Prepar3D Forums

Hi all,

I realize there are other threads circulating around regarding PC builds however looking to bring this one current and ask a few specific questions. Looking to my fellow simmers for advice. While I have used P3D my exposure should be considered very limited to date as I started off with X-Plane and now looking to make the move to P3D for a home cockpit build. Currently in the process of building a custom rig and looking for some advice on the selection of the processor, RAM, and Drive. So far the components purchased are

EVGA DG-87 Case - P/N: 100-E1-1236-K0

EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 - 2 QTY (planned for 3 QTY near future potentially) - P/N: 11G-P4-6696-KR

EVGA SuperNOVA 1600 T2, 80+ TITANIUM 1600W Power Supply- - P/N: 220-T2-1600-X1

EVGA CLC 280 Liquid / Water CPU Cooler, RGB LED Cooling 400-HY-CL28-V1 - P/N: 400-HY-CL28-V1

EVGA X299 DARK - P/N: 151-SX-E299-KR

3 QTY 4k Displays

Few things I am looking for guidance on here.

A) Processor selection - Looking to Intel i9 and most bang for my buck from day one so this will last a long long time
B) Ram Selection - Will populate with 64 GB - Looking at Corsair - open to suggestions and guidance
C) M2 Options - Open to suggestions and guidance

I really want to do this right the first time. I'm not sign many is no object however if it means I need to save a few moths for that perfect processor I'm willing to do that vs. jumping in a purchasing something lower end only to have to upgrade later. not sure how numbers of cores, threads, and cache come into play with P3D. Show me the way of wise ones!

Cheers
RobsterSF

Looks like an unlimited budget. As an engineer may I advise you that spending the most money you can may not achieve the desired results. For example, why 1600W power supply? Your biggest power draw will the the video cards and my 1080Ti x2 SLI system rarely pulls more than 500 W under heavy use. I have an 850 W power supply and it never even gets warm.

I don't think you're going to see much difference between an i7 and i9. I haven't read the reviews on the i9-7900X yet but the big boost I got from my last build a couple of months ago was NOT from upgrading 6700K to 8700K but rather from going from a 980Ti to 1080Ti SLI.

Are you planning on delidding the CPU? I know the 6-core 8700K hits the thermal barrier hard and fast as it approaches 5GHz and I suspect that the 10-core chip could only be worse.... afterall you're talking about 140W and have you ever touched a 100W light bulb when it was burning?

As for memory, there is no reason not to use DDR4 3600 MHz sticks. The Corsair 32 GB sticks come with their own fan assembly and I find they rarely run higher than the 40s C.

An M.2 NVMe system drive should be your only consideration for the system drive where the OS and P3D should reside. I recommend you include a separate data drive, something like a 2TB SSD, for addon scenery which will be growning in size exponentially as Orbx expands their True Earth product line.

It is good that you are asking for opinions, but you should also be reading all the reviews and even forum comments you can regarding hardware. If this is a flight simulation machine, you will have different design considerations from if you were building a system for shooter games.

Hi Dan,

Thank you for the response. Not an unlimited budget by any means. I wish that wee the case! I'll tell you the reason I went big is so that I'm not here six months later trying to upgrade yet again to meet the "new standard". I've done some research and seems the consensus is that the Core i7 8700k 6 core can be overclocked and anything above this will not benefit P3D as of today. I wonder what happens in six months to a year. Hopefully I'm not banging my head then wishing I had gone higher. Nothing more I hate than dropping coin only to find I should have gone bigger to future proof.

On the power supply just going big again to future proof. I appreciate the info on your rig and that does helps me.

As you mentioned read the forums and I have. Seems it's sort of all over the place. Everyone has their own ideas of what the optimal system is or would be however I do value your opinion. AS mentioned (I think) I'm an X-Plane convert and new to P3D.

Welcome more input from others on the forum as well.

Cheers
Rob

I'd set future-proofing aside as a consideration but not the driving motivation. My strategy is to build a workstation that is top of the line without being bleeding edge. My most recent build is actually just an update to an existing workstation where I installed a new mobo, cpu, dram and dual SLI. By keeping the case, power supply (850W is more than enough), drives and reusing the liquid cooler, my costs to update were reasonable (2/3 of the cost went into the dual 1080Ti's). My strategy includes reusable parts and that makes an update every 18-24 mos cost affordable. The only component that had to be upgraded within a few months was a 500 GB SSD swapout for a 2TB SSD when Orbx came out with a True Earth scenery with an order of magnitude increase in storage requirements (this was a nominal $300).

