P3D V4 Hardware?

[KSAN_Chuck]

I am currently running FSX and ActiveSky 2012 on a first-generation i7-920 (2.66 GHZ). This box has 16 GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GT730 video card, all running on Win7-64. I fly on VATSIM exclusively--all payware aircraft, some payware scenery, and lots of freeware scenery. I've got this box tweaked out pretty well, and I am reasonably happy with the performance and stability.

 

However, I will be building a new box this fall, and I am considering either a Ryzen 5/1600 or an i5/7600. This box will be running Win10-64, and it will have up-to-date memory and video card.

 

My question is will P3D V4 run better on a 6 core/12 thread CPU like the Ryzen 5/1600, or would it be happier on the 4 core/4 thread i5/7600?

 

Any thoughts will be appreciated.

[mallcott]

I5

[DominicS]

I am currently running FSX and ActiveSky 2012 on a first-generation i7-920 (2.66 GHZ). This box has 16 GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GT730 video card, all running on Win7-64. I fly on VATSIM exclusively--all payware aircraft, some payware scenery, and lots of freeware scenery. I've got this box tweaked out pretty well, and I am reasonably happy with the performance and stability.

 

However, I will be building a new box this fall, and I am considering either a Ryzen 5/1600 or an i5/7600. This box will be running Win10-64, and it will have up-to-date memory and video card.

 

My question is will P3D V4 run better on a 6 core/12 thread CPU like the Ryzen 5/1600, or would it be happier on the 4 core/4 thread i5/7600?

 

Any thoughts will be appreciated.

 

Hi Chuck,

 

Here's a really informative article you might be interested in:

 

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/amd-ryzen-5-1600-cpu,review-33907.html

 

Regards

 

Dominic

[KSAN_Chuck]

DominicS, thanks for the info. A very interesting article.

 

The biggest question between the two CPUs is (and perhaps I didn't ask it well) is whether P3D V4 has finally gotten to the point where it can make good use of multiple cores and threads. I would think that if the answer is YES, then the Ryzen line would dominate any but the very high end Intel products. If not, maybe the i5 would be just a cost-efficient.

 

I would note that I have used an affinity mask for years on my i7, and it seems to make 95-100% use of core 0, and 50-60% use of cores 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7. Core 6 is reserved for the O/S and ActiveSky. However, I've read many pros and cons to this argument.

[KSAN_Chuck]

I'm now flying P3DV4 on my new rig. It's a Ryzen 5 1600 with a good motherboard, 16 GB of 2666 MHZ DDR4 and a GTX 1060 video card (6GB). Win10-64, P3DV4 and ActiveSky for P3D4 are installed on a 250GB SSD. With no overclocking and minimal setting changes in P3DV4 (just pushed up the display settings a bit) this rig provides a very nice flying experience with default and payware aircraft.

 

P3DV4 is also much easier to set up and get running than FSX--almost nothing to do except follow the instructions and watch it work. I'm very happy--now just wait for the third-party developers to catch up.

[MrUnSavory]

I just recently upgraded to an i7-7700K Kaby Lake Processor. I was on an i7-3930k 6 core and man the difference is amazing with P3D V4. If you can afford to squeeze out a few extra bucks I highly recommend this processor. I paid $250.00 for the processor at MicroCenter and it was worth it. :)