DCS 2020 and Beyond PC Build!

I'm planning on building a new PC with aproximately 1500€.

I want what every DCS pilot wants, not a single FPS drop or inconsistency, flying sensation when dogfighting at low altitude, and so on...

Having said that, I am looking forward to take advantage of the future optimizations ED will develop (Vulkan API for example) although I don't want to fly with VR glasses nor multimonitor or video editing, just DCS World at Full HD.

I have been told AMD Ryzens will take advantage of future developments better than old Intel CPUs (i5-9600K for instance) because of their "modern" architecture.

Also, it seems like the most badass rigs people have, like Wags' or Ralfidude's, work with i9-9900, but obviously those will be out of my league.

So basically I would love to have the same performance (visual performance I mean) that Ralfidude or Wags show on their vids.

Do you think it can be accomplished with that amount of money?

Last but not least, the rig I am planning right now is: Ryzen 7 3700X + RTX2070

Also I have been told RTX won't be as useful as an older but quicker GTX 10 series. What do you think of that?

2080ti is faster than the 1080ti in dcs. Personally, I’d wait for the 3 series nvidia cards. As to cpu, even my 6700k isn’t the bottleneck in vr, the card is. If vulkan improves core utilization significantly (many say it wont be that much of an improvement) any decent multi-core may work. But for now in VR, 9900k and 2080ti are the best bet.

Yes, that is a good build but that GPU is nearly as expensive as my whole budget (1500€).

Thank you for your reply tho.

If I was to build a new system right now that's what I would build and would pretty much match my system I have now I think. Plus it would be ready for any Vulkan improvements with it's 8 Cores.

Ryzen 7 3700X + RTX2070 (Super) or 5700 XT: 39 Game Benchmark

32 GB Ram (3200 Mhz) Suit AMD

This is of course going off best bang for the buck and what DCS / Track IR can deliver at the moment.... You need to hold (Locked) 60 or 120 FPS for Track ir using nvidia Inspector or an autoexec.cfg DCS option file.

No system can hold 120. My system now can hold max setting MSAA x2, SSAA OFF and that's also at 1440P on a very large server so I'm still very happy with it.

1440 is still the sweet spot here.

That new system would also suit the mid range VR headsets like the Rift S. I still run the Rift CV1 and PD of 1.5 and lower a few setting down like the view distance. Would need to lower more if I used it online. I don't as I only use it for half hour at a time, case 1's etc. Get's annoying after a bit for me.

If you have the cash to throw around for large 4K screens and or the Valve index with it's specs and want the best experience now for DCS. Then yes 9900K and 2080ti makes more sense. That's more than double the cost, including that VR headset.

Valve Index

Two RGB LCDs running at 1,440 x 1,600 pixels, capable of a 120Hz (or 144Hz)

Samsung Odyessy +

Dual 3.5" AMOLED (1440x1600 ea)

The Rift S has a slightly higher-resolution screen than the original Rift, at 1280 x 1440 pixels per eye instead of 1200 x 1080. Rift S only refreshes at a rate of 80Hz.

I still use a 4 core system and can still hold 60 fps @ 1440P for recording. The CPU is only running at 4.8 GHz at the moment as that can still hold the 60 fps.

Example

GTX 1080 Ti vs. RTX 2070 Super vs. 5700 XT: 39 Game Benchmark

I am in the middle of building and testing a rig for my buddy, 3800x + 5700XT + 16GB CL14 ( he doesnt use DCS, otherwise it was 32GB ) and a 1TB 970 Evo NVMe in addition to his old drives ( 840 Pro 256GB SSD and a 3TB HDD for backups )

You see my rig in the sig and this AMD just performs like a charm. Out of the box the clocks of the CPU in DCS are 43xxMHz across all cores and the GPU gets filled 100%.

If I had to build one for myself, it was this combo, just 32GB 3600MHz and a better cooler. He uses the included cooler form AMD and I now know again why I have such a big fat radiator, mine is almost silent whereas his is a bit loud, too loud for my taste, but the performance is outstanding for that money.

In 1080p it is way above 100fps with the Hornet in Freeflight, still have to test on my screen with 1440p. I hope tomorrow I know more and can compare 1440p AMD vs 1440p Intel/Nvidia.

And for 10 fps, I wouldnt pay 400€ more knowing that I lock it at 60 fps anyways.

As long as no card can deliver constant 120fps+ at 1440p it's an easy question and answer imho.

Just get a better cooler down the road, you can use the included one to save some bucks and get a decent 360mm or DIY Loop later any time.

