New
#1
Upgrade advice sought, please
I'd appreciate some help with this please, before I start spending money! I am looking to upgrade my current PC (rather than replace it). I use it exclusively to run X-Plane 11 and associated programmes but, especially now I often 'fly' in VR with an Oculus Quest 2 headset (amazing!), it is not really up to the job any longer, especially in respect of the RAM installed, which has a tendency to run out (and so crashing the sim). These are the current specs and my ideas for what needs to be changed:
M/B: Asus H97I-PLUS: This does not support more than 16GBs, so a new one will be necessary (any suggestions given the info below?). I need as many USB3 slots as possible and at least one USB-C port (extra card probably): I have a lot of devices attached.
GPU: nVidia GTX1070 8GB VRAM: I don't think upgrading that is necessary
RAM: Probably go to 64GB.. Is 4x16 or 2x32 the better choice?
CPU: i7-4790K: This clearly needs upgrading. In X-Plane, the more cores the better. I don't want automatically to go for the 'top of the range' (by the time it's fitted, it wouldn't be any longer anyway!). I need to think of the match with the GPU - I wouldn't want the CPU to be so far above the performance of the GPU that the latter creates a timings bottleneck. I am tending towards the Intel i9-9900X. Is that a reasonable choice (cheaper than the i9-10900, and more than adequte for what I need I think) and a suitable pairing with the GTX1070?
NH-L12 heatsink: Would that still be good with the above CPU? Works very well with the i7-4790
Drives & booting: I have three Evo 860 SSDs, all to be retained, no HDDs. One of course contains the O/S: in fact the PC dual boots Windows 10 Pro x64 (default) and Windows 7 Home x64. I set that up some years ago with EasyBCD (and I use NeoSmart iReboot in the System Tray). Although I no longer use Windows 7, I'd like to keep the dual boot.. if anything should happen to one O/S I like the idea of still being able to boot up without external help. However, as Windows 7 Home does not support more than 16GBs of RAM (is that right?), would it have to be upgraded to Windows 10? What happens if you try to boot into Windows 7 Home with over 16GBs of RAM present? If it won't boot, that's one thing. If it just wouldn't use more than 16GBs, then maybe it can just be left as it is. All data on the three SSDs needs to remain intact.
Many thanks for reading this far (and for any advice you may have).
Martin