and we're up and running.
First off, great looking job by OCUK.
Unfortunately, haven't finished the photos yet, but will get them up later this week.
Clearly rather well packaged. The box the unit arrived in looked big enough to house a dishwasher. Once I'd unpacked things, was time to check a few things out.
The Phantek case is BIG. I'd initially been set on a full tower, as my old unit (also from OCUK) was in a rather pokey Coolermaster case. The new unit has masses of space, meaning that it will be much easier to work within. The only thing I'd wonder about on the case is the colour. Surely it would be easier to work on if the interior was white? Might not look cool, but for those of us who are more concerned about functionality?
2 thumb screws later and we’re into the case.
The Noctua cooler frankly dwarfs any other air cooler I’ve seen. Whilst I get the idea of water cooling, I just don’t feel comfortable with the idea of it sloshing around next to electronics.
The interior is VERY neat in tidy, with the cabling laid in by someone who clearly knows his stuff. Certainly not the DIY mess that I’ve ended up with in my old PC.
Then it was time to swap around graphics card. 1080 out of my old PC and into the new. Old 7950 out of storage and into the old PC. DDU clean, driver install and the old PC now gets to play as my server for Roon, Plex and DCS.
I’d requested to be given the Windows10 disk, so needed to do the install. Then wasted an hour trouble shooting my network as I forgot that I needed to install the network drivers. Once done, it was software build up, so AVG, DCS, Oculus, Steam and the assorted supporting apps like Discord, Teamspeak, Skype, SimpleRadio SRS, Voiceattack, Combat Flight tool, Oculus tray tool etc.
DCS needed to have a number of licenses deactivated on the old PC, then reactivated on the new.
It also applies unique IDs to a joystick and similar peripherals, meaning that by default, just copying across the control mappings doesn’t work. The workaround is to create a single key mapping for each peripheral, then copy the name of that as applied by DCS in the Input folder and replicate the name onto the old mappings. MUCH master than trying to remap individual buttons for 25 aircraft, but still a tedious task.
All in all, and to get both PCs back up and running and with the key software installed on the new PC, around 5 hours.
I did run a brief test, but it was only brief. Sure enough, loads and runs noticeably faster. More importantly is that I’m not expecting big things right now.
DCS is my primary “go to”, and right now, that’s primarily single threaded. My old i5 2500 was already running at 3.9Ghz, so in theory, I should have been expecting as a best case, 16% + IPC improvements.
In practice, I believe that it’s a bit more complex than that, as DCS is also an utter memory hog (hence the spec). The implications being that I think that the memory speed (dual vs single channel) and NVME2 drive would also be important to reduce performance spikes.
Either way, testing looked really good. Whilst flying at low level (where more detail is visible) previously resulted in circa 30 fps, it’s now a solid 45, peaking at 80 over water. So roughly a 50% improvement for the simple test. Clearly I’ll be trying that out some more this week.
Just as important, is that support for Vulkan is inbound to DCS (and Xplane), which should make use of spare CPU capability, hence the desire for an 8 core processor. So the spec is very much not about immediate gains, as frankly a significantly cheaper 4 core processor with 32GB of ram would be more than adequate right now. The deliberate over-spec is aimed at what we’re expecting in the next year.
The only other thing to do was order a new keyboard for the old PC. Had a chat with my brother and on his recommendation ordered a DAS 4, which is on sale right now (nice timing OCUK). That will be plugged into the new PC, and the old MS unit goes to what is currently my server.