Given your title is DCS 2020 and Beyond PC Build I would suggest holding off until around the middle of this year when Nvidia hopefully release their 3000 series Ampere GPU's and also AMD have their higher performing rivals out. The Nvidia current Turing based 2xxx series cards while great performing but expensive didn't have the leap in performance that the older Pascal 1xxx series cards did and for that reason I have hanged tight with my GTX 1070 card. My hope is that the Nvidia Ampere will bring about a 20-30% improvement over current 2xxx series while also AMD have some GPU's which can at least compete with the Nvidia top offering cards brining with it perhaps a little bit more value.

Given that your PC is primarily for gaming I presume including DCS I would try to spend around 30-40% of your budget on the GPU alone. On the CPU front I would go AMD personally now instead of Intel but having said that I would just make sure that your rig has minimum 6 cores 12 threads.

I am in the middle of building and testing a rig for my buddy, 3800x + 5700XT + 16GB CL14 ( he doesnt use DCS, otherwise it was 32GB ) and a 1TB 970 Evo NVMe in addition to his old drives ( 840 Pro 256GB SSD and a 3TB HDD for backups )

 

You see my rig in the sig and this AMD just performs like a charm. Out of the box the clocks of the CPU in DCS are 43xxMHz across all cores and the GPU gets filled 100%.

 

If I had to build one for myself, it was this combo, just 32GB 3600MHz and a better cooler. He uses the included cooler form AMD and I now know again why I have such a big fat radiator, mine is almost silent whereas his is a bit loud, too loud for my taste, but the performance is outstanding for that money.

 

In 1080p it is way above 100fps with the Hornet in Freeflight, still have to test on my screen with 1440p. I hope tomorrow I know more and can compare 1440p AMD vs 1440p Intel/Nvidia.

 

And for 10 fps, I wouldnt pay 400€ more knowing that I lock it at 60 fps anyways.

 

As long as no card can deliver constant 120fps+ at 1440p it's an easy question and answer imho.

 

Just get a better cooler down the road, you can use the included one to save some bucks and get a decent 360mm or DIY Loop later any time.

I really am trying to replace my comp for dcs

I wanna spend arnd 1500 max. 2000 if its like.. amazing. Im.pretty set on vr in a rift..

Hiw much was your friends rig,; subtracting sau monitor; (cant i hdmi my flat screen?) No rudder pedals just the machine?

If anyone else is willing to help id appreciste it

Alienware has a flashy rep and 890 comps but im old and out of the loop now.

So i figured new egg would be better. Thing is i dont know a ryzen from a burrito and so on.

Middle of the year is not far away as the others have said best bet is to wait for the 3 series cards ad see what it does to the market

I really am trying to replace my comp for dcs

I wanna spend arnd 1500 max. 2000 if its like.. amazing. Im.pretty set on vr in a rift..

Hiw much was your friends rig,; subtracting sau monitor; (cant i hdmi my flat screen?) No rudder pedals just the machine?

If anyone else is willing to help id appreciste it

Alienware has a flashy rep and 890 comps but im old and out of the loop now.

So i figured new egg would be better. Thing is i dont know a ryzen from a burrito and so on.

around 1550€ not incl. case, screen, mouse & keyb and w/o Win10.

Aorus Ultra X570 is the board and I really like Gigabyte, done a few X570's by now and all were Gigabyte based 250-330€ boards, not a single issue.

I'm planning on building a new PC with aproximately 1500€.

 

Also, it seems like the most badass rigs people have, like Wags' or Ralfidude's, work with i9-9900, but obviously those will be out of my league.

 

 

 

Last but not least, the rig I am planning right now is: Ryzen 7 3700X + RTX2070

]

Hello,

I'm in the same boat as you. I'm leaning towards the 3700X which has come down in price about $30 just this morning. It's at $413 now. I would consider the 3600 (no X) because it performs so well, and should be cheap, but it's way over it's normal price at almost $300. It should be $50 to $75 less.

As it stands, for the extra $115 the 3700X costs over the 3600 right now, you get more cores and a much better cooler. That's a no brainer for me. But I'm watching the prices for a bit. No big rush. What I did rush for was an MSI Tomahawk Max B450. They have been out of stock for a while and all MBs are way overpriced right now. It popped up at a reasonable price and I ordered it on the spot. It's just a question of what goes in it.

And I think the super expensive CPUs, though I would like to have one of course, are not really required. Is the extra 15% of FPS worth an extra 30% of your cash? For the price of a 9900K that doesn't even have a cooler, I can get a 3700X and a motherboard and 16 GB of RAM. Not a bad rig. And I'd still still have enough cash left over to order pizza and beer.

All the benchmark data coming back is showing the 10600K as the sweetspot for performance per $ right now. Gamer's Nexus rates it as the best Gaming CPU overall currently.

