Gadroc

In my opinion anything over a 930 is overpriced. You can get a 930 which runs at 2.8ghz at microcenter.com for $199 or the 960 which runs at 3.2ghz for $569. The value curve is way off and from all info I've seen it should be easy to get the 930 to overclock to 3.2ghz. Recommendation: i7 930 The main piece here is understanding how many PCI Express lanes you want. You basically have three classes of X58 boards out there. 1) Really expensive ones which augment the X58 chipset to get enough PCI Express lanes to run 3 16x PCI Express cards simultaneously. Look for boards using the NF200 chipset and expect to pay $300+ for these boards. Can be worth it if you are planning on running serious tripple SLI/Crossfire. 2) Good basic X58 boards. These boards run 2 PCI-Express 16 lanes, or if you plug in additional video cards they start dropping to 8 lanes each. Expect to pay @ $200 for these boards. 3) Boards which have the same X58 and PCI Express capabilities above but have other upgrades like dual network cards, etc. These are a waste of money in my opinion with features you'll never use on a gaming rig. Some are worth it for overclocking capabilities, but be sure to do research online if you are buying specifically for overclocking. Everyone has their brand preferences. I particularly like Giga-byte boards. I've had good luck with everyone I've had. I used to love ASUS but had a string of bad boards, although they are still highly regarded. EVGA's offerings are supposed to be great, but I have yet to try them. Recommendation: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Yes 6GB should be fine. Get 1600 or better memory to give you room to overclock. You'll pay between $150-$250 for 6 GB of ram. Don't get suckered into super clocked memory unless you are seriously going to overclock you're CPU. Stick with a well respected brand here. I use Corsair and OCZ as cheap good ram. Big fan = quieter as the fan can turn slower. You can find several reviews of various CPU cooler at overclocking sites to get a good feel for good. Recommendation: Scythe Mugen2 (Good and cheap, but may need help getting it installed as it takes a third hand to hold.) If you are using ATI video cards that is way overkill. To SLI two 5870s you only need 750W to 850W. I've had great luck with Corsair power supplies recently. I have an TX750 which works great. HX series are supposed to be better. Corsair has a nice power supply selector on their front page. Once you single in on your other components run through it. If you switch to NVidia cards you will need a bigger power supply. Recommendation: Corsair HX or TX 850. Be aware that the 5970 is an SLI on a single card. A single 5870 is faster than a single chip on the 5970 if SLI is disabled or the game doesn't benefit from SLI. Again as always go look at the benchmarks that compare games / simulations you want to run. My most recent machine is my first with ATI and I'm pretty happy. I originally got a 480gtx but took it back when it idled at 82c and was at 103c after an hour of FSX and sounded like a jet engine. The 5870 is nearly as fast for FSX but is quiet and half the temperature. One word of caution is that the ATI drivers under Windows 7 have problems with VSYNC in FC2 and Black Shark. You can not force VSYNC which means you get some tearing. It can be reduced by setting max_fps to 30 in the game config files, but it's still there. Now I don't notice it at all unless I'm panning the view with TrackIR. I'm hoping DCS A10 fixes this with the new DirectX 10/11 support or newer drivers fix it, but be aware before purchasing. Recommendation: (Your favorite brand here) ATI 5870 card This is personal preference, but I have a hard time with the cost benefit on a gaming rig. This is mainly due to the disk space requirements. Most games take up 10GB+ now. On a reasonably priced SSD you'll run out of space quick. A smaller boot SSD might be nice if you do a lot of other things besides gaming on the PC as well. Pay attention if you're existing Fatal1ty is the PCI version then you may not be able to use it. PCI slots are fast becoming a thing of the past, especially on boards now packed with PCI-Express 16 slots for SLI/Crossfire. On-board audio is no where near as bad as it used to be. I've stopped putting my X-Fi cards in my rigs for the most part. Complete waste of money. Misc Comments Video cards (because they now vent directly out of case) and cases make the biggest impact on sound. Do some research on quiet PC cases and most are just marketed with a lot of fans (more fans = more noise unless done very well) for the gaming looks market. They don't seem to sell the ones I use, so I don't have a current recommendation. Here is my current rig I use in my simulation pit: Processor: i7 930 Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (rev 2) CPU Cooler: Scythe Mugen2 Memory: 6GB OCZ Gold XTC Kit (8-8-8-24 at 1600) Hard Drives: Cheap 250GB boot drive, Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB Audio: On Board with secondary USB one for team speak Video: Gigabyte 5870 2GB Eyefinity 6 Edition. Case: Antec P182