Is there any benefit to ram faster than 3200 MHz or more than 32GB of ram? I’m in the same position, planning a solid build that can handle everything P3d v4 provides while maintaining a good frame rate.

I’ve been reading, planning and going over the various parts. Here’s what I’ve come up with (feel free to chime in with advice):
ASRock fatal1ty i7 motherboard. (not certain if I can make good use of the 10gigagit switch in networking my sim computers)
8700K delidded & binned tested up to 5.1MHz (not planning on going any higher than necessary)
https://siliconlottery.com/collections/ ... s/8700k51g
Kracken x62 CPU cooler
GSkill 3200 MHz 16GBx2 F4-3200C14D-32GTZR (is there any performance drop if I don’t fill all four dimm slots?)
M.2 970 evo 1TB is nearly as good as the pro but $100 cheaper..I’ve read the differences are not enough to notice, otherwise I’ll spring for the Pro.
Graphics card is gigabyte Aorus gtx 1080ti water force extreme, is there any reason to get a second card and go sli?
Win10Pro 64 bit

I went from 3200 to 3600 MHz DRAM and cannot attribute any performance gain to this alone... in theory you might see a 5% improvement in a test that measures large memory block movement but realistically they are similar. I have 32GB and I never see physical memory use above 10GB running P3D.

I have an ASRock board, my second, and I don't use the second 10Gb port (it's not a switch, just an extra NIC). No biggy. Were I to do my 8700K build over again I would get it delidded too. Can't say anything good or bad about your cooler, my Corsair H115 performs as well as can be expected with the lid on... but I did toss all the case and cooler stock fans for industrial grade ones from Noctua.

The second card is very expensive option and the difference is going to be apparent in only certain cases, such as when the rendering load of weather and scenery combine to slow down a single card: the SLI will keep going. Main reason I went SLI is because I like weather flying.

Thanks Dan,
What sort of sim are you flying?

marcenzi wrote: ↑Sun May 20, 2018 5:20 pm Thanks Dan,
What sort of sim are you flying?

The simulator is P3Dv4, do you mean what kind of aircraft? Strictly PMDG but I have all of their stuff: DC6, 737NGX, 747QOTSII and the 77L/W. I've yet to find another addon that comes near these products in terms of fidelity and quality, although I've heard that the freeware DC3/C47 out there (Metzinger did the flight dynamics for that one and the PMDG DC6) is in that class. Just haven't taken the time to try it yet. Full disclosure, I am a PMDG beta tester but I do not speak for them.

Hi RobsterSF,

For what you are planning to work with, I'd recommend you stay with the EVGA SuperNOVA 1600 T2, 80+ TITANIUM 1600W Power Supply ... it provides 24A support for peripherals and you want that for any water cooling (even more so with dual loop). The 1600 T2 also helps with USB power requirements (if you have additional USB cards that require power connections) if you're planning to run many USB device from the PC (in my case many controllers and many many GF modules). The 1600W T2 comes with a very thick and uncommon power cord so be aware you can't use any "standard" PSU power cord with it.

You should be able to run a 8700K at 5.2Ghz without "delid" on a good water cooling setup ... you might want to read about long term stability with "delid" CPUs (i.e. more than 12 months or however long you plan to keep the CPU).

RAM speed is important but it really depends what your CPU frequency ... you may find that you have to trade RAM timing for higher CPU frequency ... best option here is to test memory latency and bandwidth to see what you come up with when going higher CPU frequency but lower memory frequency ... this is where you need to find the balance. In my testing, I would try to stay at or above 3000Mhz for RAM and dial in the highest stable CPU frequency.

At this time I would not recommend SLI. It's my understanding nVidia plan to announce a new GPU in June with sales in July, so you might want to wait a few weeks and see what happens. Bitcoin is dead so GPU prices are falling back down again but supply is still limited.

Cheers, Rob.