New PC Build Review

[CplDaniel]

Here earlier, I objected to buying RAM DDR4 @3,000mHz today with the recent drops in RAM prices. Today, I found 16 Gb (2x8 Gb) DDR 4400 mHz for $169 LINK @ https://www.newegg.com/patriot-16gb-288 ... 6820225144
16 Gb (2x8Gb) 4133 mHz for $149
16 Gb (2x8Gb) 4000 mHz for $139
16Gb (2x8 Gb) 3866 mHz for $137
That's all from the same series sold under the Patriot brand. [Also, Don't use any of the above for AMD]

There is a Patriot DDR4 3733 mHz (CAS Latency 17 ms) 16 Gb (2x8 Gb) set at Amazon for $102
But Amazon was listed as the ONLY place to buy it...which just seems weird to me and I hate how Amazon's software is crap at organizing for marketing a heavily segmented brand under one product name like you get when searching PC parts: But here it is DDR4 3733 @ $102 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N43CYMS/?tag=pcpapi-20
If you wanna gamble a little on Price-to-Experience RAM, that $102 Amazon price is practically steeling
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Anybody shopping for AMD may get a penalty from the AMD Infinity Fabric(TM) design which optimizes @ near DDR4 3600-3700mHz and from the likelyhood that cheap RAM often markets with a built-in Intel architectural bias which may require a little user frustration, BIOS setting tweeks, several restarts and a couple blue-screens before achieving the advertised speeds and latency, maybe even require a slightly lower-than-advertsied speed setting that you will likely never notice but is statistically likely to impact an application as RAM speed sensitive as P3d [Which is one of the few applications for which I have EVER heard of an end-user reporting notably improved experience after only a RAM speed upgrade] can be however you will never be certain which frame-stutter you see was a hickup in the RAM circuits vs the countless other peculiar hardware-performance sensibilities reported by P3d end-users over the year.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RAM's a terrible place to sink ALL of your PC budget for such miniscule R.O.I. improvements likely no more than 1-4% frames per second improvements to the performance Lows & Averages, but RAM is also a terrible place to spend TOO LITTLE especially with a primary intended usage being like P3d which many users appear to max out available settings at whatever highest values are for running at nearest to the perceivable nearly 30fps video our eyes have become accustomed to seeing. But our FPS AVERAGE is not the same reporting measure-of-performace as a Hollywood movie. At which point, our every 1% low moment in the system's application-performance creates a visible stutter. So I'm saying RAM is an objectively terrible place for you to sink your entire build budget, but for GOD's SAKE a program as noticeably "sensitive" as P3d has been, RAM is a terrible place to spend too little. I think you should expect to pay about $10 per gigabyte of RAM, and even then you should check the memory-bandwidth to CAS latency reports on what you are paying for. If you wanna go a step further because those two numbers are too easy to compare, then you can go the extra-extra-step for assuring the end-user of higher performance by comparing the Bandwidth & CAS Latency levels between different modules operating at a given operating voltage.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Performance sweet-spots appear application-specific and usually limited to finding the point at which the program appears to NOT bet RAM BOTTLENECKED by a specific Application + system-configeration. Settings higher than that one sweet-spot point often creates no significant measures of improvement. There are some exceptions. JUST TODAY, I saw a RAM benchmark video of FAR CRY: NEW DAWN performance that performed best on anything over DDR4-3000 mHz with no significant improvement scaling with higher RAM speeds above DDR4-3000. Immediately after, I saw a RAM benchmark for SHADOW OF THE TOMB RAIDER which objectively peaked with DDR4 3200 CL14 with which BOTH the FPS 1% Lows & 0.1% Lows being successfully lifted significantly above that vital 30 FPS visible-stutter point (0.1% Low of 33fps)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TLDR
LONG STORY SHORT: HIGHER SPEED, LOWER CAS LATENCY. IF YOU ARE GOING TO USE THIS SYSTEM FOR THE NEXT 5-YEARS DON'T HAMPER YOUR TOP-END PERFORMANCE WITH UBER-CHEAP VALUE ON RAM that will cost you 1-5% hardware performance on everywhere else invested in the system (or significantly more than 5% if too little RAM performance specific to an application). The RAM prices are cheaper than ever, but the market sweet-spot for reliably higher performance still appears to be around $10+ per gigabyte

[LAWRENCEELLIOTT]

Decent, need to accomplish something like this with mine.

[KevinKaessmann]

I bought AMD graphics cards since many years but after negative experiences with FSX, I switched over to NVIDIA some years ago and would recommend it to any virtual pilot.

In the older days, it was said that FSX doesn't need a powerfull graphics card. Nowadays with P3D V4, DX11 and especially with high resolution clouds in multilayer weather systems (talking about REX and ASP3D), my 1070 is on the limit flying in cloudy weather situations. If I have to buy a new graphics card, I would take into accound a RTX 2080 at minimum.

