BitMaster

The good thing about TM Hotas is that it's drivers prohibit a VBS activation, so does my Logitech G25 Wheel driver and Saitek Rudder Pedals driver. Those 3 are listed as "solve those first before enabling VBS again..." No, I won't

We have been over this to death and back again in the past but I think Hiob is right..or more right than false...LoL here we go again. And Bossco's experience with not having it in 10, than having it after upgrading to 11 and then getting rid off it with a downgrade to 10 again does not sound as a per se hardware related time slice ( locked 60 fps ) issue but more like a software/setting issue to me.

^ He is 100% right !

You dont need to reinstall Win10 or Win11, not even Win7 really if you move it to another PC. The days of WinXP HAL are long gone. I mean, I have done this many times and it hardly ever causes driver issues. Just plug it into the new board, let it boot and sort the drivers and reboot by itself and you are all set. Deinstall the old boards software and install the new stuff, update Windows and you are done. It's ment to be possible. If you have hardware that is crucial and natively unsupported it may be a good idea to install that onto the old machine before you do the swap. At least copy the drivers onto C drive so you could access it but I have never needed that as all I did was hopping from 2700k to 6700k to 7700k and 8700k and always initially just plugged the drive into the new board and it always worked, not so with XP and earlier, they have a HAL, hardware abstraction layer...and if that acts up... that's what you refer to.

and I want to add, there are also external radiators, which means less tubing and no pump or reservoir inside the case unless you want to. Considering the cost per 120mm² rad space the external radiator wins as well. Imho the best one right now, tho not cheap if done right, is the MoRa3-420 (9x140mm or 4x 200mm )with 4x200mm Noctua fans for cooling. That is even larger than my MoRa3-360 ( 9x120mm or 4x180mm ) and with Noctua you get super silent fans that push a lot of air combined. Coupled with a Heatkiller CPU & GPU block and a D5/Heatkiller Pump/Res combo you can game full tilt at 18-20dB and the fans at 275-350 rpm... that is real nice, believe me. AIO is great to get the CPU cooler than with air usually but don't think those are quiet. Once you push the CPU the fans spin up... The smaller the radiator the louder it all gets, it's a rat's tail from there on, if the rad is too small for the heat load the fans need spin up higher and at 2000rpm any fan is loud, even Noctua.

You got the most expensive components already, what's left to buy should match your overall goal. Let's start with easy decisions, drives: It should be NVMe, PCIe v4 and at least 1TB for the "Games" drive and if money is not an issue I would get 2 NVMe drives, 1x OS & 1x DCS. My pick was always Samsung and with my new rig I again went with Samsung. The 980Pro 1TB is for sure no bad choice, overall a very competitive drive with no surprises. I would buy 2 of them again. Next was PSU: Keep it simple, buy a Sesonic Prime PX or TX 1kW. With new GPUs likely to surpass 4-500w peak power draw ( which isn't actually a new thing ) you should have enough juice for years to come with 1kW. A 850w should be fine too for now but will have limited reserves down the road. Estimnate 300w minimum for the 3090 while gaming +50-80w for the CPU plus all the rest of the rig... you land somewhere around 450ish watts...about half of a 850-1kW PSU. PSUs run most efficient around 50% load, so aim for that as your max load over time. Seasonix Prime PX1000 ( Platinum ) or if you really want the best, get the TX1000 with Titanium Efficiency. 12 year warranty, ultra quiet in normal use, 0dB - no fan till ~40°C. The Board...ohh...with the board you also decide between DDR4 and DDR5. Tbh honest, now that you went that way, do it all the way and try to get a decent kit of 32GB DDR5-6xxx, the fastest with the lowest latency you can get and pay for, that's the expensive truth with 12th's gen. For the board, I would either get Asus Hero or Gigabyte Master. The Asus may have the better Software and Sound but they are at the very top end of the ladder. Either one is fine I guess. DDR4 is afaik only available from low-mid range boards and all mid-highend boards come with DDR5. I assume you do not want to pair the 3090 & 12900k with a mid-low tier motherboard and. If you can afford AND find it, a 64GB kit is more future proof. DCS can tab into the 30GB range already and it has been said that Vulkan will benefit from 64GB capacity. Since it is hard to add more RAM later on, buying it right away is usually better but in the current situation it may not be possible to find 64GB, fast & low latency for an acceptable price. I went 64GB and don't regret it but mine was only 400€, yours may well be double that. So 32GB is still a fair decision, for SP I guess anyway. Cooling....Socket 1700 has it's issues with large air coolers I would not air cool that thing but get a large AIO or even build a Loop myself and also include the GPU if you can get a block for it. Watercooling the GPU makes a lot of sense. It's the hottest, loudest and most critical part in your rig when it comes to temp limits and throttling. My card hardly ever runs over 50°C under foll load and 0dB. It's a long road to a proper Loop but does pay back. If not a loop, at least get a 240 or larger AIO for the CPU and a case that accepts the radiator. Take your time

