KLR Rico

I've pieced together my pit to make a pretty universal setup; it's easy to swap between stick/wheel/yoke and nothing is specific to any one sim. I've probably spent $1-2K on it, but I'd never be willing (or able) to spend that much at once, much less on a single airframe cockpit.

I've been attempting an FFB conversion of a Saitek Yoke... I haven't been satisfied with the amount of force I was getting, but the resistor trick did the job! I finally was able to finish the project and I'm pretty satisfied with the results. Thanks for sharing the tip.

If it flies, I buys. ... So indifferent? :D

I never understood how the hell it was going to be feasible to get all the aircraft, the map, and a physical manual for $50, that's like wal-mart bargain bin cheap... but I figured what the hell let's see what happens. I wasn't surprised at all when that didn't work out and I figured my money was as good as gone (a risk I expected from the get-go). I think that ED's new rewards system is much more realistic/reasonable, and I'm glad they picked up that fumble and managed to sort it out this well.

I don't think I'd bother with 32GB right now, at least for DCS. I had 20GB on my last computer and when monitoring RAM usage, it rarely went above 6-8 while gaming, and usually not much more than 4. On the other hand, with 32GB you can dedicate half of it to a ramdisk... ;)

In general, flight sims are limited by the CPU, while FPS games get held back by the GPU. Either way, your setup should give quite respectable performance on any game out today. It looks like it's right in the sweet spot for price/performance too. I think that's the place to operate in, you have to be careful to not get into that diminishing returns on computer hardware. :thumbup:

Pretty interesting! Thanks for sharing.

I'd highly suggest going for the i5-4670K for the extra ~$40. I have mine OC'd to 4.5 on air cooling and it's happy to play DCS on high settings at 60FPS, rarely going below 40. I don't know about war thunder, but the GPU might be overkill for DCS, and I keep hearing ATI cards have issues, might be worth searching the forum to check. Either way, the GPU isn't much of a bottleneck for DCS. I had 60FPS with an old GTX560 if I kept the MSAA and all that other eye candy down a bit. Definately want at least 2GB memory though. I'm using a GTX760 now and I was able to crank up the post-processing significantly and still maintain 60FPS@80-90% GPU load. If you like FPS games and other things that stress the GPU you might keep it though. I'd also recommend going for at least a 240gb SSD, it fills up quick. By the time you put your OS and usual basic apps on there you're already used up a good chunk of a 128 gig drive. The speed advantage of SSD over a platter is incredible, I don't think I'll ever put anything but media on a disk again. You might be able to save a few bucks on the PSU. Put your system build in an online PSU calculator and you'll probably see the requirements are closer to 500W peak, although there is something to be said for future-proofing.

Ever since the Huey was released, it was my main single player go-to aircraft. Then I realized I was getting rusty at the shark, so I spent a few days re-learning that, then I fired up the P-51.... goodness, was it always this twitchy? A day or two later I got used to it again. Oh wait, I haven't given the MI-8 any love lately. Crap, I've forgotten how to use that whacky weapons panel, and WTH kind of gun pod is that?! Oh, you know what, it's been a while since I've done SEAD with the toad.... ;) As excited as I am to see improvements and more aircraft, it's hard to get bored with DCS. :D

+1, I bought ARMA 3 and wanted to like it, since my friends all play it and say how fun & realistic the helicopters are. I flew for less than 10 minutes and haven't touched it since. DCS has definitely spoiled me, arcade flight models just make part of me die.

I wonder why I couldn't use the updater even when I quit BitDefender. I wound up restoring my backup and uninstalling BitDefender, the DCS update then proceeded without incident. :crash:

Damn, that's too bad. I liked it up until now, it seemed lightweight and silent. It's looking like my best bet is to restore my drive image from last week and ditch bitdefender.