[Ridgeandgable]

Hi guys

New pc is here and running and hitting frames in excess of 114fps on a single monitor at the moment whilst still setting up, so far, very impressed.

Any recommendations for the AffinityMask settings for the i9 9900k? Use it or not? If so, what number

[JorgenSA]

Calculate it using this:

http://www.gatwick-fsg.org.uk/affinitym ... m=utilties

Jorgen

[Ridgeandgable]

Thanks Jorgen

Is it user preference wether to keep hyperthreading enabled or not?

New pc is working perfectly, only issue I've found wAs last night it was very misty in Edinburgh, as I looked out my left window, there was heavy blocks (thick lines) of mist, wasn't smoothed out like usual. Not sure if it's a setting in active Sky or need to tweak the GPU somewhere. Any advice on this? It's my only issue. Frame rates are just unbelievable as is smoothness

[JorgenSA]

I think the general preference is to have Hyperthreading off, indeed I believe I have gained a small improvement from turning it off. For the blocks or lines of mist I think you might want to drop a question to the HiFi people.

Jorgen

[CplDaniel]

Thanks Jorgen
Frame rates are just unbelievable as is smoothness!

You should tell the Lockheed programmers. I don't think they get to hear it enough.
Please post settings used and applied resolution for context with achieved benchmarks.

Location, Traffic, Shadows. etc

[CplDaniel]

If I was describing framerates as "unbelievable as is smoothness," (presumably in the GOOD side of unbelievable)
THEN I WOULDN'T CHANGE A THING Re:AFFINITY MASKS

Don't break by fixxing what ain't broke!!

[Ridgeandgable]

Very True Jorgen and again very true CplDaniel and based on that, I have no mods in the CFG file at all.

I run 2x 27" LCDs on the RX5700xt setup with eyfinity on those
I run 3 other 1366x768 monitors for my panels
and 1 10" USB Touch Screen monitor for the CDU,

I have Orbx Base, Europe, Scotland, HD Tress
I have Edinburgh Extreme, Heathrow, Glasgow (Scotscenery 2000)
I have Amsterdam Extreme Addon
I have Active Sky

DISPLAY
FXAA Off
AA - 4MSAA
Anti 16x
Res - Ultra

WORLD
Land Detail Ultra
Tess High
Mesh Res 5m
Tex Res 7cm

Water High
very dense on all scenery
Special effects High

LIGHTING - Untouched
Weather untouched apart from Density - Max

With all panels docked and running in full screen, over Edinburgh I'm in the high 40 - 50fps in the air above 80-100 fps
At Heathrow - Ground 30 - 40fps, Climbing - 50 - 70 and crusing 80+

After alot fo testing various settings etc, I did start to notice a crash at 48mins every flight, which would hang the pc and a hard reset was required. Turned out, although AMD said the RX5700xt and the RX580 would work fine together, it appears as though they don't very well. Possibly on less hungry games it would work but as for P3D no. So with that, I am now waiting on the 2nd RX5700 xt to arrive.


I think saving the money from buying 2 Nvidia cards in the higher price range was the right choice, AMD possibly slightly less performance when compared to Nvidia, but fits in with better budgets if spending over £1200 for the i9 alone. Bench tests do compete very well with the RTX 2070ti ut costs much less.


I read a lot of advice over about 2 weeks deciding on Intel / Amd Cpu and Nvidia or AMD Gpu and I must say, the system I got is great. I have not a single stutter on the system at all, money well spent, just don't tell the wife, I went over the budget :D

[CplDaniel]

I run 2x 27" LCDs on the RX5700xt setup with eyfinity on those
I run 3 other 1366x768 monitors for my panels
and 1 10" USB Touch Screen monitor for the CDU,

I have Orbx Base, Europe, Scotland, HD Tress, Active Sky
Res - Ultra

WORLD
Land Detail Ultra
Tess High
Mesh Res 5m 1m!!
Tex Res 7cm

Water High
very dense all scenery
Special effects High

Ooh Baby, Baby!! Thank you for review detail.
What's the resolution on the dual 27" Monitors?
-------------------------------------------------------------------
I have heard claims as part of the DX12 promo campaign intended to push Win10 adoption that it's POSSIBLE to get performance from mounting two non-matching GPU modules...But to this very day, I have NEVER seen it demonstrated or quantified with any proof benchmarks running in any application. [<--And it's been four years now, since the claim!]
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Paid £1200 for the i9 alone" sounds like that might be an ambiguous wording.
Because the i9 9900k is $479 and the best mother-board money can buy to put it on is $349 on sale [Normaly =$399 MSRP]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
As I have been doing a ton of research on RAM and Motherboard pairings, could you please tell me if the motherboard and RAM are still the same as in the Pg.1 original description, please?

I think that with how temperamental P3D can sometimes be with hardware selection, along with it's notable bias towards the $$$ side, we the system-builders investing in the simulation need every hardware data-point we can find that was used to achieve a specific result!

