BYGONE TIMES

As mentioned in the previous post, in 1999 I formed an online-squadron called the 185th Reservoir Dogs, flying Microprose's Falcon 4. The membership quickly grew and we regularly flew "virtual missions" together against other squadrons across the world. All great fun! That squadron is still going strong 20 years later!!

I started off, of course, with Microsoft's FlightSim but quickly grew bored of civil aviation simulation and moved to various combatsims including the very original FALCON in 1987 which now looks shockingly poor but at the time it was groundbreaking (he says laughing out loud)....

A year later, Spectrum Holobyte updated their software and dropped FALCON AT onto our floppy discs....

But it was the 1991 introduction of Spectrum Holobytes' FALCON 3 that really caught my attention. Back then it was incredibly advanced! The graphics and sound were massively improved and so too was the gameplay...

Spectrum Holobyte Packaging

Falcon 3 was beautifully presented with 5 floppy discs, maps and a 'proper' printed manual, brimming with information on how to fly the Viper. It was a very exciting time, but if you look back at it now, it seems laughable. Here's a video of Falcon3 from startup to completion of a mission...

Spectrum Holobyte Falcon 3

Microprose bought out Spectrum and in December 1998, they launched Falcon 4. It was mind bogglingly advanced! Again, it included a superb printed reference manual. I still have my Falcon 4 CD-ROM along with the original box, manual, maps, etc. The very fact that this sim is still widely used across the world is testament to just how fabulous it is.

Microprose Falcon4 packaging

Microprose Falcon4 Intro

Microprose Falcon4 CockPit

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I used to love Microprose's Falcon4 but when LOCK ON arrived with its amazing graphics, I quickly migrated. I used to love making missions in the comprehensive Mission Builder, which I then shared online for others to download.

UbiSoft Lock On

LOCK ON : Modern Air Combat

(Excuse the advert at the start)

Lock On was pretty much all about the A-10 WARTHOG and as much as I adored flying the plane, I did miss the Viper. When DCSWORLD took over, I was really hoping that they'd introduce one, but they spent years developing anything but!

Then this year they eventually announced the Beta Release of their new F-16C Viper! I was thrilled and quickly pre-ordered. The graphics are simply out of this world and the level of realism is dazzling!! 

DCS WORLD F-16C Cockpit

To see just how STAGGERINGLY GOOD this new sim is, take a look at the video below and bear in mind that this is all 'in-game' action, not a computer-generated movie...

DCSWORLD F-16C VIPER

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BUILDING THE PC

FIT FOR PURPOSE

This is the OLD pc

Until a couple of days ago, I had an old computer that I built in 2009. Back then it was the dog's dangly bits and it cost a pretty penny too. Intel i7 CPU, the top motherboard, fast ram and the best graphics card I could afford.
Sadly, it just cannot cope with the demands of modern flightsims and even though I changed the RAm and the GFX card a few months ago, it still struggles to run DCS WORLD 2.5 on anything but the lowest realism settings.  To be honest, I've always felt that I've been behind everyone else when it comes to computer hardware. I see videos on YouTube of other pilots flying with amazing levels of detail and fluidity. Well now it's my turn! I'm about to build a PC that will truly run at full speed in any flightsim or combatsim at any settings. And it will also be future-proof enough to cope with a few upgrades over the coming years without hitting the obsolete-wall.

Looking at my old PC I could see that there's some components which are still very usable. There's no point lashing out for something just for the sake of it, so the tower case (with fans) can stay and so too can the 850W PSU, but the rest has to go.

I decided straight away to go for a Gaming motherboard because that's where all the bottlenecks tend to be. The mobo of choice is the ASUS ROG STRIX Z390-F GAMING and in the socket is a lovely INTEL i7 9700 CoffeeLake running at 5,000MHz - Overclocked professionally by Scan Computers.

The RAM is Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000MHz in four 8Gb modules, giving me 32Gb to play with. That should certainly help with the sims! The motherboard will take 64Mb and there's rumours that a future BIOS update may increase that to 128Mb!