I did a re-install as well recently and even though I selected simulation mode during install it was set to game mode. Made for some eating crow as I bragged about how good I was landing at FARPS :)

Make sure you are interpreting the values correctly. I ran into the same problem with some of my touch screen indicator buttons. It turned out I was not reading all the state values correctly from the LUA export. The thread below lists some common patterns, but some of the indicators are 0.0 and 1.0 or 0.0 - 0.1. Do some experimentation. http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=45500 Lastly when exporting the data make sure you trim the value as the binary numbers flutter a little bit (sometimes zero becomes -0.000000000000001). This causes simple comparisons in script to fail (aka variable != 0) when you don't expect them to. I use the following code to sort that out. It's passed in format (most common %.2f) and the value you get out of sim. local value = string.format(format, rawvalue); if string.len(value) > 3 and value == string.sub("-0.00000000",1, string.len(value)) then value = value:sub(2) end

Do some planning before you order any hardware. The BU0836X is simpler but it's bigger and more expensive. In addition there will be a large number of wires going between boxes using a single BU0836X. Every axis is 3 wires plus one wire per button and switch position with an additional ground wire. For my collective and throttle I ended up with 16 wires between collective and cyclic. This means a large connector between boxes. Also keep in mind old analog hat switches are sometimes analog meaning they got read like an axis. You might have to do some doctoring on the switch to read it as digital buttons the the bonder boards expect.

This happens on my Window 7 64bit as well. I've also recently had the problem where Blavk Shark will "deminimize" track ir continuously so i have to leave the track ir window open in the background.

The graphics are all curtosy DickDastardly. I have his originals but I won't distribute them wihtout his permission. I'd recomend send him a PM on these forums. Yes the change panels is designed to be the equivalent of tabs. Touchpal is a raw quick and dirty lower layer and does no supply any UI helper to actualy draw tabs.

The cards don't have to be identical, but I would recommend sticking with the same chipsets vendor(nvidia) for the secondary card. Also verify that they would use the same driver version. For Nvidia you should be good with any 8xxx serious card or newer. In my previous test indicate you would want the main display and ABRIS on your primary video card and run the shovel with the secondary. Do some tests with which way has better FPS for you.

The ones I have are Innolux AT080TN52 panels.

Those where Samsung U70 picture frame / monitors. They are not tall enough vertically to fill the entire MFD, so must be carefully mounted in the center to minimize the impact. They do have some limitations so I'd recommend doing some searching and reading before jumping in. You can find 8" 4:3 LCD Panels on e-bay along with VGA driver boards for them. This completely fills the TM MFDs. This is not that much more than the Samsung U70 and is more reliable.

From your experience you should know better than to prematurely optimize a system. :) (Just to be clear that is a very tounge in cheek comment). There are many available resources on a modern computer even when running Black Shark full out. It really depends on where the bottle neck is. In particular BS 1.0.2 is a 32bit dual threaded application which can access at most 2GB of ram. Assuming you have a quad core processor and 4GB of ram you have ALOT of ram and cpu to use with out ever impacting the simulation. Even extra displays can be done with out significant bottle necks on most systems, assuming you have a secondary video card. At that point the bottleneck would be possible saturation of the PCI-e bus, which is probably not a major concern. Even using the same video card with Direct2D or WPF on Vista or above can be fairly efficient in not forcing swap of video memory all the time. The biggest impact on the DCS engine is where you execute your loop in LUA and their engine design which forces secondary displays (ABRIS, Shkval, etc) as part of the same large video space. Polling at the beginning and end of each frame is the most costly while moving them to a lower cycle rate using a co-routine can help on lower end system. This is really a trade of of the latency of your inputs and indicators vs performance and has nothing to do with the processing of the data for your display. You're warnings areas are good, if not a little dire in wording. Saying the best solution is to create new hardware using custom micro-controller is way overkill for many scenarios. There is plenty of room for even running some heavier weight systems like managed C#/WPF or Java on many systems.

