Hardware

Our friends and partners, CockpitPHD today released their latest hardware model for the flight sim community. The INT + EXT Lights Box will allow you to control the lighting of your aircraft with this plug and play device that is compatible with both FSUIPC and FSX LINDA. The 26.5 cm x 17 cm x 5 cm box allows you to control your exterior lights including the strobe, beacon, nav, taxi lights and more. For your internal switches, you’ll find seat belts, no smoking and the emergency exit lights.

You can buy it now from CockpitPHD for $99.99 which includes free worldwide shipping and a 30-day money back guarantee. Of course, as you’re reading this on FSElite, you’ll be entilted to 15% discount if you click the banner to the side!

You can read out Developer Month interview with the team to see how the create and design their new products.

We’ve kept a close eye on recent NVIDIA drivers lately, especially after some fixes and posts from Lockheed Martin regarding leaks from some more recent drivers. Thankfully, the community are reporting that the latest drivers 381.89 are working extremely well for most users after testing.

Mike Moskovich on Facebook also described it as a “376.33 driver replacement”.  Another user of the social media site, Leon van Dijk, posted a screenshot of VAS usage whilst flying from FlyTampa’s AMS to FSDT’s JFK with the PMDG 747 and ASN and it shows that there was no leakage of VAS using the new drivers.

Afonso Vale has also posted his feedback regarding the new drivers, again showing no VAS leak.

I’ve personally just downloaded the new drivers and will spend the weekend testing. Fingers crossed this is a good fix for users using new drivers in the future. We’ll be sure to keep an eye on the situation and report back.

You can download the latest drivers from NVIDIA’s website.

Nvidia released a driver update for their GeForce graphics cards, version 378.49 which was reported to leak VAS. They later released another update, version 378.66 which fixed the leak but still had P3D running high VAS usage. The only solution was to roll back to version 376.33 and hope Nvidia fixed the issue.

After being a little annoyed, I actually took it upon myself to simply report this issue to Nvidia using their forums. Prepar3d doesn’t get much, if any, attention in the GeForce forums so it isn’t any surprise the problem existed in two driver builds. After posting the issue with links to the Prepar3d forums I was asked to try the hotfix 378.72 driver to see if the problem was fixed.

I’m happy to say the hotfix driver solved everything and appears to be stable with P3D! In addition, I am actually seeing better VAS results than I was on the 378.66 build. So, if you’d like to update your drivers, go ahead and grab the 378.72 build and see how it goes for you.

Cockpit PHD are currently having a great sale where you can buy their Boeing 737 Pro Set for Dual Saitek Throttle Quadrant for just $99.99. This is a great deal, especially if you’re looking at improving your immersion when flying the PMDG 737 at home. Seems like a great deal for what you’re getting, especially if you’re after more budget hardware.

The guys offer FREE worldwide shipping along with a 30 day money back guarantee so there’s not much that can go wrong.

We’ll be having some stuff from the guys to review soon to give you a better insight, but for now, take a look around and see what you think.

Laminar Research has released the Minimum and Recommended system requirements for X-plane 11.

Minimum

• Intel Core CPU, 2 or more cores, 3.0ghz or faster. Or an AMD Equivalent
• 8GB of RAM
• Nvidia Direct X 11 capable Video card. Or an AMD, or Intel with at least 512MB VRAM

Recommended

• Intel Core i5 6600k at 3.5ghz or better
• 16-24GB of RAM or more
• Nvidia Direct X 12 capable video card. Or AMD or Intel with at least 4GB of VRAM
  • GeForce GTX 1070 or better, or Similar AMD card

Supported Video cards

• Nvidia GeForce 400 series or newer.
  • 600 or newer recommended.
• AMD HD5000 or Newer.
  • HD7000 with GCN Core or newer recommended.
• Intel HD2000 or newer.
  • HD4000 or newer recommended.

Supported Operating System

• OSX 10 or Newer
• Windows 7, 8 ,or 10 at 64bit
• Linux: “While X-Plane 11 will run on Linux, we don’t provide support for specific distributions; if you want to run on Linux, you will need to try X-Plane on your distribution to see if it is compatible. With that in mind, we have developers using Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04 LTS successfully. For Linux, we require the proprietary driver from AMD or NVIDIA to run X-Plane. You may be able to get X-Plane to run on the Mesa/Gallium driver with an Intel GPU, but this is unsupported.  We absolutely do not support the fully open source drivers for AMD and NVIDIA.”

Even the minimum requirements are quite steep; As to why this is so we do not know. X-Plane 11 is expected to be released later this month. And just as a reminder if you purchase X-plane 10 from their website you can get X-plane 11 for free.

GoFlight has released The VantEdge Yoke System. Aimed at the higher end of the market, it is made of medal instead of plastic and has improved clamps for desk connection stability. It is priced at $550 USD. It’s way out of my price range. It there anyone out there that would consider using this?