I love my trusted Fractal Design Define XL, but building gets harder with every upgrade I do and it got really cramped in there.

That’s why I decided to go from big to even bigger. The Define XL is already a big case, but the Corsair 900D which I picked is even bigger. Because of that I did some planning in Sketchup to see if everything fits and for an easy way to measure needed cable length and how much wood I need to build the base construction:

In the next step I did some airflow and fan placement planning. My Fractal case sits under my desk right now, which is not perfect for cooling and dust. The new case doesn’t even fit under the table and I placed it more openly. This allows to pull in air from 3 sides and push it out at the top. I think this placement will work very nicely:

The 900D will make an excellent candidate for full custom water cooling in the future. I will not go that way right now though.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on 2 brand new GTX 1080 custom cards.

The beasts are from Palit and are heavily overclocked out of the box. Boost clock goes up to 2 Ghz and the GDDR5X memory runs at 10500 Mhz. The model number is: GeForce^® GTX 1080 GameRock Premium Edition.

To make the upgrade worthwhile I added another 32 GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD:

All went very well and the cards are running like crazy. Not a single crash or other issue so far. The big triple slot coolers keep the cards cool even with limited spacing and SLI cooking.

I have to say: Well done Palit, this cards rock^^

Fancy NVIDIA HB SLI Bridge is already ordered and will be put to hopefully good use soon.

Got it yesterday just after release. Download went quick and maxed out my connection @11 MB/s. I might have been lucky because the website went down soon after.

Did the install and initial test flights yesterday. The result was very good VAS management and smooth operation.

I tried to get it into an OOM with London area EGLL + EGLC, not happened => very good!

Today I added more addons and kept trying to crash it… no chance it seems it isn’t going down this easily. So I started pushing, all sliders to the right, full fat ORBX England, Rex 4 + Soft Clouds, nothing… wow. It seems LM really improved a lot on VAS management, this is very good news.

PMDG already released updated installers, so I moved the 777 and 737 to P3D v3. Dialed back some sliders to get out of single digit FPS numbers… yes it seems FPS is the limiting factor now and not VAS! yay!

For the time being I got the following addons working:

Active Sky Next – official beta update for v3

PMDG 777 + 737 – official installers

FSUIPC – working, installed with a warning (which I ignored), some key binds are missing (trim inc/dec, throttle inc/dec) + crashes on P3D exit

EzDok – working, world camera broken, manual copy + config edit

ORBX – working, libs need official update, added v2 folder to v3 via mklink junctions + config copy/edit

Airports – working, just added to scenery

Rex 4 Texture Direct + Soft Clouds – working, just changed path

Virtual Avionics 777 CDU – working, simple copy + paste

Spad Next – working, no change needed

Result: Working PMDG 777 with great scenery! I will do some long haul flights tomorrow to validate the VAS management, but I’m very positive. So far the simulation is extremely stable and smooth like never before. Even hammering it didn’t result in an OOM error… PERFECT!

Enjoying ORBX FTX Norway in my Majestic Dash 8. Active Sky Next + Rex 4 are working very well today: