Griffin

Yeah, holy crap I really do hope they will get their time more than rewarded for. I even feel guilty of just paying 30$ for such a product. Well if I know a friend who would really love to fly the MiG or any other of their products, I won't hesitate to buy it as a gift.

I swear I had it on my computer but it's nowhere to be found... I would also really like to see it back online.

Hi and welcome to the forum! An excellent first post and I think it's almost spot on. AFAIK DCS belongs to the 1% that's bottlenecked by the CPU because currently the game engine only uses one core. We are really hoping the new graphics engine "EDGE" will change that (hopefully by the end of 2014). That's why overclocking is quite popular. However if you're not planning to overclock, the non-K version should suffice. Here I need to argue a bit. While the CPU evolution has slowed down quite a bit, there is no point in getting an old architecture motherboard. Z97 isn't something "special" and doesn't cost any extra. With the zero extra cost you will get much more options in the future. With Z87 you're limited to 2013 CPU's, with Z97 you also have 2014 and 2015 CPU's! Did I mention it doesn't cost any extra? GA-Z87X-UD4H is an excellent board but with GA-Z97X-Gaming 7 you'll get a newer chipset, better audio and some more modern connectivity for the same price. A no brainer. If you think that all that connectivity on the Gaming 7 is redundant and want to save 10$, grab the Gaming 5. Same goes for the MSI equivalents. Gigabyte has slightly better power feed components but if you think MSI offers better overall features, it's a great option too.

While painting an angel on the sky!

Looked at your MoBo and not only does it seem old architecture, it's pretty overkill unless you're planning to do some serious overclocking and want some very premium features. If you're like me, want to do some basic overclocking, have a high quality board with nice features but nothing too fancy, I suggest you go for something in 160$ range. Seems that Gigabyte and MSI have their great bang for the buck Gaming 5 motherboards. Gigabyte seems to have slightly better power feed components but check which has the better overall features. Asus Maximus Hero is a bit more expensive but could be a great option too if you like the features and want to pay premium for them. If you want water cooling and WiFi, which the Formula has, I know nothing about those. :)

Seems good right now except for the RAM. Unless you really need 16GB of RAM for something else, DCS won't use that much. In case EDGE will use so much, you can always buy more later. Faster speed RAM may not bring you any noticeable difference so don't pay premium bucks for some super fast RAM. IMO 1600MHz is fast enough. Someone else prove me wrong if you think DCS does benefit from faster RAM. If you want to upgrade your CPU later, make sure you buy a Z97 chipset motherboard. Z87 will not support Haswell Refresh (2014 release) or Broadwell (2015 release) CPU's, while Z97 will. I haven't had any issues with AMD in DCS but in CPU's Intel is the only way to go until AMD comes up with a new architecture. Are you buying an SSD drive? It's a must have! If you didn't already include an SSD, I suggest you halve you RAM to 8GB and use the money for an SSD. Go for the best $/GB price, Samsungs are generally great for price and quality but anything else is equally good if you find a good deal.

That doesn't look normal! APU start the Russian way?

Maybe not the most historical opponent (very plausible though) but Draken all the way for me!

http://russianplanes.net/id136808

+1

Yes that's what I was asking! Thanks. Tell me about it! It's beyond me why 1080p resolution wouldn't scale proportionally on a 4K screen since 4K is exactly 4x1080p... Such a waste of potential. I would like to surf and watch movies in 4K but play in 1080p on the same screen. That way I could just buy a 4K screen right now and in a couple of years get a powerful enough GPU to run games in the native resolution. If I buy a 1080p screen now and want a 4K one with a new GPU in a couple of years, it's gonna be freaking expensive. So, is a 1080p screen my only option right now if I want to run games with decent eye candy and don't think my PC can't handle bigger resolutions yet? EDIT: One solution would be to buy a ridiculously large 4K screen, setting the game resolution to 1080p and to enable 1:1 scaling so the game picture would be surrounded by large black frames... Could work okay on 1440p but the 4K screen for that should be way too large. EDIT: If 1080p monitor is my only choice for gaming right now, I might just as well go for THIS ONE.

