Aapje

@François That is the best gaming processor right now. But you should get a single 2 x 32 Go kit of memory. Putting 4 DIMMs in a system is suboptimal.

@Panzerlang Perhaps you should sell it to a virtual helicopter pilot. Apparently, it's reasonably usable for that use case.

I'd personally opt for air cooling with a 7800X3D. It doesn't use that much power and air cooling is more reliable, durable and less risky. The Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE cooler is a very good option. DCS (and MSFS) can make use of a lot of RAM. Given your level of spending, you might want to go for 64 Gb: G.Skill RipJaws S5 Low Profile 64 Go. The case you selected is more suited for silent PCs that do low intensity gaming. I'd suggest a case with better airflow, like the Corsair 4000D Airflow or Fractal Design Torrent. A single 1 Tb/To drive is very small. I'd go for at least 2 Tb. You can save quite a bit of money on the Windows key on the grey market.

That channel is reasonably good and he has experience with FFB (albeit not joysticks), so I'm happy that he got one.

That only makes sense to me if you also play vintage games. Besides, if you buy something nice and keep it long enough, it becomes vintage eventually.

@kksnowbear Fair enough. I quickly looked at eBay earlier and I wasn't that impressed, but I took another look and something like this seems OK: https://www.ebay.com/itm/266909613953 That's $220 and it should get him way over the halfway point between what he has and my 5700X3D suggestion. It has PCIe 3, but that should be OK in many cases, even with a future GPU upgrades. I am wondering why the DDR4 speed is missing. Might be some awfully slow RAM. Note that I didn't look very far, so there may be much better deals out there.

Brunner is a Swiss company that makes things by hand, not a manufacturing company. They're the kind of guys that you get bespoke or very low volume products from at an eye-watering price. But they are not competent at competing even with VPForce in manufacturing ability, let alone an actual serious manufacturing company that makes 10k-millions of products.

@propeler The lower the price for an FFB option, the more people can afford one. So there is no lower limit. Note that statements like "reasonably priced" and "dirt cheap" are not objective and for many people, $550 for a gaming peripheral is not at all dirt cheap. Of course, the above is just about the demand side. What is reasonably from a production point of view is a different question, and is in no small part dependent on the features of the desired product. As I've said before, I think that ideally, we have more advanced products at higher prices and more limited products at lower prices (like a desktop model with weak motors).

The difficulty with suggesting second hand parts is that it is hard to predict what is available locally to the person and judging how good the deal is and the condition of the parts requires more knowledge. So it requires a lot of knowledge on the part of the person who wants to upgrade to be able to do these things. And of course the risk factor is higher. And it may be hard to find a deal that matches the needs in this case, because DCS can very much use 32 GB of RAM, but second hand bundles are probably going to most often be 8 or 16 GB. And a lot of cheap second hand AM4 boards will lack PCIe4, hampering upgradability, and when a new one is only 100 bucks... Of course, but I would personally choose a solid 5700X3D build that can perform to a reasonably high level over the next 10 years, rather than get something half as good that only lasts for 5 years for $200, and then upgrade again for $200 to something similar to the 5700X3D build. Then the total spend is the same, but the guy will have a considerably slower system for those first five years, and will also have more fuss due to having to upgrade twice in that period.

@Holbeach You have an ancient platform. For example, your memory is 2 generations old. Your PCIe is 3 generations old. Doing these small upgrades where you go from being very far behind the state of the art to slightly less far behind is just going to result in small improvements at relatively high cost (and effort). My suggestion is to save a bit and then get a platform upgrade that can last you a good while. For example, an Asrock B550M Pro 4 motherboard + 5700X3D processor + 32 GB of DDR4 should run you about $400 new ($100 for the motherboard, $200 for the CPU and $100 for the RAM). The only issue is that you might need access to an old AM4-processor to flash the bios, so it supports the 5700X3D, but you can always just get one of the worst AM4 processors like a 1200 from ebay to do that, if the motherboard doesn't come with a newer BIOS. Then you have a platform that should easily last you 10 years, given how long you seem to use your hardware for. You can also go for AM5, which will cost more initially, but will presumably allow for relatively cheap upgrades in the future, and should last you longer than the AM4-platform.

