Help needed - Purchasing new rig

[DaveQ]

Happy New Year to all!!

It's come time to replace my 5 year-old rig with something that will run FSX and Photoshop smoothly and effortlessly. The current hard disc has had a major flaw for over a year now and gets clunkier by the week. It will barely run the SSW F-84 even with sliders all to the left and working with 4096 x 4096 texture sets in Photoshop is tedious to say the least...!

My questions are about what are the problems (sorry, challenges!) installing FSX on Windows 8.1 and whether it would be better to specify 7 Sp1 as the OS. Also are there issues validating my current FSX discs on a new machine and/or whether a new unused set of discs is required. Will the MS site still be able to validate and what happens when they cease to do so??

My pockets aren't that deep but a 4th gen. i7 processor, NVidia GTX 660 and 8G RAM are my baseline. Any help, advice or experience would be much appreciated.

Thanks all

DaveQ

[mjrhealth]

Far better off with win7 64bit, so many less headaches. Haswell is good chip, but its a lucky dip when it comes to overclocking. You would be better off with the 3730K or similar.they also run a lot cooler. I like many have re registered FSX many times. happens every time i upgrade some hardware, just takes a phone call if it wont register online itself, though it is a real pain. Had FSX since 2009.

[DaveQ]

Many thanks; I had a feeling 7 64-bit was the way to go. I'll keep this in mind.

DaveQ

[expat]

I recently had to build a fresh rig and had the usual great steers and advice from SOH members here.

Was recommended here to use Win7 Pro 64 bit o/s and went for a i7 Haswell 4770k processor overclocked to 4.4 ghz (with water cooling) and a GTX780 card. Have 2 x 250 gig SSD's and a large internal storage drive (plus another large external). Runs dead quiet, cool and smooth as silk at 30 (or 60 if you want) fps. From Scan UK.

You want to find the "Nick guide" to setting up a new rig for FSX. Very thorough. I was anxious about re-loading FSX but that was very easy. Don't recall needing to call MS about validating - think it all just went through the first time on line and it was ready to fly. Biggest issue was salvaging old files to carry over on a rapidly dying HDD - got most of the payware (but lost the log ins and keys save in Outlook) and custom scenery - but not everything. My 800+ "hangar" for aircraft was fortunately on an external HDD.

[DaveQ]

Thanks for that - I'm fortunate in that my HDD is dying slowly. Eventually went with a Dell machine because I could specify Windows 7; NVidia 760ti graphics card and 4th gen. i7-4820. Got almost everything backed up on an external HDD as well. Should be a piece o' cake.......not!!:kilroy:

DaveQ