Key is to look at objective benchmarks. All the hype and rumors about the heat and power usage of Intel CPU's turned out to be unfounded clickbait. Under normal gaming loads Intel uses less power. You have to put the CPU through benchmarks/stress tests/high voltage overclocks to get the wattage high enough to cause issues for most cooling solutions.

You can build a cheaper system with a 3600 if you are on a budget but the 10600K surpasses AMD's high end in gaming performance. Even more so when properly tuned and overclocked. If you use a cheap AMD motherboard you might not be able to upgrade with that chipset so do your homework. You should get at least one more CPU gen on Z490 motherboards.

What differentiates the 10700K and 10900K that affects performance is the quality of the silicon for overclocking/voltage and the amount of cache. Very few games benefit from more than 6c/12t right now, DCS uses 3 last time I checked. It's all about singe core performance and latency for gaming with real time graphic engines. Rendering in Blender or encoding are tasks that benefit from more cores and threads.

So far these are the best benchmarks I've found.

One other key takeaway, until the new 3000 series graphics cards are out most of these differences are academic unless you are using a 2080 Ti and playing at 1080p. Prices can also vary a lot from country to country. So a 3700x might be the better deal in yours. Any savings in your budget from CPU choice should be put towards the GPU and then cooling. There's some measurable difference at 1440p but at 4K it's almost always a GPU bottleneck. Then specific to DCS and sims you have the issue with TrackIR and locking to 60fps. So for most people the 10600k or the 3600 is the best choice right now unless you are trying to squeeze frames out of a 2080 Ti or better.

AMD is supposed to be releasing new CPUs later this year with better IPC and clockspeeds but by that time the new Intel gen will be close to, you can always wait for something new and shiny.

I'm really on the fence about a new build. Almost pulled the trigger on the 10600K to OC but local availability isn't that good still. Could do 10700K I guess (available) but that's an extra $100 I don't need to spend on a machine that is more or less dedicated to DCS/gaming. I do work on my Linux boxes, the Windows PC is treated like a 'gaming console' and does nothing else.

Ryzen XT I think is just going to be a stop gap - not convinced it is worth waiting for unless the single core performance is something special. Given what current Ryzen does when OC it's not going to be a stellar jump. Not sure Ryzen XT OC'ed will meet 10th gen OC... Best/worst likely pissing match stuff.

Don't get me started on NVIDIA.

With a budget in mind, I'm looking at it this way:

- 3700X is $413Cdn.

- 10600k is $469 + $50 to $100 for a cooler

It's $100 to $150 more for the 10600k. And I see the 3700X as certainly being good enough.

If they were the same price, I might opt for the Intel.

Between those two there isn't much in it. In my area 3700X is $430 and 10600K is $399 so...

For OC purposes I'd be buyng a cooler for either one. Intel Mobos are more expensive.

I dunno. AMD is compelling but Intel rules single core.

Amazon has the 10600K for $469, you're doing better than me.

You're right about Intel owning the single core action, but Ryzen isn't that far off, it's cheaper, and I want the extra cores. The way FS2020 is looking, it might need them.

No OC for me, stock is where it will stay.

I try to use these guys when I can. Bezos doesn't need more money.

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=4_65&item_id=166898

I won't question the others, but support those who are saying wait for the GeForce 30xx series. It's looking to be so vastly superior to the 20xx it's not even remotely funny. Like half again the performance, raytracing for "free" (which doesn't benefit DCS but does other games and the nVidia iRay-based CGI pinups I do for fun) and 2/3 the power usage.

On top of that the rumor mill is that it'll be cheaper because AMD and Intel (of all companies, Google their Xe architecture) are making competitive discrete cards these days.

Thanks, I'll take a look at your site.

And I have to admit I'm an Amazon fanboy. For all their faults, Amazon has given me great service through the years. I bought all the parts for my last PC there and I'm doing it again now.

A bit OT: When the plague was in full swing two-months ago, and travel was cut off on the highways here and the grocery stores were nuthouses, I was able to send my kids emergency supplies right to their apartment via Amazon. Two deliveries to their door within days and they had enough food to go weeks even if they couldn't step outside their door. And then I slept well. So, yeah, I'm a bit of a fanboy.

I just threw a new build together over the weekend, specs as follows:

CPU: i5-10600k (5.0 GHz)

Mobo: Gigabye Z490 Vision

GPU: RTX 2080 Super

RAM: 16GB DDR4 3200 CL14 (G.Skill FlareX)

SSD: Samsung 970 Evo

Screen: Oculus Rift S

I had taken a bit over a year long break from flight sims as I had to part out my desktop for a new laptop for a high travel job. So I'm switching over from effectively nothing. My previous desktop had an i7-8600k and GTX 1080 Ti, otherwise exact same hardware or at least similar. I've found this new setup with moderate detail settings (listed at bottom) gives a reasonably consistent 80 fps for the Rift S in both small single player missions and in my 1 evening of F99th with the JF-17. The same could not be said for the previous desktop, it basically locked at 40 fps at the same settings unless at high altitude. How much of that change is due to the new system and how much is because of DCS optimizations I don't know.