Let me put it in other words: If you ru(i)n a 1-3k€/$ GPU on a cheap PSU it's your own fault. Running such expensive HW on a 80,-€ Bronze PSU is a crime, but hey...the victim is also the murderer. I have seen dozens of blown PSU's over the years, about 50% of them kill the whole PC when they blow up. There is only a handful of companies that build PSUs. Corsair, beQuiet, NZXT, Tagan, Antec, Chieftec, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Phanteks and many many more DO NOT BUILD THEIR PSU's !! They order them to their specs from that dozen of companies that actually build Power Supplies. Among them for example: Seasonic, SuperFlower, Flextronics, Delta, and maybe 5-10 others in total. The difference between a Bronze "Brand XYZ" and a Seasonic PSU for example is that Seasonic has their PSUs 20% overpowered, so a 1kW PSU will hold 1200w for quite some time before it fails. Many others that claim to be 1kW or whatever fail at 75-80% of their rated output. Unfortunately, Hard-OCP's website is offline, that site had the best PSU reviews over a decade. Those reviews told me a lot and explained many issues I came across with low-quality-to-mediocore PSU's when they were pushed hard. I run this "Corsair" AXi-1200 which is actually built by Flextronics, the recent years all my builds I did used Seasonic Platinum PSU's with very few exceptions and I have no issues with them in machines doing 24/7 for years as a Server. Very robust & reliable. I would not by my AXi-1200 again but get a Seasonic Prime 850-1kW range.

Take a Seasonic Prime TX 850w Platinum. One of the best you can get. If you plan on buying one of those rumoured 4xxx Nvidia's going 500+ Watts you may want tzo consider the 1kW version of this PSU. https://seasonic.com/consumer/power-supplies?attr_80plus=16&wattage=20&wattage_range=820_928

I just built a new system and put 64GB in it. Imho 16GB is not an option, really, if you want to use DCS seriously. You don't need the fastest RAM money can buy, neither for Intel nor for AMD. The sweetspot is somewhere around 3200-3800MHz, cl14-cl18. The best kits you can get use Samsung B-die and one way of finding them is looking at the latency values. 3200-14-14-14-34 is only available on B-Die kits, so is 3600-16-16-16-36. Those kits are 100% B-die and like to overclock if you intend to do so. My new 64GB kit is a 3200-14-14-14-34 B-Die and my old 8700k uses a 32GB 3600-16-16-16-36 kit, also B-die. Kits with 3600 16-18-18-38 can be B-die but could also be made of a few others but none of those can do such tight timings as B-die can. Going to speeds above 3800-4000MHz and beyond makes little to no sense with DDR4. latency penalties equals the gains in clock cycles usually & the price is unproportionaly high. With AMD it's mostly contra-productive above 3600~3800MHz. The sweetspot is 3600-CL16 with a little tendency to more bandwith at a higher cost vs 3200CL14 with equal latency and a little less bandwith but therefor ~100€ cheaper ( 64GB kit ). I bought the 3200CL14 and overclocked it to 3600CL16-16-16-36-1T and it runs fine, not even the slightest glitch or anything. But tbh, you wont see much difference as long as you stay somewhere between 3200-3600 even if the latency is worse. Still, if you want to be on the safe side get low latency modules. Since overclocking beyond 3600 makes little sense with my AMD CPU I opted for the 3200 kit and hoped it would run 3600 with CL16 all the way and it did. And yes, they are also Black, no LED ! edit: usually, 3600 CL14 is only available at 1.45v...and I would be cautious with this, depending on what CPU you run because it may not harm RAM but your IMC may not like 1.45v ( or even 1.47xv depending on your Bios/Board ) for a longer period of time. I would not do this on my 8700k as I know that chip doesn't like such high voltage on RAM modules. I honestly dont know how other CPUs or even my 5900x would handle that. iirc Buildzoid considers 1.45v as the absolut max for every day use, that is already a warning for me to step back to 1.40v, which is what I am using for most overclocks, and currently use for this rig. Out of the box the board applies 1.374v to XMP3200 and for 3600 it needs a little more with 4 modules. If it would need 1.45v to be stable I would dial back until 1.4v was enough to be stabe. That's roughly my guideline when I play with RAM.