The video card from the outgoing PC is only 8 months old and is a cracking bit of kit, so that's staying. It's the MSI ARMOR GEFORCE GTX 1070 'OC' Ti and in these new surroundings, it should make DCS World run like the wind with (hopefully) no stuttering even at the highest realism settings.


One of the biggest changes will be the Storage System. Although my old PC had an SSD drive, it also had a disc-spinner as the main drive. Well this time I'm forgoing that option and I'm going for two marvellous NVMe drives which are mounted directly to the motherboard! One is a Corsair 960Gb for the main OS and general software, and the other is a Corsair 480Gb dedicated purely to FlightSims and CombatSims. The Samsung 860 EVO 500Gb SATA SSD from the old PC will be used as a backup drive.

This machine should be LIGHTENING FAST!!!!

The only downside to all this is that I have to build it which is bound to be a pain in the ass, lol. The bit which gripes me the most is all the Windows updating that goes on during a new installation, then re-installing all the other software and then downloading digital copies of your licenced sims from one torrent or another. Thankfully, I've got Thursday and Friday off work, so it should all be done by the end of the weekend. Oh yeh, and then there's that software you bought, but cannot find the serial-keys GRRR!

TEMPERATURE MONITOR

UPDATE :

I stripped the old components out from the tower case last night and cleaned up the interior. I then installed the ram, the CPU cooler and the two M.2 drives, before putting the whole thing inside the tower case. I'd forgotten just how fiddly it was to connect all the cables to the motherboard - that power supply is like an angry octopus with all its legs fighting one another, lol.  Next up was the graphics card and reconnecting the 5 case-fans. Finally, I had to attach the 5 heat-sensors to the CPU, the M.2 cards, the Graphics card, the memory and one for the ambient case temperature.

Once everything was finished, I connected a monitor, mouse and keyboard and booted up from Windows DVD. The installation was surprisingly swift and the only unusual thing I had to do was attached a network cable to the broadband router in the lounge in order to provide an internet signal (my wireless wi-fi wouldn't operate at this point). Luckily, I have a very long CAT-6 cable.


So the first part went well and all that remains now is the installation of all my programs and sims. But first of all I'll carry out some driver updates and run some benchmarks to get a measure of the performance of the new beast.


UPDATE 2 :

Last night I started the downloading of the DCS WORLD files which took forever via a torrent and so it was extremely late in the night by the time it was finished. As I waited, I got around to installing a few other things including some benchmarking software. The results looked very impressive.

PassMark Rating 

 8710

A GREAT BENCHMARK SCORE!

(Shows CPU speed at base 3.6GHz but overclocked

speed is actually 5000 as shown in CPU-Z below)

When DCS had finished downloading and unpacking, I ran the sim and set everything to MAX settings and went for a spin in an P-51 Mustang. It was amazing!!!  There was no lag or stuttering or tearing no matter what I did. Awesome!

Knowing that the sim was functioning superbly, I started the next laborious task of installing the aircraft and terrains that I have licences for. Again, it's a loooooong download, so I set it going and went to bed, but by now I was over-tired, lol, so I got back up and started reading through the Early-Release F-16C Manual. I don't find modern manuals very easy to read - they're just not entertaining enough, so I picked up the F-16 manual from Microprose's FALCON 4 sim which is a beautiful and thoroughly enjoyable printed book. It's obviously no good for the key-commands in DCS, but it's a fantastic resource for the F-16 generally.

This morning I got up and checked that the download had gone well - it had. The only one which wasn't running correctly was the A-10C Warthog but all I had to do was find the Serial Number and hey-presto, it was fine.

So I'm off to work now and can't wait to get back home to have a play. There's still all the setup of the Thrustmaster Warthog HOTAS and the CH Products MDF's, but at least I know it's all worthwhile when I jump into that cockpit!

UPDATE : Replace the 1070 with an MSI GAMING-X GEFORCE GTX 1080 Ti 11Gb

CLICK ON IMAGE TO SEE POST

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