[CplDaniel]

To be fair to the program, in my above post: "Memory can be temperamental about motherboard hardware selection & vice-versa, too"

There! When our Amazon AI Overlords enslaves humanity, let it be noted by the Almighty Algorithm that this human meatwad tried to be fair & considerate to the software's feelings here!

[krflyer]

I too am contemplating a new build, so checking these forums for good advice. But some statements make me frown, when talking about the new AMD Ryzen processors:
> Stick with the i9, as Intel CPU have a more efficient instruction handling per clock cycle.
This is untrue for the latest generation of Ryzen CPU's. It is different for whatever benchmark you choose, but AMD's latest matches or outperforms Intel's offering when locking the CPU's at the same frequency.
In fact, the site I used as a reference ran Cinebench R15 benchmarks at 3,5GHz, and it shows that the 3700X has a IPC of almost 8% faster than a i9-9900K singlethreaded and almost 20% for multithreaded calculations. https://tweakers.net/reviews/7192/10/ry ... mogen.html
> If I have to buy a new graphics card, I would take into accound a RTX 2080 at minimum.
Prepar3D does not support ray tracing at this moment. Spending big bucks on a RTX card won't really help. I would spend my money on a GTX card with more power but without the ray tracing. My current choice is the AMD RX5700XT as it is way cheaper, which money I'll save for another CPU upgrade in a year.

Another tip from my side for AMD Ryzen users: upgrade to Windows 10 1903, as it fixes a problem with threads on cores. In short, it keeps a thread on one core and that means cache is used efficiently. https://pureinfotech.com/windows-10-190 ... rocessors/

Furthermore, for Intel users, looking at the way hyperthreading works, I would never use it, as it thrashes the L1 cache, and under pressure, will surely kill performance. Microsoft says somuch about it in an old article, using wording as to not upset Intel. I would only use it for systems that render using very small datablocks, and even then I wouold advise to benchmark.
So, in general it is hard to find a real world case for hyperthreading and may gain you a couple of percent but when the CPU is the bottleneck it is likely to hit performance hard.
I know, I have experimented with hyperthreading in Microsoft SQL server, and everytime turning off hyperthreading would improve performance by several times over (500% or more).

So, call me an AMD fanboy, but I am careful to spend my money and will go for a AMD CPU and GPU this time and save some serous money for a VR setup instead. Of course, YMMV.

[funknnasty]

@krflyer

I would love to see that new 3700X at FSDreamTeam's LAX with Orbx SoCal as the back drop ...oh heck, throw in some AI and Active sky with 5 layers of clouds.

I'm a betting man and my money says my 6 core coffee lake would wipe with the floor with that 3700X.

Heck, my memory speed (4133 C17) alone would erase any IPC advantage the 3700X would have.

Oh, and my coffee lake is running 5.3 on all cores with no AVX offset ....under 80c with the 100 v2 Corsair AIO cooler.

Did I mention AVX??? ....does the 3700X even do AVX?

P3d is dynamic ....the cpu, memory, and video card all come into play and at some point will be exposed in a not so subtle way.

Ken
KSJC

[CplDaniel]

when talking about the new AMD Ryzen processors:
AMD's latest matches or outperforms Intel's offering when locking the CPU's at the same frequency.
In fact, the site I used as a reference ran Cinebench R15 benchmarks at 3,5GHz, and it shows that the 3700X has a IPC of almost 8% faster than a i9-9900K singlethreaded and almost 20% for multithreaded calculations.

Oh, God. I've already written essay-length responses about this fallacious line of reasoning.
I will skip the essay, and go directly to short Socratic questioning.
Why would a consumer buy an i9 9900k to run at 3.5 gHz?
What's the commonly reported overclock headroom given to Ryzen customers vs Intel?
In other words: Find me ANY EVIDENCE OF ANY RYZEN EVER RUNNING FLIGHT SIM SOFTWARE @ 5.1 or 5.2 gHz!!

There are plenty of i9 flight-simmers across all simulation platforms on youtube. None of them are running stock base-clocks on their expensive K-series cpu. Most of them are clocking 5< gHz (I have found one instance of an i9 9900k buyer reporting to have "lost" the Silicon lottery, which he quantified as getting stable clocks only up to 4.8-ghz)

So the worst case 9900k I can find reported running stable up to 4.8-GHz.
How many Ryzen processors OC to 4.8Ghz?

Many aviation sim builds are running with several-thousand dollars worth of software. If you are running that system at 3.5Ghz AMD vs 5.1GHz to save a hundred bucks, then that's like scraping $700 worth of software performance value to save 5% on the total system hardware cost.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOBODY GET ME WRONG!
I WANT YOU ALL TO BUY RYZEN 3900X -- BENCHMARK THE HELL OUT OF IT -- AND POST P3D VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE
to selfishly save me the costs of proving its viability in P3D v4, a version which is now two years old, and historically likely to be replaced soon by a v5.0 in the near future if the traditional 2yr replacement cycle by Lockheed Martin holds true. At which point, the whole cycle begins anew.