Did some research and I'm quite sure the 21:9 ratio is not so smart choice even though I found a nearly similar screen for just 300€. Sticking to the 16:9 would give me the options of either waiting for the 4K prices to come down (not really interested in paying 500€ right now for just surfing), or get a 2560x1440 screen. The benefit of sticking to 16:9 screens is that I can still play with them on the 1080p resolution just fine because they scale in proportion and my PC will be able to handle that. In theory it should be easy to just run games in 1080p and use the 4K/1440p when doing anything else on the PC but I've found some serious debates on internet regarding that. What do you think guys, will 1080p gaming look just as good on a 4K/1440p screen as on a same size 1080p screen? Is anyone here using a high resolution screen for gaming on 1080p? This is already off topic but there's no sense in making a new thread for the same dude's computer even if the title isn't valid anymore.

I don't think my PC is ready for 4K yet. That monitor has about triple the amount of pixels compared to the one I linked. From the little I've read, you need dual GPU to run games on max.

True that man. I've been drooling at THIS ONE for a couple of days now. A stop gap solution before Oculus Rift next year? Would you think the new PC would run DCS okay on that resolution? I've been working for three weeks without weekends now and might need to do a fourth one. Maybe I should treat myself with the upcoming paycheck? Hmm... ;)

You too are right but I bought it with power reserve in mind for future. Who knows what EDGE, 4K and Oculus Rift will require. Although I wasn't planning to get a second graphics card in near future, I wanted to be able to get one hassle free if needed. It will be cheaper to just buy another one and plug it in than to upgrade the PSU at the same time. I thought that buying a high quality modular PSU would serve me for at least a decade and could cope with whatever I throw at it. About the MoBo + SSD deal, I calculated the "real €/GB value" of the SSD based on the cheapest €/GB I could find available to me. The value is 64€. If I subtract the SSD "real value" from the MoBo price, the price of the MoBo would be 105€. Damn good deal I would say. I appreciate your valid points guys and I think I was able to give a reasonable answer to why I bought what I bought. If something doesn't feel right, it's great that you give me a signal for a reality check. Is anything else overkill? :D

I would agree but in my case it depended completely on the deals I got. I bought 16GB of high quality used RAM for less money than inferior quality 8GB would have cost me as new (saved about 10€). I wouldn't have even considered the MoBo without a bundle deal with a 120GB SSD for free! The SSD costs 80€ as new so you could either consider that I got the great MoBo for 90€ (170-80) or the SSD for free. Or anything in between for that matter. And like I said previously, I'm running out of existing SSD space so it does come for good use. Looking at the big picture, I got more high quality stuff for less money. :)

This will be my PC as a whole and the list is mostly just for my own reference: CPU- Intel i5-4670K CPU Cooling - Antec Kuhler H2O 620 with a Scythe Gentle Typhoon and stock fan in push-pull GFX - Gigabyte Radeon HD 7870 2GB OC Windforce RAM - Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz 16GB MoBo - Asus Maximus VII Ranger PSU - Super Flower Golden Green Modular 800W Case - Fractal Design Core 3000 Mass Storage: - 240GB Sandisk Extreme SSD (OS, programs, games) - 120GB Kingston HyperX 3K SSD - 500GB Western Digital HDD (For personal stuff) - 160GB Seagate HDD (For backup) Some generic DVD drive AOC Q2963Pm 29" 21:9 2560x1080 Steelseries Siberia V2 headset Logitech X-230 speakers & subwoofer Logitech MX518 mouse Ancient Fujitsu Siemens keyboard Flight sim gear: - CH Fighterstick & Pro Throttle - Komodo Simulations ProAT Pedals - TrackIR 4

The TrackIR camera which sits on your monitor is both a receiver and an emitter. It emits when you use the reflector thingy. The TrackClip Pro on the other hand has built in emitters and by checking the TrackClip Pro tick box in TIR software, it disables the emission from the TIR receiver (so I believe). In my opinion, the TrackClip Pro is superior in accuracy and sits on the headset I would be using anyway so I don't have to use a silly and uncomfortable hat.