@Nightdare Yeah, that one was already hugely expensive. Probably due to the long throw and all the extra material that requires. Unless they change it to lets say a linear mechanism with a belt, a FFB version would probably be at least as expensive.

Totally expected, as getting the software right is clearly quite a bit of effort (since you have to implement a telemetry-based system for a bunch of sims). It's better than the hardware being bad, since you can download new software, but not new hardware. Keep in mind that this is what you often sign up for when you (pre)order the first product of a certain kind, that a company makes. That said, I'm not yet convinced that the hardware is good for all use cases. I want a test to heat failure, people trying it out with long table clamps, etc.

You misunderstand me. I'm saying that if Winwing prices a FFB throttle within lets say 100 euro of the VPC VMAX Prime, it may be convince people who would otherwise get the most expensive throttle from Virpil.

I have no problem with that decision from a technical point of view. However, they've promised it for late 2022 and a bunch of other dates that they won't make. The lesson again is to not start tossing out dates unless there is at least a working version in the lab. Although to be fair, we didn't get a new date in this video, so perhaps they are learning.

It might also create very good detents. I'm also thinking that it might require only very weak motors, since you always need to be able to override it anyway. Perhaps they can make something that is not that much more expensive than the VPC VMAX Prime and then I can see the rich people going for this instead. Especially the airliner people, but indeed not so much for DCS, I guess.

@rapid According to this post the FFB2 is 0.8 Nm by default (no resistor mod), so the first one is probably in that region as well:

You can just open up your case and measure. It is about 305 mm long.

@rapid It looks like it may be a FFB throttle. That would be a first.

See the end of this video:

If you care a lot about blacks, I would suggest a Pimax Crystal Light with local dimming, rather than the PSVR2. In a poll I saw, the vast majority of PSVR2 owners reported mura or near black chrominance overshoot, also with dark scenes. As far as I can tell, OLED in VR gets overhyped mostly by people who think that it is good because their experiences with monitors, but in VR there are significant downsides. There is a reason why regular OLED isn't very popular with headset makers anymore, including companies that tried to make it work, like Pimax and Meta. Of course, with VR, people differ a lot in how sensitive they are to various issues, or even differ physically in how their eyes work and such. So there are definitely people who like the up- and downsides that OLED brings, but I think that it's more likely that the Pimax works out for a random person.

The issue with that choice is that you are sacrificing upgradability and reusability for the future. When buying new, I'd sooner go for a 7600(X) on AM5 with DDR5-6000. Then in the future you can almost certainly do a major upgrade for fairly little, by upgrading to the last X3D processor for the AM5-platform once that comes down in price a lot. For example, those that bought into AM4 early, can now do a huge upgrade for only £210 by moving to the 5700X3D. Most likely there will be a similar option for AM5 in the future. Spending a little bit more to save hundreds in the future is not a bad idea. Also, games seem to be getting increasingly optimized for DDR5 and the price of DDR5 has become very reasonable, so why buy the slower DDR4 memory today, unless you get a nice 2nd-hand deal? Of course, it is hard to say what the best choice is, without knowing the local prices. I don't know what the new and second hand prices are in England/West Norfolk.

Indeed, so far the headset just doesn't look like a good option compared to a Q3 or Crystal Light.

Buildzoid has the ability to measure voltages, and he found excessive voltages even with the BIOS changes, so most likely any (heavy) usage of the system will cause further degradation until the microcode fix is released (assuming that fixes it). So the only thing that you can really do seems to be to keep your system off or at least, not put load on it. So go touch grass or watch Youtube, and don't play DCS. Of course, that is not at all a solution...

None of the chip-making companies ever make an all new design. It is always based on what came before, with changes. You are just arbitrarily deciding to call some designs 'all new' with no objective basis. The 12900KS boosts higher than the 13700K, but only the latter degrades. There is something different with the internal voltages of Raptor Lake. It's unclear whether it's just the chip being pushed too far (with the microcode), or whether the chip is (also) more sensitive due to a design change. Intel is not being particularly honest about what the issue is exactly. Rumor has it that the performance penalty should be relatively small. About a percent or so. But we'll have to see whether this rumor is true.

DLSS increases the load on the CPU and reduces the load on the GPU, so if moving to the 2080 Ti makes him CPU-limited, then he'd probably better keep it off.