“I will destroy you!” is one of Morbo’s oft-used lines in Futurama, and I have to say that naming my new gaming PC after him was a good decision.

The Offer

Months ago, when Chris and I first started talking about me getting involved with Angle of Attack, the issue of recording flight videos came up pretty quickly. You see, while I was flying in X-Plane regularly, I was flying on a Mac. While my trusty circa 2009, 24” iMac, Flexo, has been an excellent workstation, he was never intended to be a gaming machine, and consequently his video card with a scant 256MB of RAM was only capable of handling X-Plane—and even then with a rather low level of detail. Flexo certainly wasn’t up to snuff for flying around the skies in FSX, with the level of detail and beauty to which the AoA subscribers had become accustomed.

The Dilemma

This left me with a dilemma: I could either turn down the opportunity to do flight videos and miss out on what would surely be an exciting and fulfilling experience with AoA, or I could save up and start figuring out what kind of machine I could build that would handle FSX with aplomb. I think you already know on which route I decided.

Some Background

Now, lest you think I’m some Mac fanboy, let me point out that I’ve been using PCs since the 80s, and was already on the Internet and administering UNIX boxes before the graphical Web even took off. (No, I’m not 60, I’m just 35.) I also used to run an IT company that built PCs and servers for high-end clients like web hosting companies and ISPs, and that company grew into a data center provider, where I engineered and built the switching fabric of the data center and was in charge of all HVAC, electrical systems, and internal IT systems. I also saw to the construction of a multi-kilometer fiber-optic ring around downtown Vancouver and personally engineered the campus residence network at one of BC’s largest universities—I’m no stranger to PCs and all their supporting infrastructure.

It’s just that, for the past several years, I had taken a break from the PC world. I’d resigned from my previous post as CTO of the data centre company, and took some time off from IT altogether. At home, I just wanted to have a reliable machine that didn’t take up too much of my time, and after all the years of troubleshooting Windows on my network I decided that I was fed up with Microsoft. On top of that, Mac OS X was now maturing, and seeing as it was loosely derived from FreeBSD, my old-school favourite OS, I made the switch. Since then, I’ve gone through four Macs, a bunch of iPods, iPhones and an iPad, and have enjoyed them all immensely. For gaming, I just stuck to consoles in the meantime.

The Solution

Then, given my opportunity with AoA, I needed a way to run FSX with TrackIR, a yoke and pedals and various other goodies, along with X-Plane and some video editing software to produce the videos that would be recorded on the machine. It was then that I decided to catch myself up on what had changed since I last used a PC regularly, and spent months studying what were the latest and greatest platforms, devices, and accessories, and toiled for some time to put together my dream machine—a PC gaming rig custom-tailored with the necessary power for flight simulators, capacity for video editing, and silence for voice-over work.

Black is the new black.

Coming Up

Over the next several days, I’ll be sharing with you the process I undertook to get myself back up to speed with the PC state of the art, decide on which peripherals would provide me with the best, most immersive experience, and determine exactly which pieces to assemble into my biggest, baddest PC ever. While I won’t be reviewing every piece of hardware, I’ll be sharing with you my decision-making process used in selecting them, providing you with some flight sim specific considerations, as well as giving limitations of the hardware and software I discovered along the way. I’ll also be sharing my trials and tribulations, of which I’m sure there will be a few, in getting all the software configured and running smoothly. Hopefully, my experience and research will help those of you that are considering building new flight simulator PCs for yourselves.

In the next installment of Building Morbo, I’ll go over the final parts list and introduce you to the machine, discuss some of the primary requirements for building a flight simming computer, and share how those requirements shaped my initial, big-picture decisions.

Throttle On!

Jordan Krushen

Photos by Valerie Wyns

Let us know what you think—if you have any suggestions or requests for certain subject matter, let us know!