Need some advice for new computer

[captpola]

If I remember correctly, the X52 ships with an external 180W AC adapter. I replaced it with the Dell FWCRC 240W AC Adapter. Runs cooler. FSX Gold Accelerator ran okay on it but I have since switched to the XPS 8700 Windows 10 Pro system.

Ron

 

I'm confused..the AC adapter mine came with is 330 Watts but I thought it's the power supply that's inside the computer that matters not the "charging box"

[Rupert]

Welcome captpola! It's always good to have another RW flyer in our midst!

 

I was looking at your specs as described and went online at Alienware to find a X52 R2, but to no avail. Lots of listings for X51R2, but I found none for the X52.

 

So instead I went to the Intel and AMD sites and looked up your CPU & GPU. They both should do very well with FSX. As long as you can run around 4GZ clock speed with the CPU, you're good to go.

 

Based on your other postings I'd say your Power Supply is 330 watts. Which is smaller than I'd spec when building a computer myself but apparently they're comfortable it'll be fine.

 

As to whether you should take your 'puter back, I'd agree you're probably paying a little more for the fancy box. But unless you are going to build one yourself, I'd probably keep it. It should be fine.

 

However, many of us build our own computers & have found it is very easy to do. It also allows us to make various hardware changes easily with "off the shelf" hardware. Dell, like most manufacturers use a lot of in-house designed hardware which might not work or at least easily work with "off the shelf" hardware.

 

There are many excellent videos on the web to show how to build a desktop. Basically, you're putting together a kit with separate parts you buy. In fact you can buy bundles of parts (kits if you will) from various vendors such as Newegg and save money there too. The boxes I've built end up costing about 66% of most retail boxes. But I grossly over-spec everything in comparison to what I could buy as a whole unit. Content per content I could probably save 50% to 60% of assembled computer costs.

 

As to software, yes you can easily spend $1,000+ right off the bat! What I suggest is you try freeware first. That way you'll start understanding what works best for you before you spend a bunch of cash.

 

This site alone has some great freeware libraries. Especially for aircraft. If you try that route to start out, I'd suggest you upgrade your membership to First Class. That money helps support the site & also gives you faster download speeds.

 

Again, welcome!

[Rupert]

I'm confused..the AC adapter mine came with is 330 Watts but I thought it's the power supply that's inside the computer that matters not the "charging box"

 

They call it an adapter, but it is in fact the power supply. Why do they call it an adapter? Because your input from the wall connection is Alternating Current and your computer works on Direct Current.

[captpola]

Welcome captpola! It's always good to have another RW flyer in our midst!

 

I was looking at your specs as described and went online at Alienware to find a X52 R2, but to no avail. Lots of listings for X51R2, but I found none for the X52.

 

So instead I went to the Intel and AMD sites and looked up your CPU & GPU. They both should do very well with FSX. As long as you can run around 4GZ clock speed with the CPU, you're good to go.

 

Based on your other postings I'd say your Power Supply is 330 watts. Which is smaller than I'd spec when building a computer myself but apparently they're comfortable it'll be fine.

 

As to whether you should take your 'puter back, I'd agree you're probably paying a little more for the fancy box. But unless you are going to build one yourself, I'd probably keep it. It should be fine.

 

However, many of us build our own computers & have found it is very easy to do. It also allows us to make various hardware changes easily with "off the shelf" hardware. Dell, like most manufacturers use a lot of in-house designed hardware which might not work or at least easily work with "off the shelf" hardware.

 

There are many excellent videos on the web to show how to build a desktop. Basically, you're putting together a kit with separate parts you buy. In fact you can buy bundles of parts (kits if you will) from various vendors such as Newegg and save money there too. The boxes I've built end up costing about 66% of most retail boxes. But I grossly over-spec everything in comparison to what I could buy as a whole unit. Content per content I could probably save 50% to 60% of assembled computer costs.

 

As to software, yes you can easily spend $1,000+ right off the bat! What I suggest is you try freeware first. That way you'll start understanding what works best for you before you spend a bunch of cash.

 

This site alone has some great freeware libraries. Especially for aircraft. If you try that route to start out, I'd suggest you upgrade your membership to First Class. That money helps support the site & also gives you faster download speeds.

 

Again, welcome!

 

Thank you for the warm welcome and all the j formation too. I made a typo, it's an X51 R2, sorry. To be honest I got such a good deal on this computer because it was an open box and only missing a power adapter it was hard not to purchase it. But I don't mind returning and building a new one if you guys recommend I do so to get much better performance and realism from FSX.

[captpola]

They call it an adapter, but it is in fact the power supply. Why do they call it an adapter? Because your input from the wall connection is Alternating Current and your computer works on Direct Current.

 

Thank you Rupert,

 

So I guess I have a 330 Watt Power supply

[Rupert]

Thank you Rupert,

 

So I guess I have a 330 Watt Power supply

 

If you got a great deal on your computer, you might just want to keep it and experiment. Later, if you're still into simming, then you can build one to suit the type of simmig you choose to do. For an example FSX needs lots of Computer Processing Unit speed but a not nearly as good Graphic Processing Unit. When FSX was written they expected CPUs to get steadily faster, but they didn't anticipate multiple cores in the CPU.

 

Most of the newer games use lots of CPU cores, so they generally don't need as much CPU speed in the first place. Also much of the processing work FSX does in the CPU, is done in newer games in the GPU instead.

[captpola]

If you got a great deal on your computer, you might just want to keep it and experiment. Later, if you're still into simming, then you can build one to suit the type of simmig you choose to do. For an example FSX needs lots of Computer Processing Unit speed but a not nearly as good Graphic Processing Unit. When FSX was written they expected CPUs to get steadily faster, but they didn't anticipate multiple cores in the CPU.

 

Most of the newer games use lots of CPU cores, so they generally don't need as much CPU speed in the first place. Also much of the processing work FSX does in the CPU, is done in newer games in the GPU instead.

 

 

Okay that sounds like a good plan. So you did say my CPU/GPU is good enough to run FSX towards its peak?

 

 

 

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[evm]

Excellent. Thank you, I will do that. Do you have any freeware that's worth downloading?

 

Sorry, I don't do freeware a lot. But there are some people here who might jump in.

 

But I have a freeware photoreal scenery of the Netherlands called "NL2000", that I think is really good. I know of equally free offerings for Belgium and Italy, but I haven't tried those. One that I don't have either, but by the sound of it is a good thing is "FreeMesh X Global". This is a free mesh replacement as alternative to FSGlobalUltimate or FS Genesis.

 

One of the first ground texture replacements I bought was the "FScene 4X Total Pack". That one is a little older and sells for about $20 right now. I always liked it, even preferred it to GEX in some regions. But it is a little outdated. You can find it for example in the FSPilotShop linked above and compare the screenshots to what you see on your PC. Then again, FTX Global is considered to be the reference product, and you get that for about 70$. GEX is good too, but more expensive. I have all of those three and TBH I find it hard to decide which one is "the best". I sometimes switch between these products, just for variety. And one is better in some regions than the other, there is no on-size-fits-all (for me, that is). But most of the year I fly photoreal anyway, switching to normal textures only in fall/winter (because with photoreal you don't get seasons - as in google maps)

[inky160]

My bad. It's the X51 Alienware not the X52. The power pack is described as used with operating and charging a laptop for both the 240 and 330W "AC Adapter". Guess these work for both laptop and desktop computers.

 

http://accessories.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&sku=331-9053

 

http://accessories.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&sku=332-1432&~lt=popup

[petenoak]

I myself was considering Dell's Alienware line but am now looking at Cyberpower's wide range of options. I'd be interested in how your system handles fsx (when you finally get it!).

 

From Cyberpower's own website there are at least five different GTX 970 cards offered, whatever that means.

 

BTW, UPHILL3, did you go with Windows 7 or Windows 10?

 

peter in oakland, ca.

 

 

 

I myself have a CyberpowerPC Super Gaming PC on order: CPU Intell 6700K - not overclocked (at this time) liquid cooled, a GTX 970, and 16MB RAM. Don't know if I'm allowed to say here, but I bought it from (initials "TD"): But I think the're stringing me along after a week of waiting after purchase - I think it may be out of stock right now - but I hope it will be worth the wait - thought of doing my own build, but the cost of something going wrong, and the price of components; Well, I'll leave the build to the geeks...

[evm]

Okay that sounds like a good plan. So you did say my CPU/GPU is good enough to run FSX towards its peak?

 

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

What do you mean by "toward its peak"?? You need to specify what you expect.

 

Is your computer good enough for an FSX near maxed out with graphics and scenery addons at high resolution, maybe even powering multiple screens? IMHO, no. The GPU is too weak and you have no SSD to stream the desired photoscenery really fast. But no worries - you can bring every system to its knees with the right settings and addons in the sim.

[captpola]

What do you mean by "toward its peak"?? You need to specify what you expect.

 

Is your computer good enough for an FSX near maxed out with graphics and scenery addons at high resolution, maybe even powering multiple screens? IMHO, no. The GPU is too weak and you have no SSD to stream the desired photoscenery really fast. But no worries - you can bring every system to its knees with the right settings and addons in the sim.

 

Ohh i see, honestly I see screenshots on here of guys that play and the game looks like it's "real life". I want to mimic that. Sceneries look real, aircraft and terminals, ground equipment.

 

 

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[Rupert]

Ohh i see, honestly I see screenshots on here of guys that play and the game looks like it's "real life". I want to mimic that. Sceneries look real, aircraft and terminals, ground equipment.

