I'd tend to wait if you can. With the RTX3000 series being rolled out now and AMD RDNA2 being rolled out next month you will have better GPU options coming.

Your other option could be to buy a box without a GPU and put a cheaper second hand GPU in in as a placeholder until next year when the 3000 series should be more plentiful. This is basically what I did a while ago, I bought a cheapish RX580 card to play now but will upgrade to a GTX3070 when things settle down and prices are stable.

It's an exciting time in GPU land but also a painful one. With CV19 and new GPU generations being released supply shortages are pretty rampant.

I fear I may have opened Pandoras box and I should move this to a separate thread - don't wanna hijack this one!

mentalinc: Suggest you read this https://www.techspot.com/article/2085-microsoft-flight-simulator-2020/

Thx, thats the text version of the video that @JWR posted. Very helpful to have the web version - saves me trying to scrub to the right parts of the video! :)

RTX3080 - is a lot of card, and a wad of cash. I'm not a hardcore gamer, just want a system that will run MSFS 2020 reasonably well. I'm likely to direct that cash towards yoke/pedals/4k monitor instead of more gfx power.. but the idea of getting a '3080 ready' system and a used 1070 or similar is very interesting...

My primary use case is to support IRL flight training, area familiarisation flights, and developing muscle memory.

Well, I dilly dallied for months and finally went out and bought a gaming laptop yesterday.

ASUS TUF FA506IV-AL043 ($2,189 from Just Laptops)

Ryzen 4800H, RTX 2060/6G, 16G RAM (3200), 512 NVME SSD + 1TB Storage

Installed MSFS 2020 (std version) via Steam, and despite the game crashing between lessons, everything looks good and runs fine on Very High settings. The game is generally pretty slow to load, and to load-in - it's not obvious to me why that's the case.

Just KB + Mouse controls so far, which I do not recommend. Rudder control is awful and s/w compensates for variable pitch/yaw by making keyboard inputs 'sticky'... which feels like some kind of auto-trim.

I'll try with my PS4 controller later, but will be keen to look around at options for yoke/pedals.

Steam version: Do NOT do a 'verify game files' inside steam. I'm now downloading 100GB of game files again because this deletes the game files! Lots of people have fallen into the same trap.

NZ Scenery - any word on getting 3rd party NZ scenery? I had a look at Godzone, but nothing there except a post from Feb saying 'we will see what happens'.

The Sky Tower looks like a normal high rise building. At least major land marks are discernable.