To be clear the software I've written does several things. First it can render gauges based off information extracted via the Export.lua (very much like LOVP and BSVP, but with different technology and built to interface many sims), it can do touch panel controls (like touch pal) and it can communicate with hardware interfaces (direct x controller now many more to come) all with a WYSIWYG editor. It can not recreate full game graphics necessary for MFDs (unless the game supports it like OpenFalcon), for the thrustmaster demo we used FC2 and just had some static menus on the MFDs. A10C will have the ability in the box to display the MFD graphics on separate monitors similar to BS.

Touchpal is not resolution specific, but the profile is. You'll have to modify the graphics and setup the xml file to place them appropriately.

Not that I know of. That kind of capability has to be built into the simulation, the closest we can get is things like BSVP rendering gauges on another computer. The killer problem being the Shkval and ABRIS have to be displayed via BS itself which limits our monitor configurations.

Did you get this sorted out? I assume you have since you where getting KPaws profiles.

It is a true increase in FPS (for some), but it does increase the latency of the data exported. The setup prescribed in that thread reduces the export functions to 5 executions per second. That means for something like BSVP your ADI pitch and bank will only update 5 times per second, which can result in some choppy gauges. tNext = tNext + 0.2 The above line says run this routine again in .2 seconds. You can adjust this as you want to get a good balance between game FPS and gauge data latency.

With eyefinity 1 monitor is the right choice, as I said before the aspect ratio setting is causing the problem. You'll probably need to edit the options.lua file and manually enter 4.8 as your aspect ratio directly in the file. 16:10 selection in games sets this value to 1.777777778 which is wrong for you monitor configuration.

Aspect ration is your problem. One of your monitor alone maybe 16x10 but when seen as one screen through eyefinity they are 48x10. The aspect ratio setting in game is for the entire display not just one screen. If there is not an appropriate option listed you will need to set it by hand in the options.lua file.

You do have the Left ALT-F1 view which is HUD only. Unfortunately there is no way to fully replicate lock on MFD displays so it will be of limited use. Now on DCS we can have fully functional MFD which should let fly HUD only view completely.

I'd definitely flash the firmware on the G940. I discarded the G940 a while ago and recently pulled it back out of the closet. I'm very happy with it's behavior in Black Shark using 5.09 and the new firmware. Setting the right values on the force feedback settings is import though. I'm using the settings Zerotown recommended which you can see below. The stick now locks in on trim with minimal jerk and stays put. Enable force feedback: ON Total effect strength: 101% Force of the spring-effect: 50% Force of the dampening-effect: 90% Enable centering spring: OFF

You can see an example of this technique on the pit we (SCSimulations) made for Thrustmaster. That is a 22" screen in the front panel.

They look damn near identical to the ones I got which are: Innolux AT080TN52 panels.

I have a pair of 8" 4x3 LCD panels which I put behind the MFDs. These completely fill the MFD but they are larger horizontally than the MFD which needs to be hidden behind panelling. There are a few e-bay stores which sell small LCD panels and VGA driver boards for them. You can also use a normal larger format monitor and cut out a wood bezel to overlay it to mount the MFDs on. And use the surrounding screen real-estate to display glass gauges with something like LOVP, BSVP or Lightnings falcon gauges. The u70s leave about a half inch of vertical space inside the MFD. It's not to bad but care has to be taken to center the mounting of the u70 vertically inside the MFD. Also the USB screens may be problematic depending on how DCS A-10C renders the image for an MFD, and I've head of possible performance problems. Not saying they won't work, but might want to be cautious on the investment. There is a big difference between the what leavu renders on the MFDs in the video above and a fully texture mapped 3d terrain display which may be required for some of the MFD modes in A10C.

Just as a heads up it requires an 8" LCD to fill the inside of the TM MFDs. Also most of that saitek gear only works with FSX so you would have a hard time getting it to work with Lock On or DCS.

Yes you can have all of that with DCS and a lot of elbow grease, the right tools, skills and money. Making physical gauges is not for the faint of heart and will require some precise tools and skill. I would recommend that you pick up Mike Powells books for a start (http://www.mikesflightdeck.com). Take a read through this forum as well as there are examples of each one of the things you ask.

Hmm... I can't download the file from ED. Comes up with a blank browser window.