 

 

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Beware what you see on the internet! There are people who spend countless hours editing, cleaning, even adding photos into their "screenshots" and film clips!! You could do that too. But then you wouldn't ever fly!

[evm]

Ohh i see, honestly I see screenshots on here of guys that play and the game looks like it's "real life". I want to mimic that. Sceneries look real, aircraft and terminals, ground equipment.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Any screenshots in particular? Normally it is pretty obvious what addons were used when taking it, sometimes it is even written in the description. From that we can determine what you would need addon wise, and then what kind of puter would be needed to run this fluently in an actual flight. Not trying to insinuate something, please don't misunderstand me - but the actual frame rate required for taking a screenshot is 1 FPS... and PhotoShop is a wonderful thing indeed.

 

And you could always ask the author what he used to produce the shot too.

[captpola]

I just would like to write a list down of what to start off with.

 

So far I got:

 

FreeMeshX

PMDG A/C

REX

FEX

MEGASCENERY

 

 

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[petenoak]

Hello Captpola,

 

I also was so impressed with screenshots on a flightsim.com forum that I asked the poster for his fsx resolution & Options settings. I tried to reproduce what he used and the result looked almost as good as his post. There just may be a difference between an image post on the internet and what our monitors look like at home!

 

Using a scenery upgrade like Orbx and aircraft with HD texture (e.g. Carenado) make quite a difference in how a screenshot looks. So would a weather engine like REX. I use the first two but not the third because of a 5 year old system.

 

Anyway, you want to know whether your system will handle such addons. I think it will but as with any system you may have to turn some of the Options sliders down somewhat. How much is difficult to say since there are so many ways to save fps on some you can compromise on. I think the 4.0 clock speed is good but the 4790 processor is old now, they're up to 6700 or beyond by now, not that I have any idea what that means!

 

Did you mention whether you can overclock the processor speed? Some motherboards don't allow this. I do know that would REALLY help, but then you have to have a good power supply and cooling system. Have you installed fsx yet? How does it run with no special addons?

 

As to adding an SSD drive, well scan some user opinions, like here: https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?275931-Ssd&highlight=ssd+advantages

 

 

As I already posted, I first considered Alienware but now I'm leaning towards a Cyberpower system. I do recommend you do the same. Dell's Alienware are a bit overpriced for what you get, I think.

 

peter in oakland, ca.

 

 

Ohh i see, honestly I see screenshots on here of guys that play and the game looks like it's "real life". I want to mimic that. Sceneries look real, aircraft and terminals, ground equipment.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[W2DR]

Having been at this a looong time I honestly feel the best initial investment you can make is FTX Global. The difference in the worldwide texture rendering is just amazing. And, the best part is that it won't affect your performance at all. In fact, many of us have found the performance to be a bit better than with the default textures. Add the freeware mesh to that and you'll see quite a noticeable difference. Go slow with the addons. You may just find that what you have is good enough. I've purchased well over 200 addons in years past and I never use 90% of them (ORBX excepted - I use all of them). The other thing about addons is that almost all of them adversely affect performance to some degree. Only buy one thing at a time and see how that works. If you jump in whole-hog and buy a bunch of stuff all at one time you may well find that you've brought your machine to a screeching halt.

 

Doug

[UPHILL3]

Hi Petenoak:

 

As Cyberpower offers no options, had to take Windows 10 (with my fingers crossed).

[W2DR]

What do you mean by "toward its peak"?? You need to specify what you expect.

 

Is your computer good enough for an FSX near maxed out with graphics and scenery addons at high resolution, maybe even powering multiple screens? IMHO, no. The GPU is too weak and you have no SSD to stream the desired photoscenery really fast. But no worries - you can bring every system to its knees with the right settings and addons in the sim.

 

Here's another opinion (they are like belly buttons, everybody has one). The CPU is just fine. It will run everything at 90% max and you'll never see the difference between that and fully maxxed sliders. As far as the GPU goes, FSX could care less about the GPU. It doesn't use any of the capabilities of the modern GPU and any mid-range GPU will be OK. Also, there is no documented visual difference between SSD and HDD transfer times other than the initial loading of the sim textures and mesh. The in-game performance of the HDD vs. the SDD is not visually noticeable.

 

Doug

[W2DR]

Hello Captpola,

 

..."I think the 4.0 clock speed is good but the 4790 processor is old now, they're up to 6700 or beyond by now, not that I have any idea what that means!..."

 

The 4790 and 4790k may be a bit long in the tooth but they are still the King-Of-The-Hill as far as single-threaded processing is concerned. If I were building a system for maximum FSX/P3D performance I'd still opt for the 4790.