As for the 5.0 GHz overclock, that was completely trivial to achieve. I set the clock to 5Ghz and the voltage to 1.3v. It runs cool and stable like that. I tried 5.1GHz but crashed on boot so I rolled it back to 5 and haven't messed with it again yet. I may try some further tweaking but for now it seems to work well.

DCS settings:

Textures/Terrain Textures: High

Civ Traffic: Low

Water: Medium

Vis Range: Hihg

Heat Blur: Off

Shadows: Low

Cockpit Displays: 512

MSAA/DoF/Lens/MotionBlur/SSAA/SSLR: Off

Clutter: 0

Trees: 50%

Preload: 150k

Chimney: 4

Anisotropic: 8x

Terrain Shadows: Flat

Cockpit Illumination: On

VR PD: 1.0 (looks better than Rift 1 with 1.7 PD)

Bloom Effect: on (no idea what this does)

MSAA Mask Size: 0.42 (default)

I just threw a new build together over the weekend, specs as follows:

 

CPU: i5-10600k (5.0 GHz)

Mobo: Gigabye Z490 Vision

GPU: RTX 2080 Super

RAM: 16GB DDR4 3200 CL14 (G.Skill FlareX)

SSD: Samsung 970 Evo

Screen: Oculus Rift S

Nice! You're not far off a "best of" system. That should be sweet.

I ended up going the Ryzen route. Figure it should handle DCS and FS2020 well enough.

Have:

2060 Super

32GB DDR4 3200

MSI B450 Tomahawk max

Crucial SSD

Arriving soon:

3700X

Corsair 750 Gold PSU

Need:

A case! Want the Phanteks P600S, but out of stock.

I just threw a new build together over the weekend, specs as follows:

 

CPU: i5-10600k (5.0 GHz)

Mobo: Gigabye Z490 Vision

GPU: RTX 2080 Super

RAM: 16GB DDR4 3200 CL14 (G.Skill FlareX)

SSD: Samsung 970 Evo

Screen: Oculus Rift S

 

I had taken a bit over a year long break from flight sims as I had to part out my desktop for a new laptop for a high travel job. So I'm switching over from effectively nothing. My previous desktop had an i7-8600k and GTX 1080 Ti, otherwise exact same hardware or at least similar. I've found this new setup with moderate detail settings (listed at bottom) gives a reasonably consistent 80 fps for the Rift S in both small single player missions and in my 1 evening of F99th with the JF-17. The same could not be said for the previous desktop, it basically locked at 40 fps at the same settings unless at high altitude. How much of that change is due to the new system and how much is because of DCS optimizations I don't know.

 

As for the 5.0 GHz overclock, that was completely trivial to achieve. I set the clock to 5Ghz and the voltage to 1.3v. It runs cool and stable like that. I tried 5.1GHz but crashed on boot so I rolled it back to 5 and haven't messed with it again yet. I may try some further tweaking but for now it seems to work well.

 

DCS settings:

Textures/Terrain Textures: High

Civ Traffic: Low

Water: Medium

Vis Range: Hihg

Heat Blur: Off

Shadows: Low

Cockpit Displays: 512

MSAA/DoF/Lens/MotionBlur/SSAA/SSLR: Off

Clutter: 0

Trees: 50%

Preload: 150k

Chimney: 4

Anisotropic: 8x

Terrain Shadows: Flat

Cockpit Illumination: On

 

VR PD: 1.0 (looks better than Rift 1 with 1.7 PD)

Bloom Effect: on (no idea what this does)

MSAA Mask Size: 0.42 (default)

Why only 16GB ?

More didn't seem necessary. I remember DCS topping out at around 12GB when I'd last played. I just tested before making this reply and it's maxing out on growling sidewinder server (15.4GB). So I guess I may add 2 more sticks.

I think some people posted 20GB+ usage on the Channel map. The Syria map might be a hog as well.

And figuring FS2020, not sure if you're into that, will use a ton. I went 32GB.

Having 32GB or even 64GB is always good thing for DCS and sims in general. Even if game itself doesn't need that much it still good to have lots of memory for file cache.

Having 32GB or even 64GB is always good thing for DCS and sims in general. Even if game itself doesn't need that much it still good to have lots of memory for file cache.

+1