metalnwood

Don't buy it. Let us talk about it though :thumbup:

No Sorin, I am not stalking you so give the opposite view! :) I on the other hand would go for the 7970, with the performance of the cards being on par the 3 gigs can be an advantage when running triple screen. I wasnt sure how much vram was being used but in a thread here the other day someone said it was over 2gigs. On the other hand if the 680 never goes below 30 then that is the one to get as I dont know of any computer that has managed to to that - depending on setting of course.

The other thing that iracing does which DCS does not do it keep trackir working properly. I.e. in iracing you can look around the world and everything continues to line up properly. In DCS when you render three screens they views will not line up properly when you move your head around in TIR, from memory it was pitch that really showed it up.

The torrent is OK, mine came down in ten minutes or so, I went out for a few hours and saw I seeded another 150gigs so someone is getting it :)

Perspective would be the number of customers steam has and the associated number of servers and bandwidth they have to manage it all.

I decided to download the torrent as updater is not even starting. I got about 10 MB/s down from the torrent and seeding from a 1 Gb/s seedbox.

You little trickester, you dont need any help lol :)

You can set up dcs to run across multiple cards. To do it basically you just need to have all your monitors set up as extended desktop and tell DCS to run in windowed mode and set the resolution to be the overall size of all your monitors. It will look like it is running fullscreen. I am not sure of the performance problems in doing this, if any, and this is potentially where softth could enhance performance. Not sure. It's certainly your only option if you want to run it in full screen. Unless your two cards are nvidia and support NV surround together.

I dont use nvidia, only ati but I think the featureset it the same. He sets up nvidia surround and uses the built in bezel management. His fourth screen is arranged next to the wide screen and he sets the res in DCS to ~ 8000x1080 while exporting all things to the screen on the right - which just happens to be underneat physically. You should never need to use the three viewports. Everything he wants to do he can do without softth. Not that softth doesnt have merit for some things but he hasnt asked for anything specifically requiring it so for a first timer it may be easier not to have to configure it.

Softth is not a requirement to do it, Mad tommy's link is required and thats the only thing you need to do. The third link is to EMC but it has not worked in some time. I would just read the second link, forget softth as you have never used it before and then revisit it if you find you need to use it for some reason but you may save yourself a headache getting by without it first.

Some ideas in these threads.. http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=85478 http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=86194 http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=84572 http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=80233 and a few on my thread http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=65388&page=4 If you are inclined, there is a lot of information on this board of guys building excellent quality panels, all the answers are jere.

I also tried to make a panel for helios and xplane. Of course the data cannot be exported from xplane in to helios, unless I could be bothered writing a data conversion for it - which wouldnt be all that hard. It just makes it a little easier for things like the radio/nav stack because by default how xplane works really sucks for a touchscreen. right now I have a panel bound to a button on the stick which pops the panel up and hides it. I might make two panels bound to two diff buttons, one for the radios and the other for misc switches. I have found it works pretty well with my pause button on the stick, I look at the radios, pause the track ir and then freely tune it with helios so the radios/freqs are easily seen while turning the helios knobs.

We should get together sometime, I made a couple a10 pits for aucklanders recently, there are at least ilikepie, kaiza, another guy brad, who are on the forums who all live in auckland. We meet up from time to time. Also a bunch more on kiwisim who dont come here but we see each other occasionally like at airshows or when I need help moving machinery :)

I have been on an effort over the last little while to try and identify some good scenery to download. I Cant convert anything from fsx as I dont have it installed and cant be bothered installing it all anyway.. A while ago I converted a bunch of osm data but it got lost on a HDD misshap so I might have a lot of work to do... Where in auckland are you? You seem to play a lot of sims that some of us locals do..

I had a quick look on the prop forums and while I didnt find the gun you were referring to it was clear that this is a forum for enthusiasts that like to build their own stuff. That means first and foremost they are building things for themselves. Remember that Deadman has all the real stuff, he is not investing the time in moulds etc for himself, it's only for other people. I dare say that if some of the guys on the props forum were not making them for themselves they may also want to recoup some of the hours they spend making the moulds. Also you are using up someones valuable time and Deadman has put a value on his time. I dont know the breakdown but I can appreciate it. There are a lot of things I just wouldnt do for a minimum amount of money, its not like hes going to a theme park while building stuff for other people. I am sure he more exciting things to be doing.

