Aapje

The Flanker is not natively supported by the AB9 for now. The Constellation Alpha does work.

You can't upgrade just the CPU because you would need to replace the platform anyway. 12-14 gen Intel uses a different socket.

Keep in mind that we don't know the release date and have no idea how good the software will be nor do we know how good the hardware is really. Waiting is a gamble.

You have to decide for yourself. We can't decide for you what tradeoff you prefer.

No issue for me, but I have pretty big hands (XL). The sensitivity of the controls is more of an issue for me, with the the 4-way hat on the side often triggering 'up' when I try to do sideways. My old Gladiator didn't have that issue.

I've heard a bunch of people comment about the small size of the Kosmosima and that was also my experience. I now have a Virpil Alpha and it has a lot more girth.

I assume that you tried the Gladiator? That is known to be small, but that is not representative for the Gunfighter grips.

The selection of controls is indeed the best thing about the TWCS and on that front it punches above its weight. Unfortunately, the actual throttle part is very poor, and the durability is also not very good. It is commonly recommended as a decent entry-level product, but it is very much an aged product that is overpriced for what it is, IMO.

@DejmienoPl A lot of people focus blame the poor quality of their old stick on it being plastic, but high quality plastics used in the right places (with metal components where needed) are actually very good and comfortable. Real modern planes never use metal sticks. You often pay a substantial premium for getting a metal grip. Anyway, the VKB Gladiator is the best mid-range joystick. Basically, everything below it (and even several more expensive products) have major issues. Then above that you have the separate bases and grips, where VKB and Virpil provide very good solutions. Keep in mind that these are designed to be mounted, so that can result in extra costs for mounting kits. Winwing is cheaper as you've seen, but you pay for this with poorer quality control and especially poor service. There are a lot of horror stories about them where people basically get screwed over, and end up with no money and no functioning product. So are you willing to take that risk? The highest end of the scale are the FFB bases, which are way nicer still and probably will fully cannibalize the top end of the previous category. You have the VPForce and FFBeast, which are top tier, but also in price. Then Moza has a solution with a good base, but mediocre software and a poor grips. I personally have the Moza AB9 with a Virpil grip, which works quite well and which was substantially cheaper than the VPForce and FFBeast. Any day now they will also come out with a cheaper AB6-base with less power. Virpil and Winwing are going to release a FFB base as well, where Winwing has announced very attractive pricing, but their base is very tall (although less wide than the competition). This may require a full rig, and not be suitable for table mounting. We also have no idea how well their hardware and software will actually perform. And I'm personally very happy with the VKB STECS throttle.

I mount it to my desk. It is a very solid desk though (hand-made, thick wood).

The disadvantage of the 9950X3D is that is has two compute-chiplets, and one of them is not suitable for gaming. So you can have issues if the game decides to run (partially) on the wrong chiplet. That is why you see people messing about with Process Lasso, to manually decide what runs where. With the 9800X3D, you don't have these issues. The downside is that you have fewer cores, but almost no games use that many cores, so this is more an issue when you also want to use the CPU for heavy video/image editing and such. So the 9950X3D is more of a hybrid CPU, whose primary value is that it is both good for gaming, but also for heavy video/image editing, etc. If money is no object, I would still get the 9800X3D, so you don't have any hassle, and then save your money for a CPU upgrade later on. Rumor has it that the next generation of AMD CPUs may see much reduced memory latency due to a much better connection between the compute-chiplet(s) and the IO-chiplet. And each compute chiplet is rumored to go to 12 cores.

If the only heavy thing with the PC you do is gaming, then neither of the 9950X or 9950X3D are the best choice. You are better off with the 9800X3D.

I would say that this is a big part of the problem. That people are making comparisons to a mod for a 27 year old game, shows how limited the offerings are. If there was a modern alternative to DCS, where that alternative makes different choices, then people who don't like the choices that ED makes, would have an alternative. In general, I think that having that alternative would be very healthy in a lot of different ways (for players, third party developers, but also for ED).

It's still DDR3. The GPU that is in there is already 6 years newer than the CPU. Generally the GPU can be a decent bit newer than the CPU, but I have strong doubts that the current CPU can cope with a 1080, let alone something faster. Keep in mind that even a 4060 is over twice as fast as his current GPU. And upgrading the current platform means being limited to PCIe 2.0, so that is also going to limit the performance.

That CPU is almost 15 years old and as a Xeon, is not made for gaming (workstation CPUs are made to do a lot in parallel at a steady pace, not relatively little very fast). If you only get a new GPU, it will be really held back by the platform, especially in simming, with is relatively CPU-heavy. So my advice would be to do a platform upgrade designed for further future upgrading (by getting a cheap AM5 CPU that is still way faster than what you have now and that later can be replaced with an X3D CPU). There is no point in buying a way faster GPU and have it held back so it performs like a much slower one.