Ah, I'm using BitDefender as well, but this was the first time I ran into this problem. I did try exiting BD on one upgrade attempt (trying to rule it out) and the upgrade still failed. Did you have to fully remove BD? Thanks for the help.

The PS3 Eye is a great headtracking camera. I usually run it at 640x480@75FPS, but the ability to run at 180FPS is pretty nice. I use mine with freetrack. I think I'll have to check out facetracknoir because freetrack hasn't been updated in some time and can be a bit finicky. I hadn't seen that clip before. I can't believe they're able to sell them for that much! You can make one for a couple bucks. I guess I'll have to put my 3d printer to work and start putting IR clips on ebay. :)

The new updater's auto update to the updater isn't working for me. It got stuck on "initializing" and makes the rest of the system unresponsive. I hard reset the computer, but that broke the updater, which now says that it's not compatible with my OS. Repair doesn't work either, since it uses the updater. I then backed up my main DCS folder and user files, uninstalled/re-installed DCS, but it's still doing the same thing. WTH?

Wow, that's awesome that this has been modeled (or at least attempted?) How about testing the cooldown by a firing a relatively short burst, using time compression to skip forward an hour or so, and then repeating until empty?

If the jist of the OP was to say "I'm stalling while jinking", and then the fix was to reduce elevator throw, that's not the best approach. You're going to want the full elevator travel in other situations. Better solution would be to develop a finer touch while flying, or worse case, use curves.

^^ OOOOHH! That explains it! I didn't think of the radio command, I was just hovering until my nerves were shot then came over to the forum to see what I was doing wrong. I'm loving this campaign so far, I think it should be included with the Huey module. Really great job! PS- I don't know why, but I tried to rep OP, but I get a popup saying I can't give rep to the post... It's certainly deserved though!

I highy recommend the i5-4670k, I'm very happy with mine.

+1 on this! I have a hell of a time trying to use the flex or door guns with headtracking.

^^ That's my route so far. I honestly don't see the point of upgrading the GPU right now. I have textures, visible range, and scenes on high. Normal HDR, 8x AA, and cockpit shadows. I played around with the settings a bit and I'm as far as I can tell I'm still pretty much CPU capped as far as the framerate goes. I only use this computer for flight sims, I don't play any FPS's or anything GPU heavy. I also just use one display at 1080p. I'm kind of hoping EDGE mixes it up and makes me GPU bottlenecked so I have an excuse to upgrade. :D

Just crazy!

After running an old workstation (2x xeon E5420's @ 2.5) for so long, I had gotten pretty used to 15-20 FPS in any mission with a fair amount of action, and dips to 10 FPS were pretty normal. It didn't seem to make much difference what the sliders were set to either... The smaller missions were usually pretty playable, 30-40 FPS was typical. Finally, I put together a somewhat decent rig, and I couldn't be happier. I chose an i5-4670k on an asus Z87-A, paired up with 8gb of Kingston Hyper X, pulling data from a 240GB crucial M500 SSD. I reused my GTX560 for the graphics, since it's never seemed to be the bottleneck on the games I play. I got the OC stable at 4.5 GHz on 1.275V. A coolermaster 212 evo keeps it in mid 70's C on stress testing, but I usually see upper 60's on the games. I was hoping that I'd get decent results from the upgrade, but I'm actually quite overwhelmed with the improvement. I'm managing 40-60 FPS no matter what's going on in the mission. I have no idea how I thought the game was even playable before.... So, to anyone else out there thinking about upgrading, DO IT! I built this rig for about $600, and it was easily worth every penny. :thumbup:

I voted P-51... Both aircraft are challenging to fly well, but the P-51 is less forgiving and has a higher systems management workload.

I think Swoop had a lot of good points, and many of those reasons are the same I use when I select maximum prop RPM for landing. Just as an interesting tidbit, in regards to what I've quoted from Swoop's post... I've been told that a windmilling prop has as nearly as much drag as a solid disk with the same diameter. A fact I've always found rather mind-boggling.