In my IT career, hardware has always been my strong point. I learned most of what I know about hardware by taking old PC’s, taking them apart and putting them back together again. I’ve always subscribed to the philosphy that software is only as good as the hardware it is running on. This philosphy is especially true with regards to the flight simulator hobby. While I’ve been working in the IT field for almost 20 years, it doesn’t mean I’ve always had powerful machines to run the simulator software on. Much like an auto mechanic that may do quality work for customers, but drive a beat up truck….I pride myself in the work I do in the IT field, but with every release of Microsoft Flight Simulator I always found myself in the backseat and I haven’t always quickly moved up into the drivers seat until now.
As I mentioned here, I’ve been flying computer simulation games for over 25 years. I’ve watched a computer game grow from being a basic, no thrills (especially in comparison with today’s versions) to an almost true to life gaming experience. An entire industry has been born to support this very fast growing hobby and from all accounts, everything is very healthy.
When I began looking at getting back into the hobby, I first had to research what version of Flight Simulator was the latest and greatest. Flight Simulator X was released around the time I dropped out of the hobby. I had purchased it, installed it and played around with it. But at that time (late 2006) FSX was pretty much standalone. The hardware I owned at the time just barely would run it and I still had that PC in operation when I began looking into the hobby again. Since FSX was still the latest and greatest version I would build a system to fit that need.
I’ve always wanted a machine dedicated to my flight sim hobby. Flight simming is pretty much the only “game” I play on a computer and just wanted something I could dedicate to this software without cluttering it up with email and such. I spent a little time researching through forums to find out what other simmers were building. I knew I would build the machine myself with off the shelf components versus buying a brand name machine. I needed a machine based on my specs and only wanted what I wanted. I also wanted to stick to a budget, but I didn’t want the budget to 100% dictate all my design decisions.
I knew I wanted to build the machine around a couple of key points. In my mind these were requirements. First I wanted the hardware to take advantage of a 64 bit operating system. I’ve been testing Windows 7 at my day job and knew it was a solid OS. The second key element was the Intel i7 processor. I’ve heard very good things about this chip and I’ve always used Intel in my homebrew machines. I knew the rest would fall into place. So I made a shopping list and off to Micro Center.
My Parts List
Intel i7-930 Processor
EVGA X58 FTW3 Motherboard
GeForce GTX 460 1024MB Graphics Card
OCZ DDR3-1600 RAM (6 GB worth)
Corsair TX750W 750 watt power supply
Microsoft Windows 7 64bit OS
Antec Twelve Hundred ATX case
Once home with all the parts, I began the fun job of putting it all together. This Antec Twelve Hundred case is much more than I need at the present time. But I’ve never owned a case with this much ventilation and the lights are neat too. I had the Windows 7 64 bit OS running in no time and just applying a few tweaks here and there to just get the most out of Windows 7. After a few more hours I had Microsoft Flight Simulator X installing on the new machine.
I’ll admit I’ve spent the better part of this past weekend and many hours this week tuning and tweaking FSX. I had a bear of a time getting my GoFlight hardware working the way it should with this setup. The issues??? Equal parts of hardware, software and my own lack of knowledge has contributed to most of the issues. I still am experiencing a few issues and am working directly with the awesome guys at GoFlight. I am confident all will be resolved soon. Anyway, I was surprised at home much I had forgotten in the almost 5 years I’ve been away from the hobby. Of course, the information I forgot is only a small drop in the bucket compared to all the new information available now. While what I’m going to say next is not scientific in any way…..but I personally believe that all aspects of the hobby has grown by 2x, 3x or more in these past 5 years. I regret not being a long for the ride.
All-in-all I’m glad I chose to allow my background in hardware to make the right decisions on building this new machine. The machine and software (Windows 7 64bit) is working great together. I’m getting the performance from all aspects of the configuration that I expected and believe I have room to grow. Of course, none of us know exactly what will be needed for the new Microsoft Flight. But I’m confident my current setup running Flight Simulator X will perform just fine for the next few years. After all, I have learned that FS9 is actually still used heavily in the community and we all know it takes the industry a little while to catch up to the latest and greatest Microsoft releases.
So for now I’ll continue to tweak this new machine to get the best from it while using FSX. I do plan to install FS9 and all my add-ons from the old machine just to do some comparison studies. I’ll probably blog about this experience in the future. Stay tuned…..
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my flight sim blog. Please tell a friend.
Until next time,
J