 

Doug

[captpola]

Hi guys, just wanted to seriously thank everyone for all their help. I'm starting to understand this sim world little by little! Yes I have installed Peter, but the next day I had to leave for a trip so I didn't have time to play around much. Also I have upgrade to Windows 10 available, should I install that? I'm flying the redeye tonight from LA so I should be home by 6 am (Michigan is home)

 

 

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[evm]

Here's another opinion (they are like belly buttons, everybody has one). The CPU is just fine. It will run everything at 90% max and you'll never see the difference between that and fully maxxed sliders. As far as the GPU goes, FSX could care less about the GPU. It doesn't use any of the capabilities of the modern GPU and any mid-range GPU will be OK. Also, there is no documented visual difference between SSD and HDD transfer times other than the initial loading of the sim textures and mesh. The in-game performance of the HDD vs. the SDD is not visually noticeable.

 

Doug

 

I beg to difffer about the opinion thing. I don't write about my theories here, but about my observations (which are mine alone of course). The speed superiority of SSD over HDD is very well documented - an SSD is 5 times faster than any HDD whatever it is doing. But if you can see the differences in the sim depends on how much you throw at it IMO. It may not be very noticable in the sim at normal texture based operations. But it definitely is noticable in my sim, in an all-photoreal environment with added autogen, complex airports, AI traffic and an equally complex own aircraft. I even created a RAM drive for the AI planes. Made the difference from the few-milisecond-black planes when looking around with TrackIR to allways-nicely-painted ones. Which btw to my eye proves that these AI liveries are constantly reloaded from the disk.

 

Granted that my sim installation is on the extensive side. What I can clearly see may not matter in standard sim operations at all. But the OP asks for "maxed out".

 

On another note, maybe he should take a look at Prepar3d v3. Looks pretty good right from the start. But then the GPU will probably suffer a bit.

[Rupert]

Having been at this a looong time I honestly feel the best initial investment you can make is FTX Global. The difference in the worldwide texture rendering is just amazing. And, the best part is that it won't affect your performance at all. In fact, many of us have found the performance to be a bit better than with the default textures. Add the freeware mesh to that and you'll see quite a noticeable difference. Go slow with the addons. You may just find that what you have is good enough. I've purchased well over 200 addons in years past and I never use 90% of them (ORBX excepted - I use all of them). The other thing about addons is that almost all of them adversely affect performance to some degree. Only buy one thing at a time and see how that works. If you jump in whole-hog and buy a bunch of stuff all at one time you may well find that you've brought your machine to a screeching halt.

 

Doug

 

+1 on the ORBX!!! I'm happier with that than any other payware I've bought. And there are a lot of other names like Scotflight which go right over top of it.

[Rupert]

Hi guys, just wanted to seriously thank everyone for all their help. I'm starting to understand this sim world little by little! Yes I have installed Peter, but the next day I had to leave for a trip so I didn't have time to play around much. Also I have upgrade to Windows 10 available, should I install that? I'm flying the redeye tonight from LA so I should be home by 6 am (Michigan is home)

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

If you had Windows 7, I'd advise you to wait a while for more debugging of X. That's what I'm doing. However based on most of the feedback on 8.1 I'd go ahead and do the upgrade now. That way you'll only have one learning curve.

 

Just my Bellybutton:cool:

[W2DR]

I beg to difffer about the opinion thing. I don't write about my theories here, but about my observations (which are mine alone of course). The speed superiority of SSD over HDD is very well documented - an SSD is 5 times faster than any HDD whatever it is doing. But if you can see the differences in the sim depends on how much you throw at it IMO. It may not be very noticable in the sim at normal texture based operations. But it definitely is noticable in my sim, in an all-photoreal environment with added autogen, complex airports, AI traffic and an equally complex own aircraft. I even created a RAM drive for the AI planes. Made the difference from the few-milisecond-black planes when looking around with TrackIR to allways-nicely-painted ones. Which btw to my eye proves that these AI liveries are constantly reloaded from the disk.

 

Granted that my sim installation is on the extensive side. What I can clearly see may not matter in standard sim operations at all. But the OP asks for "maxed out".

 

On another note, maybe he should take a look at Prepar3d v3. Looks pretty good right from the start. But then the GPU will probably suffer a bit.

 

I don't disagree Oliver. And my comments are based on real-life experiences also. My comment was aimed more at the maxxed-out-pretty-much-plain-vanilla variety of FSX that most folks run. I've run a basic FSX (and P3D) on a variety of drives - SSD, 10000 RPM HDD, 7200 RPM HDD, and 5400 HDD and I honestly don't see a difference with any of them. But (there's always on of those) I think you're right if someone, like you, has an installation with many complex addons. If I had your installation I'd probably opt for all SSD drives. I know it doesn't take long for many of us to exceed the capabilities of whatever machine were using but I don't think the OP is there yet.

 

Doug