I have been flying the Condor Soaring Simulator for many years, and have been happy with just a Dell Laptop and TrakIR. However, with the recent Condor 3 (C3) upgrade I have discovered the hard way that my current laptop – a Dell XPS15 – just isn’t up to the job. I can get by with all the graphics options turned down to minimum, but that isn’t very pleasant visually. So, after yet another BSD halfway through a race (and I was doing so well, too!) I decided it was time to invest in a dedicated ‘gaming’ machine just for C3.
My thinking about getting a dedicated gaming PC was influenced by the very active ‘US Soaring’ discord channel by Davis (DC1). I have been lurking there for some time, and I have been picking up bits and pieces about what hardware people are using. So a day or so ago I posted a request for input, and boy did I get ‘Input’! DC1 even started a separate “Frank’s PC Build” thread for all the traffic.
Back in the day (pre internet, pre Microcenter, before even fire was invented) I often built PC’s for myself and others, and it was a pretty laborious process. Read innumerable magazine articles, order parts by mail (not email – just ‘mail’), wait six weeks for delivery, assemble and test. Turns out its a wee bit different in the modern internet age; there is a site called ‘PC Parts Picker‘ where visitors can construct systems from currently available compatible parts, and then when the list of parts is complete, click one button to get transferred to Amazon with a cart already filled from the list – cool!
After a couple hours discussion on the discord site, and a lot of help from DC1 and others, I settled on DC1’s list (https://pcpartpicker.com/list/LhBqPJ) plus GTX-1080 GPU ($217 at Amazon) to start with. I ordered everything except the GTX-1080 from Amazon (Davis sold me his old one for $100 + shipping), and parts started arriving fairly quickly. The list is shown below:
Here’s a photo of the parts I have on-hand at the moment:
As can be seen in the above, this pile has everything I ordered from Amazon, so I’m good to go except for DC1’s GTX-1080 GPU, currently on its way here – hopefully arriving this coming Wednesday.
In the meantime I Plan to unpack everything and start populating the motherboard and case.
Asus ROG STRIX B760-A Motherboard:
Back in my day a motherboard was a LOT less complex, so this should be interesting. Fortunately it comes with a pretty decent printed manual, and of course any number of YouTube tutorials, like this assembly video.
Intel i7-12700K:
For this step I watched the build tutorial closely, as I knew this step was critical. In particular, I wanted to make sure I had the CPU module inserted in the correct orientation. As I went through the process, I was able to assure myself that the module will fit in only one orientation, so these guys clearly had me in mind ;).