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Gents, Older 'Dad' here - actually, I qualify for Grandfather. If that doesn't disqualify me, shoot me a PM.

Gents, Thank you for taking the time to respond. I do appreciate it and value your input.

Hello Ant0ine -- that really looks sweet - but the more recent posts are over a year old. Shame they haven't updated or posted more news - perhaps they ran into obstacles?

Hello, Fairly new to DCS, but not flight SIMs. I'm running with a truly ancient Thrustmaster T-FLIGHT HOTAS-X that seems to work ok, but is missing castle switch among other things that would make life easier. e.g. To effect radar lock or slewing, I have to lean forward, reach blindly over aforementioned HOTAS and meddle with the ,.; / and ENTER keys. Trying to operate many of the weapons in the A-10C or F/A-18C is a real drag with the keyboard. Of course I've drooled over the Thrustmaster Warthog offering, but I'm still coughing and gagging on the price - that and there's no Z axis, so I'd be stuck buying a separate set of pedals or go back to using the Z / X keys which isn't helpful at all. So, looking for a decent HOTAS with appropriate manifest of switches on stick and throttle. It needs to have Z-Axis somewhere so that I can operate rudders as I'm no longer working full time and have to keep the whole package to a limit. H/W: Home built PC - i7 4600K / Win 10 Pro, 16GB RAM, RAID-0 1TB SSD, GeForce 970 Stryx GPU / Corsair keyboard and mouse / TrackIR 5 pro / Blue Snowball mic. That said, my budget is <= $350 USD. Recommendations? Aaand go...

Engineer's perspective Hey Ergrim, I know these things can be really infuriating, and without knowing everything about your system, I hope to help by offering a few things: My old adage that has saved many a bacon is simply asking yourself this one question, "What did I change last?" You may not like the answer and you may even be tempted not to answer it truthfully. After 39 years in engineering, honestly answering that question and performing the requisite follow-up has fixed many a "it's ***DEFINITELY*** not that" scenarios. My most recent bug-a-boo was with the TrackIR interfering with a custom key setting with my Corsair keyboard. So, for your joystick: First, remove ALL unnecessary USB devices from the system - UNPLUGGED. I'd even go as far as leaving the mouse off and using keyboard shortcuts for windows menus. With all unnecessary devices out, take a look at the joystick operation from the device's management console. Still not working right? Next, try uninstalling the device from the Device Manager, even if you've done it before. Once removed, shut the system down and fire it up again. (e.g. don't just reboot.) Bring the system back up without the controller plugged in. Go into the Logitech menu and uninstall. Now reboot the system once it's uninstalled. I'd also double check using System Internal's suite "AutoStarts" to check to make sure nothing remains in the auto-start for the joystick. Look for Logitech. [start the AutoStart program in admin mode if it does and remove the offending entry(s).] Now, clean slate, re-install per the manufacturer's instructions. If this does not clear up the issue, I'd contact Logitech technical support before wiping Windows. Note: I have seen more weird issues caused by mis-managing your USB hub connections than you might imagine. e.g. Always place streaming / high bandwidth devices on the first 3 ports on a 7-port USB hub. The last 4 are cascaded ports and share one I/O port from the first of the two 4-port chips. It's usually a bad idea to mix streaming devices with interrupt devices. (e.g. You should avoid placing streaming devices like web cams on the same physical PC port (via a HUB) with something like a keyboard or mouse.) Keep one HUB for streaming I/O and another for interrupt I/O and you'll have fewer issues. Hope this helps!

Total newcomer to the game, and have to say that I do understand performance issues can be a serious downer. However, having spent less than $1200 on this rig I built a few years back, I get pretty decent performance from it. I don't know what your settings are, but I have set my screen resolution to 1920 x 1080 and most items for detail are high. The graphics are decent and the framerate has zero stutter so far in my single player games. My main system runs an i7 and there's 16GB of ram. I'm running a pair of Samsung 1TB SSD's in RAID-0 for OS and game. GPU is an ATI Radeon 970 - nothing special here. I'm running Windows 10 Pro and have anti-virus and some other utils running in the background. Now, if you're trying to run this at ULTRA I don't know what the requirements would be, but logically, I might suggest reeling back a little. Try toning down the details to better match the capabilities of your particular setup. Fair winds mister.