Aiming for a new rig - how important is RAM, which GPU + CPU would be advised by the community (FSLabs + heavy sceneries + ultra settings)

[Claas Krause]

Hi everyone,

Hope you’re all having a cracking day.

I’m currently looking at upgrading my setup and could use a bit of steerage from the community on which direction to take. My budget is sitting around the €2,400 – €2,900 mark, and I’m aiming for a fairly beefy spec.

The plan is to build around an RTX 5080 and the AMD Ryzen series. I’m currently torn between the 7 9800X3D and the 9 9950X3D; I’ve been reading up on the performance benchmarks and it seems a bit counter-intuitive, so I’m curious to hear your real-world thoughts on which delivers the smoother experience for flight simming.

On the storage front, I feel a 2TB SSD is a must these days, though I might drop to 1TB if I spot a decent bargain on eBay or Kleinanzeigen here in Germany. As for memory, I’m leaning towards 64GB of RAM. I could start with 32GB and upgrade later, but I’d love to know if you think 64GB is truly the “sweet spot” for the more memory-intensive addons.

The Goal: Currently, my HP Omen (RTX 5080 mobile) is struggling to keep up. When I’m flying heavy 3rd-party airliners (Fenix, PMDG, iniBuilds, etc.) into complex sceneries at Ultra settings, it just doesn’t cut the mustard. I’m seeing about 20 FPS (boosted by Frame Gen), which is a bit of a struggle.

I’m aiming for a rock-solid, smooth experience—ideally 80 to 90 FPS with Frame Gen (so about 40–45 base). Since my monitor is capped at 60Hz, I might just lock it there, but I want that overhead to ensure it never stutters.

A few questions for the experts:

• In your experience, how much of a difference does 64GB vs 32GB make when juggling heavy sceneries and complex aircraft?

• Between the two Ryzen chips, which one is currently wearing the crown for stability in the sim?

Thanks a million for any advice you can spare.

Warm regards,

Claas

[Marios Martinis]

Hi, regarding RAM , I am using 32GB and not having any issues at all, I would say more than this is not necessary unless you want to run a couple of other programs together with the sim.

For me Sim, chrome-youtube, and couple sim apps running together are just running totally fine in my setup.

Have in mind that if you go for 2 sticks - 32GB total and later you want to buy another 2, so 4 sticks and 64gb total you may end up having stability issues running AMD EXPO at suggested speeds.

32GB - runs fine, much cheaper with current RAM price

64GB - surely more future proof but you may not see any difference right now.

By the way my settings are not all the way right - but fairly high (using 7800x3d 32GB 9070xt 1440p resolution)

[Claas Krause]

are you using Texture Resolution at Ultra?

thank you for your comment! - I think you have a rather strong AMD CPU which helps a lot! may I know which graphics card you are running?

[Marios Martinis]

Texture res at high. I don't see any gains at ultra rather than high/max vram values and lower performance.

I am using amd 9070xt.