Ah yes, I have started to assemble the FDS Jetmax SKTQ Single-Seater cockpit. I will write up a full page article on it soon, but in short, it is pretty damn nice.

It is well made, but obviously not as exacting or detailed as the $100,000 cockpits can provide.

It did have quite the adventure while being shipped via DHL which caused some damage and missing bits, but FDS-Jetmax were more than helpful in getting it all straightened out.

The following are a few pictures showing a bit more progress over the next 3-4 days. First up, the glareshield supports are in place.

Next up, the bezels, pots, switches, gauges, AFDS, annunicators, tiller, and engraved panels are getting into place and the wiring has begun.

Next up, the monitors got mounted, the knobs are all in place, the CDU and throttle quadrant are settled in. Time for some power and lighting tests. It should be noted in the image below, the panel backlighting is custom and is not included in the normal JetMax product.

I have since completed the JetMax and wrote a lengthy review up on it. Check it out if you are interested!

All along during this adventure, I knew that my current PC would not cut it for FSX. It was an Dell XPS 8300 with an Intel i5 @ 2.8Ghz and bloated with years of games, apps, and other programs. Even with the fairly recent GTX760 video card upgrade, the best framerate I got on the ground at a decent sized airport was 12-18fps.

I know framerate isn’t everything, but it does matter. I managed to tweak sliders and textures and scenery to a usable degree, but it was time to step it up to something with more grunt.

Therefore, let me present my new FSX-only setup:

• Corsair 750D Full Tower Case
• EVGA Fully-modular Gold+ 850W Power Supply
• Asus Z97-PRO (Wi-Fi ac) ATX Motherboard
• Intel Core i7-4790K CPU
• Corsair H100 Water Cooler
• 16GB of Patriot Viper DDR3-2400Mhz Memory (replaced the 1866Mhz Vengeance memory in the image above)
• 256GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD (for the OS and non-FSX use)
• 1TB Samsung 840 Evo SSD (For FSX and all related add-ons, scenery, etc.)
• Gigabyte GeForce 970 GTX 4GB Windforce 3X video card
• Three (3) Asus 24″ VN248H-P LED/LCD IPS thin-bezel monitors
• Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate SP1
• and some cheap Asus DVD-ROM drive…

After many hours of building, installing, optimizing, and pulling my hair out, it is finally alive! It even overclocks itself to 4.5GHz without issues. My old PC will now be just be my home use computer and I can leave all the flight controls permanently mounted to a desk dedicated to flight sim in it’s own room.

More to come!