If I had to bet I'd bet that those current Z690 boards will not accept any DDR5 module from the future...and there also is the IMC, both have to accept the RAM. DDR5 is nice but not for now imho.

As a sidenote, if you need to clean out Windows you might want to give jv16 a look. It's been developed for almost two decades ( changed it's name from RegSupreme to RegSupremePro, jv16 Powertools, .. maybe a few more ) and it only got better. It has a 14 day trial which is basically enough to clean out windows. During my 20 years+ fixing PC's this tool has helped on many many occasions to get a PC back working as it should. As always, such tools are like an axe in the forrest, use it wisely and always use the backup feature ( jv16 does create a backup ) in case it goes wrong. In all those years it only failed once on my own system and deleted the Brother Scanner GUI...many many years ago, ever since it never failed again cleaning registry or installs.

Honestly, who cares about the Warranty with a RAM kit. How could they ever proof I ran them above 3200 ? There is no way to do that. The only thing you have to obey with Ryzen is that you better don't force the IO-Die to go into 1/2 mode, somewhere between 3600-4000MHz that will likely happen. If you stay below that crucial tipping point, say 3600 as a safe setting, you do not have to fear any downsides. I am very sure Intel uses a whole bunch of kits to test and not only this ONE kit, be realistic.

I run a true 3200-14-14-14-34-17 kit, 4x16GB, and it is outperformed under full stress from the same kit at 3600-16-16-16-36-1T. There is no drop in performance anywhere, neither my fps go down, my latency is ~99% the same where as Aida64 tells me I improved by a few nanoseconds, bandwidth is a little higher as expected. Bottom line, I cannot see any proof that 3200/14 is always better than 3600/16 nor does my CPU go nuts and cuts down on performance. The good thing is, I saved quite a bit of cash getting the 3200/14 and oc them to 3600/16. They are basically the same kit. My other true 3600/16 kit ( only 32GB, 4x8) has 3200/14 as one of it's profiles... OK, I need to up the Volts to 1.4v but that is well within DDR4 specs for permanent usage.

+1

Actually, a GPU running at 99-100% is what you paid for and is the desired state of the card when gaming while NEITHER bottlenecked somewhere else NOR fps-capped by the user. A GPU running in the 80s% and not fps capped is a clear sign of a big bottleneck, usually CPU in terms of DCS. Those cards are ment to be run at 100% by design.

VIA 686B SouthBridge, best when fully loaded with 4 devices @Ultra-DMA133(?)... Maybe one of the worst Southchip Bridges ever released LoL Jokes aside. I upgraded both as well, newest X570 chipset driver + latest Nvidia and all seems normal.

