New PC - Your opinions

[Michal Majerczuk]

Good Evening Ladies and Gentleman,

After several of slow years working my way up with my current computer I gave up and I'm ordering parts to build a new one from the scratch.I am going to build it for it to fulfil the role of a ''Gaming PC'' which will additionally help me out with Video Montage and Graphic Designing that I do in my free time as a ''Community Manager'' as volunteer for one of Polish smaller E-Sport Tournament Gaming organisers.

I'm currently looking at the following components for my PC:

CPU - Intel i7 7700K - (4 x 4.5 GHZ) - Kaby Lake - Overclocked up to 4.8 GHZ
CPU Cooling -Corsair Hydro H100i V2 (Advanced Liquid Cooling)
Memory - Corsair 64GB Vengeance LPX 3000MHz (4x16GB) DDR4
Graphic Card - NVIDIA GeForce 1080 Ti - 11 GB - (PCI-E) - DVI/DP/HDMI - HD/4K/VR
Power Supply - Corsair RMx 1000W (Modular) PSU
Motherboard - ASUS ROG Strix Z270F (Intel Z270) - 6xUSB 3.0/2xUSB 2.0
Sound Card - ASUS STRIX RAID Pro 7.1 (PCI-E)
Hard Drive #1 - 256GBSamsung PM961 M.2 SSD, Read 3100MB/s, Write 1400MB/s
Hard Drive #2 - 2 TB Seagate (2000 GB) SATA-III HDD 7200 RPM 64M Cache

I'm thinking which simulator would fit those components better.Some people say it will run both P3Dv4 and XP11 really well and some of them say it will combine with one better than another.

Any chance you can share your opinion wherever this PC will be good enough to run one or another and any other games such as Witcher 3,GTA,PUBG,Call of Duty WW2 and stuff such as?

Regards
Michal

[Alasdair Whyborn]

I think you should consider buying a 8700K, the two extra cores will be really nice for recording and video processing. They are still a little hard to find in the shops, but with a bit of patience they will arrive.

I'm personally not a fan of the AIO liquid coolers, I personally either run air cooling or a custom water loop. I have had pretty bad experiences with the reliability of these units.

64GB of RAM is a more than needed, I would stick with 32GB (2x16GB) for now, the prices are pretty high at the moment too.

GTX 1080 Ti is the best you can get. You should consider one with a custom cooler, I'd say EVGA or ASUS are the best. These have very high power usage so the stock blower cooler's aren't really enough.

Corsair power supplies are good but somewhat overpriced, if you want top quality you should be looking for the likes of seasonic. I would recommend the platinum 860w, this one uses the same basis as the Corsair AX860, but you can usually find it cheaper. 1000w is way more than you will ever need for a single GPU. For power supplies you need to do good research to know which ones are the really good ones, remember that this is the heart of your computer, if you buy a crap one it can kill the whole of your system.

You can't really go wrong with a ROG motherboard, though you will need a Z370 for the 8700k.

Internal soundcards are really superfluous these days, you can get much better sound quality with an optical or USB DAC that is outside of the computer. Anything inside will pick up a lot of interference from the power supply and voltage regulators on the motherboard and GPU, one of those cards will sound just as good as the motherboard audio.

Storage wise I would recommend going with a 512GB SSD, you'd be surprised how quickly you use up the space. I install a lot of stuff on my 3TB main drive (WD Red) and even then my 256GB (Crucial MX100) has filled up awfully fast. For hard drives I personally stick with WD (or Toshiba if I can find a lot better prices) Seagate drives have been the quickest to die on me. I think WD reds area great option if you want a looooot of space for low price, they are a bit slower than Blacks, but I think the tradeoff is usually worth it.

When it comes to XP vs P3D, you are trading graphics, which can be way better on X-Plane, especially with photo scenery, for the quality of the aircraft. From what I've seen P3D and FSX have a better choice of really high end aircraft. I am biased, but overall I do prefer X-Plane.

Speaking of photo scenery, you will want a very storage drive for that. I've already used almost 500GB on not very high resolution scenery. You can be looking at upwards of 8GB per 1x1 degree tile... It takes a LOT of space, but I think it's well worth the effort if you really want to make the sim look better.

Here are some shots of what I have, everything on these images is freeware. My GTX 670 isn't powerful enough for me to turn up a lot of the clouds, lighting, or increase the texture quality, but I think it still looks really nice. (that fantastic 12.5FPS must have been when I turned on antialiasing )

[Mauro Gerber]

I have a 250GB SSD for c-drive and a 500GB SSD only for FSX.
I'm very happy with the H115i cooling from corsair, but you must have a gibt housing to fit.

[Lionel Bischof]

I agree 110% with everything Alasdair said. For the cooler if you don't wanna go the custom loop route I'd recommend having a look at Noctua coolers. Some of them can even outperform AIOs.

[Alasdair Whyborn]

I have a 250GB SSD for c-drive and a 500GB SSD only for FSX.

Yes, I ought to clarify this. Having a huge amount of storage space is not a must have unless you really want to get lots of photo scenery in X-Plane. Otherwise I'd say 2-3TB hard drives and 500GB SSDs are probably the best balance of capacity and price.

I agree 110% with everything Alasdair said. For the cooler if you don't wanna go the custom loop route I'd recommend having a look at Noctua coolers. Some of them can even outperform AIOs.

This. I personally am using the NH-U14S at the moment for my i7 4790k. I'd say the best choices are either the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO (cheap but good performance), the Noctua NH-U14S (somewhat better performance than the 212, quieter because of larger fan, but somewhat more expensive, good option if you want to move to watercooling later as it should fit on almost any motherboard), and the Noctua NH-D15 (highest performing air cooler, performs similarly to AIO water cooling loops, have to be careful with motherboard compatibility because it's massive, expensive but cheaper than the AIO water coolers).