Aapje

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.

No. Save up and wait for the release of future hardware.

The 14600K is quite a bit faster and it should probably help quite a bit. That said, I would advise against getting that processor unless you also run productivity software that benefits a lot from the e-cores, since you are buying into a dead platform, and cannot do a cheap upgrade in the future. With AM5 you can go for a solid upgrade with big upgrade potential, for example by getting a 7500F (from Aliexpress), 7600X or 9600X. The former is especially good value for money. For AM4, we saw that AMD released fairly cheap X3D CPUs for AM4 once they released their new platform, so going this route probably allows for a big upgrade for relatively cheap later on. You can then keep your motherboard + RAM + cooler, and only have to drop in the new CPU. Another option is to directly go to a 7800X3D or 9800X3D. Then you have a processor that is top of the line (and substantially faster than the 14600K or the cheaper AM5 options) with still a reasonable price (in particular the 7800X3D).

There is a bug in the software where they effectively lose 1/3rd of the power of native effects. They fixed that in an internal build and it should be released at one point.

The primary source are the solid review channels like Hardware Unboxed, Gamer's Nexus, etc, although they don't test DCS. But they tend to see a consistent advantage for the X3D-CPU's. We also had people here who switched to AMD and generally were happy with it. That said, I would not necessarily switch if you already have a 14900, unless money is no object and you want the last drop. The difference is not so massive that it would make a huge change. And supposedly the degradation issues are solved if you get the newest BIOS for the motherboard.

A dedicated access point in line of sight with Wifi 6E or 7 is generally strongly advised. So basically, you make a separate Wifi network on the 6 GHz band and use that only for the Quest.

Brake axis works and almost all buttons work, except for the flip trigger, that is not mapped in a useful way. The software doesn't have any way to configure the mapping, so you get what you get.

https://discord.gg/s4TUAjwA

To start off with, I'm going to ignore your irrational constraints and give the actual best advice. Then later on I'll give the fanboy advice for the CPU. For the GPU, a 5070 Ti should be able to about to hit your performance targets. A 5080 is going to have about 15% more headroom, but it probably going to cost a lot more than 15% extra. Check your local markets for the price difference and think about whether you want to spend the extra amount. A 9800X3D or 7800X3D is going to be the best CPU. The 9800X3D seems to be much more overclockable, so it is probably worth the price difference. The Intel option is a 14900, which is slower and runs way hotter & is thus much more problematic with cooling. You'll also be buying a motherboard with zero upgrade potential for the CPU, while an AM5 motherboard will get at least one more generation. Of course you are free to make bad choices in life, but after already making the bad choice of getting the 10600 (a stopgap solution released because Intel couldn't get their 10 nm process working), do you really want to make another bad choice just because Intel used to do well for you? PS. Get 64 GB of DDR5-6000

Yes, but you need an adapter: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSflUrHfM9AB0f-0WGyhOLxvXQNMr7E8TBDSYYJUBQ8kqaDC7g/viewform

You should give your rough location so people will know if shipping is going to be an issue. And your picture is broken.

Just keep in mind that Virpil has long delivery times and that you should take the displayed delivery times with a huge grain of salt. If you get their CDT stick, I would suggest getting at least one Throttle Module with it. You can never have enough axes, IMO.

There is a Pimax subforum.

List of known issues/workarounds: https://github.com/mbucchia/Oasis-Driver-for-Windows-Mixed-Reality/wiki/Known-Issues

I think that your body & mind gets mixed signals if you use a motion rig with a monitor.

@wct24 You need to wait 1 day and 14 hours for the Oasis driver to be released, before you can use it. I suggest listening to some music while you wait: Let's see if the WMR headsets will live forever.

Like I said, I'm not criticizing your choice. I'm just talking about the reality that quite a few people are looking for a bargain, and those people are susceptible to overly rosy descriptions of products, which can result in them making poor buying decisions. So we should be careful not to overhype a product that doesn't deserve it.

I don't mind it when someone makes an informed decision to get something that I wouldn't suggest, but I don't like it when claims get made that are not true. In particular because it can cause other people to make decisions based on incorrect info.