He didnt say what aircraft he was flying in FSX, not all are equal and not all xp models are better.

If you want to go three screens then you need a 600 series card or higher from memory, they are the only ones supporting 3 screens off a single card. Otherwise the ati cards support eyefinity for most models now sold. Ps, not trying to hijack your thread but keep your options alive if you had contemplated tv's I didn't see the need to disregard that option after ones guys post. Many people around here are running them.

Thats not entirely fair. If you already have a lot of money invested in FSX and you have a framerate that you are happy about then xplane probably doesnt have anything substantial to offer you at this point. xplane certainly has some pro's but if you have got fsx working reliably with a lot of addons then the chances are that xplane cannot match it. the future may be a different story.

If you have the $$ for both then there is no question, especially if you fly helos. Using an axis on the throttle might work ok for some things, I wouldnt like it and I think it would not work well at all for a helicopter. I have had the CH pedals, they are OK but I prefer the saitek combat pedals because the foot spacing is a bit farther apart and the resistance can be adjusted. The CH pedals move very easily when you rest your feet on them, you can inadvertanly be applying rudder when you dont mean to. You can plug many controllers in to the computer for DCS. I might have had 5/6 at most.

8 gigs system ram will run it fine as well.

I dont have fsx or prepar3d on my system at the moment after I hijacked ssd from my flight sim machine. I do have xplane on it though and go for the odd fly about. Graphics are much fast than FSX, now way I could contemplate running 4000x2000 in FSX and have something called a framerate :) I know a lot of people have used a tool that converts fsx scenery to xplane (fs2xplane) but I havent tried it because you need fsx and the scenery installed, which I dont at the moment... As an example, just the first one pulled from youtube.. You can see it does a pretty good job, from other examples I have seen you should be able to pull at least your scenery across. Planes are another thing though.. It does have it's pitfalls but it has some highs. In the end for me I dont do enough civ simming to care to much about using while it's under development. There are certainly things I would want to come more quickly though - atc and autogen airports.

If it is for DCS then get the largest single card you can. Don't get two lesser cards SLI'd, you will get less performance.

That system should do it fine, thats around 3.6 megapixels, a lot of people are running over 6 megapixels with multiple monitors on a single card. I am not sure how much ram is used by DCS but I remember going from a 5990 to a 6970 had a large difference, a lot of it was actually because of the extra ram. Not sure that it would consume more than 2 gigs for a single screen, it should be OK.

I agree with you, for whatever sized screen more resolution is generally better. Not better only when the game doesnt have the horsepower to use the resolution and you get a slideshow. My only point of contention is that resolution has nothing to do with the field of view you get on your monitor. to say as you did that 'In our discussion above the higher resolution 1440 pixels compared with 1080 will permit a higher FOV in the sim because of the zoom' Is not correct. I agree more resolution can be better, I dont agree with the other stuff.

You are confusing resolution for FOV, they are not the same. Yes, a screen with a higher resolution will show more detail for any given FOV but it will not show a larger FOV. It's similar to modern digital cameras. If the sensor is the same size and they both have a 50mm lense then the photo they will take will have the same FOV, the sensor with more pixels will have more detail under scrutiny of the image but the FOV will not be any different. Also jsut because you have a higher number of pixels does not mean you want to zoom out. Lets say you put 30 degrees FOV on a 1080p 27" screen, you are not going to want to put more FOV on a 27" screen with more pixels because you are just fisheyeing your picture, there would be no practical advantage to it. There is no doubt that it will look crisper on a 30" monitor with more pixels than on a TV. Will you see more detail, that is debatable, you are also on a much smaller screen which in turn is hiding that detail. Remember a 24" 1080p screen will also look just as crisp and clear as the 30" showing lots of detail. Put that exact same image on a 42" and you have no less detail but it is more life size and easier to see that detail. I never have to squint, look forward or zoom much in to the screen to see things that are on a smaller screen with the same resolution. Here are 3 42's, sorry, they are a bit bluury but that is because of the iphone trying to get focus , you can see the 23" touchscreen has bad focus too and would be very crisp. A small monitor is OK but when the OP has also asked about TV's I dont think they can be dismissed because nothing can beat the immersion other than a projector. There are not many other ways you will get your side views going down past your feet for a great outside view, especially cool on landings. You yourself have said you would go for projectors with less pixel density if you had the space so why tell the OP not to go for tv's with more pixel density?