Aapje

Testing with these headsets in a competing flight sim shows that the Quest 3 has less overhead, so with weaker hardware, you get a better result with that headset. But then the Pimax Crystal Light pulls ahead with a better GPU+CPU. The 4090 Mobile should be strong enough to give the advantage to the Pimax Crystal Light.

I would stay away from Gigabyte unless they have a really good deal. They have messed up too many times in the past. I'd take Asrock over them. For AMD, Sapphire, Powercolor and XFX are usually considered to be the best AIBs for GPUs. But of course, it's always best to look at the reviews of the specific model if possible, since any company has stinkers now and then.

No, it's 4K per eye. Two times 4K is 6K, not 8K. It is easy to be confused, because if you take a single screen and increase the vertical and horizontal resolution by two times, you'd think that the resolution doubles, but since the screen area increases by a multiplication of the vertical and horizontal resolution, it actually increases by 2 to the power of 2, which is 4 times the increase. And the fact that they use 4K and 8K as names doesn't help, because that makes it seem like a doubling, when 8K is actually 4 times as many pixels as 4K. And the answer is no. Not even a desktop 5090 can run these headsets with maxed out settings. So you are going to have to run it with lowered settings, for example, by using DLSS 4, foveated rendering, lowered graphics settings, etc. Ultimately, no one can tell you if you consider the end result to be acceptable. There are people who have been happy with much weaker hardware, and people who are not happy with much stronger hardware.

The mobile 4090 is actually a 4080 with a lower TDP, so it actually performs more like a desktop 4070 Super or 3080. So you can look at people's experiences with those GPUs.

The TDP matters a lot. The 5090 has almost no safety margin with 12VPWR, but the 9070 XT has a solid margin. I would still advise an undervolt with nearly all modern GPUs.

Something is grinding. Probably needs some bearings.

Unfortunately, Moza doesn't have the best software team. On the racing sim side it also took them a long time to catch up to the state of the art.

I also watch the Nvidia reddit to see what issues people report and also only update if there is a reason. If you don't have a recently released GPU, there is typically rarely a good reason to upgrade. Although there is now a good reason with DLSS 4.

A little search suggests that real pilots who were passengers have assisted as co-pilot when the captain got ill or died, but no cases where they had to take over on their own, let alone cases where a flight simmer landed the plane. There was one situation where a flight attendant took to the controls when there was an oxygen issue and that person was the only one who got to the portable oxygen in time. This person had a pilot license, but no qualification for the plane. He couldn't land the plane, but he got to the controls at the same time that the plane ran out of fuel, so it was a tough ask anyway. He did steer the plane away from Athens. This was Helios Airways Flight 522.

@SharpeXB I was thinking more about a scenario where both pilots ate the fish and got sick, and they ask a passenger to land it. In that case it's not about having fun, but about getting the plane down safely.

Modern airliners with autoland are probably fairly easy to land if one knows the procedures for configuring it (which can be practiced in a sim), assuming a suitable airfield + weather conditions and an emergency declaration so everyone stays out of the way.

I think that they are pretty much equal. J vs K on the other hand...

I see clear signs that we are in a strong downward movement on the pricing of the 7800X3D, so I would just hang tight for a bit. In my local market, the price went down by 55 euros in a little over a month. And in the US, it seems that the price just dropped by $50, bringing it lower than the pricing in my local market. Typically, US pricing is a bit ahead of pricing elsewhere. Turkey is probably a bit behind the EU in pricing changes. My expectation is that prices will drop by 50-100 dollars/euros in the next 1-3 months. Basically, they tend to gradually lower the pricing to get more buyers, while trying to get people to pay as much as possible. AMD seems to have miscalculated that many people switched over to AMD as Intel's Arrow Lake is a major flop. But AMD is increasing production a lot to catch up, and we should mostly see a normalization of pricing once that happens (probably a bit higher pricing than usual due to the lack of competition, but not as much as now).

Back to the good old tradition of using bicycle parts for planes.

Why not ask Moza support or on their discord?

As far as I know, Virpil doesn't publish specs for the protocol. Ideally, the companies would standardize on a single connector and protocol, and all the grips and bases would be interchangeable without adapters or any custom programming.

If I search for VFX, then I don't see a recent discussion. And it's pretty obvious that a company can only support a product properly if they have a device in hand.

It's like the holocaust... OK, perhaps I went overboard in the other direction this time.

The availability and pricing of the 5090 is horrible, so I'd just wait some months, especially given the rumor that AI sales are disappointing, so we may be at the low point now, with the rumor being that Nvidia is producing a lot of 50-series chips now, that will come on the market in a bit. You could first upgrade to a 9800X3D + AM6, which is now actually properly available.

I would suggest a Stream Deck XL. There is all kinds of support out there to show data from the sims on the buttons and toggle to different button images, so it is not just a button box, but a dynamic system that shows data and that can show multiple displays on just one device. You can search on this forum for Stream Deck support for DCS. For MSFS, using Axis and Ochs with the Guenseli profiles from flightsim.to works very well. For Elite Dangerous, this seems good: https://github.com/mhwlng/streamdeck-elite And the X56 joystick is considered to be quite poor, so you can think about replacing it with a VKB Gladiator Space Edition.

The latest rumor is that the B200 systems are not selling as well as expected, so Nvidia moved lots of production capacity to the 50-series, and have recently supplied a lot of chips to AIBs. Production and shipping of the cards takes at least a month, so if the rumor is true, we should see lots more supply and thus dropping prices around the end of March.

The 2080 Ti is very similar to the 5090. 20-30% performance increase, but with a price to match. So not sure why you would classify them differently. And I would argue that the 1080 Ti was the good release. People generally ignore the 2080 Ti. And the 3090 Ti was never considered good by those in the know.

This one? https://www.vrsimsolutions.nl/product/15828489/vr-f18-cockpit-panels-add-on-for-winwing-mip

AMD doesn't seem to learn their lessons, and if they just keep repeating their strategy of making their cards slightly more attractive than the Nvidia alternative in their own eyes, then they will make the following mistakes: Assuming that the Nvidia cards are attractively priced, which is probably not the case in the long term (when there is more supply than just a trickle) Assuming that buyers have the same pro-AMD bias that AMD has But perhaps they'll surprise me and the cards will come out with a truly attractive price, but the general strategy with AMD is to wait until the prices drop to something that is more reasonable. They usually need some time to sort out their drivers anyway, although due to the delays the drivers may be better at launch than usual.

The connector are interchangeable, but they already started replacing 12vhpwr connectors with 12V-2x6 connectors for the 40-series cards, so presumably they have now transitioned over fully. However, this merely reduces the risks a bit, it is not a full fix.