Hello and What About That F-14B Tomcat

Sorry, I was on mobile. Let me elaborate.

PC hardware is marketed in rougly these brackets:

  • High end ; The bestest for the mostest
  • medium ; Affordable but able to run stuff ok-ish
  • low end ; For office work.

Now in the high end sector a lot of money is made selling stuff that is like 80% more expensive yet about 8% more powerful in real life applications.

This means that throwing more cash at the problem works fine if you are at the threshold between the medium and high-end brackets. But if you get further up that ladder, it stops working.

Upgrading from a 1080 to a 2080 is not as big a leap as it is from a 970 to a 2070. Not by a longshot. And it’s far more costly to do.
Two 2080’s in SLI will not give more frames than a single one. They will only give more headaches trying to get them to run properly.

So there you have it. Save your excess cash so you can buy the next big thing. It will come. Count on it. The market will provide.

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Smarter, more computer-y people in the room than me - but it looka like your current setup doesn’t have an SSD? If you have a bit of cash leftover from the Rift buy, I’d get one just to put DCS in - that’s a nice way to reduce stuttering and loading times for not a lot of money.

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@schurem has the right idea; your existing setup is pretty good and more than adequate for VR, outside of not having SSDs. I would honestly trade the HDD in for one at half cap and add an extra SSD if you’re not doing a NVMe SSD and a SATA SSD pair. Ditch one of the 2080s, add in a decent UPS if you don’t have one.

I don’t see where you said what your current stick setup is, though.

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Two words, “crowd sourcing”
that’s how I keep myself in beer
 nuff said. :grin:

Diminishing returns is a thing in most hobbies and pursuits. It is exactly the same with amateur astronomy for example. You can pay $500 for a telescope, or $5000. The $5000 scope will certainly be the better instrument, but if you could quantify it, it would not be 10 times better than the $500 scope. There are a lot of people who feel the $5000 scope is worth the expense though. You end up having to invest a disproportionately larger amount to jump up to the next level of performance.

At the end of the day, you just have to set a budget for yourself, and get the best equipment you can that your wallet (and spouse) will allow :wink: .

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I was looking into a new graphics card recently, and settled for a used 1080ti. For about 65% the price of a 2080, locally. I don’t miss the extra 10 fps as much as I would have missed that money
 The 2080ti was an even harder proposition at the time
 Maybe. when I get into the next generation of VR, an upgrade will be needed, but by then, we will probably be looking at a market with availiable 7nm NVIDIA GPUs, anyway


Let us not forget that this is a time where Chinese imports are not as cheap in the US as they were, a lot of tech companies have been struggling to keep their planned profit margins for their investors, so they have desperately spiked up their prices. Phones now cost over 1000 dollars, Apple products offer less of their usability edge, and PC parts have not shown great performance increases (except for the new AMD family that recently brought some competitiveness to the market). It’s just not a good time to buy tech right now.

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Not a chance! But you CAN bask in the joy of knowing that you are stuttering a little less than everyone else for about 3 months. How much is that worth?

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I don’t argue that if by usability you mean just “normal work” as it were–email, web word processing, spread sheets, etc. I think where Apple products far outpace other PCs, tablets, phones, etc. is in their ease of use and interoperability. A pic I snap on my iPhone X is available on my MacBook Air when I want to post it to “Where you are in photos” thread
I don’t really think about it
it just works.

Just yesterday I pick up my iPad and headed off to a Hampton Clean City Commission (I’m the Chairperson this year). The agenda had been sent to me in email which I quickly saved in OneNote before I left. I added a couple of photos that I wanted to talk about at the meeting (Monarch Butterfly Waystation) and a web link (www.monarchwatch.org) and some other things. At the meeting I brought up the agenda and took notes right on it using Apple Pencil. Now those notes are available to me on my iMac, MacBook, etc. Again, stuff just works without my having to think much about it. In a few days, the secretary will email the minutes and I’ll check them with my notes


Still, back to the original point, that email, OneNote (actually meant for PC), word processor, photo library, web browser are nothing to brag about in and of themselves. Al are rather mundane with no features that stand out, except the ability to smoothly interface and exchange data with each other and across platforms. In my mind, that is what you pay a significantly greater price to get. Is it worth it? I think so
but that is just me.

My PCs are strictly game machines–albeit I do development work for my company, esci Flightsim Publications on two of them, primarily FSX stuff.


so what else dow want to talk about while waiting for the F-14 to be released
 :slight_smile:

This is my current Setup

I think, I might end up overclocking my CPU and maybe buy an SSD, with the left over money, I’ll have about $90 left over so maybe a 512GB SSD

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This is a pretty good idea.

Alright, I’ll let you guys know if and when I order them.

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I think it’s worth mentioning that in general, when building a new system, or upgrading an old one - that replacing your previous weakest links should come before improving any already moderate/strong parts.

As an excessive example: doing a 1070 to 2080ti or maybe a 4th gen i7 to and 8th gen won’t net as much of a boost if you run on a hard drive vs. going to SSDs.

32GB of Ram also made a big change for me, from 16 even though DCS never had me use more than 12 of it. With 32 on board and DCS running I can get up to 19gb in use.

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But where’s your HOTAS and pedals, if any?

I recommend pedals before anything else - VR or HOTAS. The twist-a-stick is just not the same.

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Definitely! Made all the world of difference to me. Couldn’t go back to twist now

Wouldn’t want to open that can of worms! :slight_smile:

But yeah I agree with you, it’s just that 15 years ago there was stuff that you could effectively only do with a mac, and nowadays, the worst pc experience is not that far behind. I was a video editor when final cut came out and it was revolutionary!

Absolutely. In fact for what I use my Macs for, there is nothing that PCs cannot also do and may do better.

My Mac and PC are side-by-side, sharing a mouse and a keyboard. I have it set up so that the mouse effortlessly moves across the two screens. The Windows side feels practically useless relative to the Mac. Since the PC is directly in front of my chair, that’s the machine I naturally WANT to use. Typically after ten minutes of frustration I move the file to the shared folder and do what needs to be done on the Mac. Just yesterday I was trying to print a passport photo which must be 2 inches squared. The Windows editor gave me only options: to crop in pixels or percent, and gave me no info about the pixel density of the final printout. So I went through 3 sheets of photo paper and never got anything close to acceptable. One minute on the Mac side and I was done. I should also mention that the Mac was built in 2010 and still runs fast. It was also my flight sim machine until early last year. Mac users are are often derided as too technologically inept to figure out the terminal scripting tools needed to be a literate and functioning PC user. They are basically too stupid to get around the Windows Soviet-looking interface and dig a little deeper to unlock the OS’s potential. Yep, that’s me!

I will not pay for PC without SSD. Atm I have at home 4 PCs, desktop and laptops, and no single HDD.

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