Ok thanks guys, I went with the Asus Maximus VII Ranger since they really are giving me an 80€ SSD for free! Wonder why they want to get rid of them so quickly. Also your unanimous recommendations and reviews I've read confirm that it's a good choice. I remember reading that but it didn't really dawn on me what that really means. Now that you put it that way, I need at least 5 SATA ports with the new SSD, so you're spot on with the better connectivity. From what I've read, the SATA Express won't be coming a standard very quickly. And I don't really understand what's the point with those new M.2 SSD's in a desktop PC. They do seem nice for laptops. I also tried to find it and it's really odd that there's no English manual online. :huh: Would have been nice to get familiar with it before the MoBo arrives. Thanks for the info wherever you managed to find it. So now every part is purchased and on the way. The parts are: Intel i5-4670K for 203€ Asus Maximus VII Ranger (+ Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB SSD) for 169€ <---GREAT DEAL FOR FINNS Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz 16GB for 68€ - Thanks hitman for a great deal! Tomorrow I will list the whole hardware in my PC into this post in case someone is interested. And yes, I'm running an AMD card lunaticfringe! ;) Hoping to get back on the virtual skies soon for first time in months.

Ok thanks guys for quick replies. I'll think about it for a little while. I wouldn't really even consider the Asus without the SSD bundle. It does come to real use because I'm left with 30GB of SSD space currently. Less connectivity for more price and some funny and useless features driving the price up. However a review from today gives it an excellent rating in overclocking. I hope they didn't skimp on the VRM quality too much to bring the price down.

Now I'm stuck on the motherboard selection. It's hard to compare them since there are literally a million of them and the problem with the Z97 is that there are not many reviews yet. I'm basically down to three candidates. Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming 5 MSI Z97 Gaming 5 Asus Maximus VII Ranger The MSI and GB are around the same 150€ price and very similar to each other. Very hard to choose between the two. I've read before that GB uses superior VRM components but I'm not sure if I'll notice anything with my basic overclocks. The Asus is 20€ more expensive but there is a nice looking bundle that would offer me a Kingston 120GB SSD with it! Sounds like a great deal but it has only 6 USB ports in the back and no SATA Express connector. Would I even need the SATAe? It does seem to have the best software.

If you want to take a random walk down the wall street, gamble and play by a hunch, then sure go ahead. However one of the main rules of investing is to know what you invest into. The latest buzz is usually one of the worst kind of investments. Well not the worst but usually it wont yield a huge amount (not that it's the goal of investing anyway). The reason is that the latest buzz, like the biggest and most famous companies, always has thousands of analysts and individual investors watching the company and valuating it very efficiently. Stock markets always look ahead by at least a few months so basically you don't know anything right now about Alibaba that will benefit you in the early next year. The holiday sales profits are already in the share price. In the long run, it might be a great investment, becoming a value company and giving you high and ever growing dividends for the rest of your life. In that case gambling with it until next year will be unwise. But if gambling is what you want, I believe other forms of it could yield you a much better profit. I leave speculation to gamblers and I'm also not so interested or have enough time to know exactly what I invest into. Thus I either let others do the analyzing of individual shares for me (mutual funds) or don't take a position at all (index funds/ETF's). In my case though, I don't think it as investing per se, I consider it as saving into the stock market for years to come, either until retirement or to fund bigger acquisitions later in life. For this purpose, stock markets are really good. However knowing about market psychology is very important. It's been proven time and time again that those who try to time the market get the worst returns and it's statistically the worst mistake. You could always get lucky though... or not. Now, I'm not an expert of stock markets in any way and only started saving money into stocks early last year but I've read enough of literature that made it clear to me the difference between gambling and investing. I don't mean to sound negative about buying shares and am actually happy to see people talk about them on this forum but that was just my two cents on the subject. :) It's great to see people sharing thoughts about investing!

Thanks Falcon. I didn't think the Mi-8 page has a description as Ka-50 didn't have either. What if the system is off? Does the sand pile up into the ejector tube and into the baffles while some of it is passed through the baffles into the intake?

If you would like to upgrade later, maybe in a couple of years, to the upcoming Broadwell CPU's, buy a Z97 motherboard. You'll be able to run both Haswells and Broadwells. No such option with Z87 motherboards.

+1 AlphaOneSix?