John,
I haven’t built a PC in over 10 years, before SSD’s and liquid cooling were commonplace so I had no experience with that. Rather than risk ruining expensive components I just opted to do a custom build this time around.
I spent a lot of time looking at/pricing systems with pretty much every custom builder out there.
Ultimately, the best bang for the buck ended up being AVA Direct, a company in Ohio.
My new rig:
Full tower ATX case
1000 Watt power supply
ASUS TUF Z390-Pro Gaming mainboard
Intel I9 9900K / overclocked to 5.0 Ghz / Liquid Cooled
64GB 3200 Mhz RAM
nVidia GeForce RTX 2080 11GB video card
Samsung 2TB SSD / primary drive
Seagate 4TB 7200 RPM storage drive
Asus STRIX SOAR 7.1 sound card
Windows 10 Home
AVA Bronze (3 years labor / 2 years parts)
$4500.00 / FedEx Shipping
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Monitor – Viewsonic VX4380-4K – 43″ UHD 4K computer monitor (not a TV)
$600.00 from Amazon
All said and done, a little over 5 grand invested…but, it’s been 10 years since my last new system and I was WAY overdue.
P3Dv4.5 out of the box with default settings I actually saw frame rates in excess of 250 FPS!.. LOL
I’m currently running P3D with most sliders well to the right, along with Orbx Global Base, Global Vector, North American/South American/European Landclass, Global Trees HD, Global Buildings HD, REX SkyForce with ActiveSky as the engine, and consistently have frame rates above 50.
If I get into some really heavy weather the frames will drop to between 30-40 but visually it’s still smooth.
I’m just now to the point where I’m ready to start adding 3rd party planes and airports.
Mike