Building a Flight & Car Sim PC on a Budget

Overview

I show you how I transformed a $35 Dell Precision T3500 workstation into a capable flight and racing simulator PC. With a strategic CPU upgrade from a Xeon W3530 to an X5690 (8 cores at 3.46GHz), a GTX 1070 video card, and a 512GB SSD, this budget build proves you can run modern simulators like MS Flight Simulator 2020 and Forza Horizon 5 without breaking the bank. Total cost: around $275 for a fully capable sim rig.

Key Moments

• Starting with a $35 Dell Precision T3500 with quad-core Xeon and 12GB RAM
• Upgrading the CPU from W3530 to X5690 for 8 cores and 3.46GHz base clock
• Installing a GTX 1070 graphics card with power adapter modification
• Adding USB 3.0 PCI card and 512GB SSD using a 3D printed bracket
• Flight simulator achieving 25-30 FPS on MS Flight Simulator 2020
• Racing sim build complete, awaiting proper steering wheel (Logitech G920)

Full Transcript (Edited)

All right guys and girls, today we’re going to be setting up a simulator, a racing simulator machine. I’ve already done a flight simulator machine and what we’re doing here is we’re using a set of Dell Precision T3500 machines. These came with a Xeon W3530 running at 2.8 gigahertz, that’s a six core CPU, and they have 12 gigs of DDR3 RAM. They came with no hard drive but we’re installing a 512 gig SSD and some GPUs.

As you can see here, this machine already has been set up with a flight simulator setup. It’s got the Thrustmaster yoke and some other accessories here. We’ve done some upgrades on it which we will do as well to the computer we’re setting up for the race simulation.

The upgrades that we’ve done to this are: we added a USB 3.0 PCI card, PCI Express card for Wi-Fi, because I needed to install a high-speed Wi-Fi adapter so that we can use the high-speed internet connection much better, because USB 2.0 just wasn’t cutting it. I’ve installed a GeForce GTX 1070 video card, plus like I mentioned a 512 gig SSD. Oh, and the most important upgrade I think that we’ve done is we upgraded the CPU from the Xeon W3530 to the Xeon X5690, which runs at 3.46 gigahertz and has a boost speed of over four gigahertz. And it also goes from six cores to eight cores.

So you can see here the flight simulation works really well. We get around 30 frames per second, 25 to 30 frames per second, which is pretty good considering that you’re not gonna believe this: I got these computers for $35 each of them. $35 bucks with 12 gigs of RAM, the Xeon CPU, motherboard, power supply, and they even came with video cards, but the video cards are gonna be upgraded. So I think that’s a pretty good deal. So $35 bucks for the computer, I guess $40 bucks for the 512 gig SSD, and about $200 bucks for the video card.

Okay, so the first thing that we need to do here is we’re going to take off a couple of plastic pieces here. This is a very modular case so you can take this off. This has to come off in order for the large video card over here, which we’re going to install. We’re going to install that video card, the SSD, upgrade the CPU, and we’re going to use this 3D printed adapter to install the SSD right here.

But first, like I mentioned, let me go ahead and take this off and we’ll take out the video card as well. So the video card these guys… I believe came with a Quadro FX 580, which is a decent card for some gaming, but not for the kind of gaming that we want to do. So we’ll set this aside and maybe use this in another like lower end computer.

Okay, so what I’m gonna do now is I’m gonna take this plastic off and then I’ll show you how we install the video card. Okay, so we have to take off these screws right here, two screws that hold the hinge in place, then we just wiggle it out. And now that’s free.

Another thing that we need to clear out is: in order to get the whole entire video card in like this, you can see this part right here comes off. Luckily, this case was designed so that I can take off these screws right here. You can come and take a look, and this basically comes off like this. And now there’s an empty space. If you can come take a look from this angle, we have all the space there for the video card to go in.

I’m gonna take the video card and push this back… come on, open. All right, there you go. Now the slot I’m going to use is this blue one and I need two openings for that. So I’m going to go and slide the video card in just like that, and then I just close this off and the video card is installed.

Now notice over here, look at the back of the video card. This right here is a power plug. The motherboard came with only a six plug adapter. So I’m gonna go ahead and get an adapter that I bought and we’ll use that to plug that in. So let me show you that.

Okay, so here’s the adapter I mentioned. In the other computer I used a six to eight. This one is a six to double eight but that should be fine because one is just not gonna be used. What I’m gonna do is I’m gonna plug in the six into here and then we’re gonna plug in one of these into the video card. There you go. And that’s it, video card is ready.

Okay, so the next upgrade we’re gonna do is we’re gonna replace the CPU. This is the Intel Xeon X5690 which is an 8 core CPU with 12 megs of cache and 3.46 gigahertz base clock. We’re going to use some of this thermal paste as well. In order to do that, there’s a clip here I’m gonna pull and then this whole panel kind of lifts up out of the way. Let me show you how. You see how that’s lifted up? And this is the heatsink that we have. This one is a little bit different than the other computer. So hopefully… it’s the heatsink should be more than enough. The TDP for both CPUs is pretty much the same.

So I’m going to go ahead and take off these screws. Let me do it at a diagonal so that there’s less flex on the motherboard. All right, so the heatsink comes off. Probably going to wipe that off. And that’s the CPU. So I’m gonna unhook the clip and then lift up this plate and the CPU comes off. We gotta be very careful with the motherboard.

So that’s the old one and this is going to be the new one. That goes with these tabs towards me like the other one. We’re going to be very gentle here when we just sit it down. There you go, now it’s sitting in there. And then we just put over the cover and we put the clip underneath like that. So now I got to put some thermal paste and put the heatsink back on.

All right, so I went ahead and installed the heatsink as you can see down there. That’s all ready to go and I lowered this panel. The next thing that we need to do is we need to mount the SSD.

So I’m using this Gigabyte SSD, Inland. I got it for like 40 bucks on Amazon. And I got this 3D printed bracket that is meant to fit into these Dells. I got this from Etsy for like four bucks. This is gonna go like this. It’s gonna mount here and then once I put it in here I’m gonna be able to plug in these SATA cables right into the drive. So I’m gonna mount that and then I’ll show you the result.

Okay, so let me show you what I did. I installed the SSD on the 3D printed adapter and then I installed it there. I used the SATA zero port to connect it. So now we’re ready to install an operating system. We’re ready with the video card. That’s it. We’re gonna be using a USB Wi-Fi adapter that I’m gonna plug in in order to get this loaded on and then we’re gonna install Windows 10.

So let me go ahead and close this off and put it underneath the desk and then I’ll show you how it works.

Okay, so the good news is that the computer is working great. You can see here I can accelerate and the frame rate is pretty high. This is Dirt 4, I believe. It’s really, really crisp and detailed.

Unfortunately, I think I made a mistake. I think this steering wheel doesn’t work with most games that we’ve tried. We tried Forza 5, we tried this one, we tried Need for Speed, and the steering wheel is not detected. So I went ahead and ordered a replacement. It’s a Logitech G920 and that’s going to be here tomorrow. We’re going to give that a try and see if that works.

But for now I’m going to end this video here and then maybe give an update once we have the steering wheel working. Yeah, overall I’m pretty impressed with what this old Xeon CPU can do and pretty happy with this video card so far.

So yeah, if you like this kind of stuff, be sure to subscribe and leave a comment below on what you think about this build. I have a bunch of other videos coming up as well with some other stuff, so yeah, stay tuned.