Looking for good basic system

[TiminNC]

So I have an OLD Dell laptop that I have determined to be inadequate for Condor. I have a joystick and pedals purchased from and recommended by Cumulus Soaring. I like the feel (now that I took the spring out of the joystick). The pedals are just fine.

I have been researching a LOT about compatible systems and would prefer to keep with a laptop, but I am not married to the idea. What I have come to discover so far:

SSD is a plus
4 GB ram is plenty but 8 is better (?)
i5 or AMD (not sure of the AMD that would be sufficient)
GPU .... ahhhh this seems to be the biggest rub in the equation.
OS Windows 7 up to 10. 7 seems to be the preferred.

There seems to be some difficulty with getting a laptop NVIDIA GPU to be recognized by Condor and a lot of hoops to jump through to get it to work properly, if at all. Some have success and others seem to still have problems.

1. Do the same problems exist with desktop systems with NVIDIA GPU's? Does Condor just work better with desktops? (I have no problem going that way if it will save me the headaches.)
2. Windows..... Seems that there is some trouble with 8.1. Is 7 the way to go... is 10 alright???
3. Is there a preferred NVIDIA GPU?

I will be looking at used units first so I am just trying to get a sense of what to look for. And most important is my use of the system. I am primarily going to use it for training and solo task flying; don't plan on doing any online contest flying. I imagine that would keep the process needs down.

Is there anyone running a laptop setup that seems to be working well for them; is so, what?

Or if someone can get me into a desktop setup that won't break the bank I am open to that as well....

Any and all advice is greatly appreciated. (I just dodged a bullet on a laptop purchase I almost got stuck with )

Thanks all

Tim

[janjansen]

I dont think its possible to buy a computer today that cant properly run condor. Most of the limitations and problems you'll read or even encounter, are not due to insufficient computer specs, but condor itself, and enormous sceneries that have stretched condor way beyond what it was designed to do. The issues with many laptops is making sure the game uses the actual videocard, and not the IGP. I dont know the details, but its probably because of Condor's ancient DirectX 7 underpinnings. You could try dgVoodoo DX11 wrapper to be able to select the correct GPU. At least one user reported this solving the problem for him:
http://forum.condorsoaring.com/viewtopi ... 88#p149688

But even modern integrated graphics have no problems with condor. Im actually using my intel IGP instead of my brand new RX470 AMD gaming card, because on the intel IGP I can use dgvoodoo which lets me run higher resolution (my monitor is 2560x1080) than directx 7 could support. That same wrapper doesnt work properly with the AMD card or drivers. Frame rates are fine on either. For the record, dgvoodoo worked fine with my previous nVidia card.

However, V2 might be a completely different story, and might not be far off. Its anyone's guess what that will require. In general, I prefer nVidia cards, because of their better drivers and software support. As for windows version, there is not much wrong with windows 10, and I would certainly pick it over 7.

[DanD]

I was doing the same look, since I've been experiencing out of memory blue screen of death on the big sceneries (Cape of Storms, Arc Alpin). Im currently using an old Acer Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16 GHz, AMD 7790 1GB).

A friend suggested I look at this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPJGVbdXgrs - "$250 Gaming PC - Play games at 1080p". Wow.

I then spent several days looking at a whole bunch of youtube videos on cheap new builds, then came back to the one above.

I compared the used i5-2400 with a new i5-6500 here:
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-6 ... re-i5-2400 - pretty well identical performance, though the older one uses more energy.

Video card look at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiYQqNiqQKU (Dec 15, 2016). I was looking at either the Radeon RX 470 4GB vs Nvidia GTX 1060 3 GB.
I have parts for a used i5-2400 Optiplex, some RAM to bring it to 8GB, and a GeForce GTX-1060 (thanks to Boxing Day sale) coming in shortly. It might be interesting to run Condor V1 with the integrated graphics chip to see how it performs versus what you're running now before buying a GPU/video card (prices go down and performance seems to be going up with the arrival of more VR games).
edit: I'm also thinking of getting a SSD drive as well; they're cheap and should "improve my gaming experience".

I have no $ link to anyone in the videos. I like the Paul's Hardware series, some of the others make me grind my teeth...

Good luck...

[Rodan]

You member off PSS?