Two months ago I started accumulating bits and pieces for a computer upgrade. The reason was the new Ryzen's were released. So, I snagged a Ryzen 7 3700X at Newegg (saved a couple bucks, but not much). A couple weeks after that I picked up a 570X chipset board for $20 off, an M2 SSD, some standard SSDs and, of course, some DDR4 memory. I pulled the guts out of an FX8350 build I had (sold the CPU on eBay, gave my son the AM3 socket motherboard and still have some DDR3 memory listed on eBay). The case, hard drives, power supply AND Win10 operating system are being used in my "new" build. (Getting the Win10 license moved over is another story, so if anybody goes this route and has questions, send me a PM.)

You may ask, what about the graphics card? Good question. Last week on my almost daily email from Newegg, the ASUS reference RX5700 was on sale for under $300 (along with a $20 rebate and Ghost Recon Borderlands digital d/l). A cracking deal!

I finally got everything up and running today. I've only done F-18 Case I carrier landings so far, but the performance and graphics are fantastic. I finally have something that looks and feels like "Wags" information videos (at a cost the "penny pinching" me accept).

Those of you that aren't there yet, don't give up. The new AMD gear is almost affordable!

I have also been working on a project to save the rudder pedals from my G940 setup using an arduino board as the controller. I have not gotten it working yet, but if I do I will report my success here!

P.S. I'm going to insert a link to a good article at Guru3d about the 3800X CPU, but it also mentions the "value" winner 3700X. Lots of good information about this new CPU and how to go about getting a value performance "beast". https://www.guru3d.com/articles-page...-review,2.html