I shortly tried 11 on my new 5900 system and it was meeehh. I had a serious performance loss but I cannot for sure tell it was 11 only as I had a freeze bug as well that caused me to install 11 first place as I couldn't find the fix in 10 so I gave it a shot. Sadly I carried the bug over, also in DCS with a bad performance, somewhere around 25%ish loss in fps. But I ran DCS on my 8700k with 11 and had no such loss iirc. If I dont remember a loss, there was none, that's my logic here. With the 5900 and 11 the loss was so obvious that you cannot not remember it, hope you get what I mean. I might try 11 on this rig again, just for the kicks, I will play around with it for a little longer before I put a final install on it anyway, it installs so quick, even quicker if this damn Gigabyte Bios had a working Netboot but it doesnt. I for one am lucky that I found the culprit for the freezes on this Gigabyte Aorus X570S Master board, it's any version of SIV they have, install it on my specific rig at least, 10 or 11, and you get annoying freezes watching YT, gaming, etc.. rendering the whole system useless for anything content related. Type a letter, yes ! But for that I dont need 12 cores and 64GB, ehhh It's nothing new, Gigabyte has just the same rubbish software bundled with their systems sometimes as Asus has, great hardware but the Software...not really.

No, you can't even install it. Mind the architecture, x86 vs. ARM. You'd need to install Win10 for ARM.

I ran into a distorted sound issue under high load and the Realtek Audio Control won't let me split front and rear audio out into 2 separate jacks, which I think it should do as of 2021 and that kind of board. So...after trying many things that didnt fix the sound issues I am trying out 11.... let's see if it fixes the sound issue, heck, there is always something... PXE doesnt work on that board, which is a pain... I like to install via PXE and it errors out when connecting to the WDS....LoL

factor in the kW/h price that one pays. What pays in Texas might not pay in Denmark and for sure not in Germany where electricity is so damn expensive. But true, I used my 1080ti for mining back the extra money I paid for when I got it "overpriced" ( you would now call this a bargain I guess ). Actually, if I had kept the BC I amde with it I could have made a few Grand off of it but I sold mine when they were 6-8k€...crying doesnt help.

My 8700k runs OK on 11, a few things get annoying, for example the left-mouse-click bug in File Explorer but that is minor and likely to get fixed. With my new 5900X I am sticking to 10 for now. Not even trying to think about installing it, LoL. Man, this 5900X flies...on 10 :=)

You misinterprete the CPU value. You refer to the total CPU load but for DCS it is far more important to see each individual core as it mainly uses 1 core to run the game and a few other in addition for other tasks. YOu will never see DCS use 100% on modern CPUs, they have too many cores of which DCS currently makes no use of. Look at the individual CPU graph ( logical cores in Task Manager ) and you will see that 1 core is likely at 95-100% most of the time. More RAM makes sense but I would hesitate to buy a new "old" board and another 16GB of new "old" DDR3 RAM. Maybe a new board-cpu-ram combo makes more sense !?

1.5v is likely DDR3 ( what your System runs on ) but the 1.35v is a DDR4 value and that RAM will not fit into your system. Best is to go to a local shop, friend etc. that can guide you. Replacing that board might be not the best idea, rather think of board+cpu+ram then, makes far more sense if you can afford it.

So, ordered my 5900X today, along with 64GB and the Aorus X570S Master mobo. As a result of the Win11-AMD issue I am installing this new rig with 10Pro for the time being though my 8700k runs OK with 11 so far. Tbh, my idle power usage is down by 40 Watts with 11. Can't tell why, but my Corsair AXi PSU says 100-120w now and not 160w in idle which it used to be ever since with this combo. edit: found it, the 1080ti was always consuming 67w in idle under 10 and the drivers of that past 3 years. Now with 11 it is 18-19w only !!!! Why was it consuming that much more under 10 ??? 0,04kWx24hx365dx3y x 0.30€cent = 315€ electric bill, that's a nice 2TB Samsung wasted in idle ! OK, in RL it slept 2/3 of that time, so it wasted only around 100€ worth of energy.... still, small things add up to a big pile edit2: also found out why the Geforce card used more in the past. It's the Maximum Performance setting on GeForce Cpanel that causes it. I thought it would not affect idle consumption but it does and you have to reboot to make the effect work. Most settings in there work with "Apply" but that setting needs a reboot to show an idle consumption from less than 20w to hop to almost constant 76w. Yeah, I tried that option long before to see if it matters with idle consumption and I saw no change...I didn't reboot !! Anyway, got me an eBay copy of 10Pro and start there. I will reinstall the OS a few times anyway when the rig is new. Luckily I have a WDS Server with 10 and 11 on PXE

Yep, just hit the button on my 64GB kit. 64 is the new 32