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Microsoft is giving away a custom Flight Simulator PC that won’t play Flight Simulator at max settings

Microsoft is giving away a custom Flight Simulator PC that won’t play Flight Simulator at max settings

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Weird vibe, but hey

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If I were the Microsoft marketing executive pitching a once-in-a-lifetime giveaway of an incredible custom-built Flight Simulator PC (via PC Gamer), I would do two things:

1) I would probably make it look like a full jet engine, not half an exposed jet engine, to avoid reminding people how airplanes can rarely (but terrifyingly) fail:

2) I would make sure it has the very best parts on the market, both for wow factor and so my one-of-a-kind Flight Simulator PC can hopefully play the notoriously demanding game at max settings someday.

Weirdly, this PC will come with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 (not a 3080 or 3090!), as well as a Core i7-11700K rather than Intel’s new flagship Core i9-11900K. We recently tested that Core i9 with an RTX 3090, and it still wasn’t enough to hit 60fps in Flight Simulator at max settings, though I imagine the Core i7 won’t be far off our results with its very similar specs.

Does this PC still have great specs? Absolutely. Should you question them if you’re the lucky winner of this Microsoft France / Gigabyte Aorus collab? Definitely not. That RTX 3070 is worth upward of $1,200 all by its lonesome. I’m just telling you what I would do.

Oh, and 3) I would absolutely make that giant fan go all the way around and spin, so it can serve as an epic, brag-worthy case fan for the entire PC.

Speaking of epic Microsoft giveaway items, do you remember the Xbox Series X fridge? Not only is Microsoft actually now putting a real Xbox Series X mini-fridge into production, the company’s apparently going to be designing them from scratch. That’s according to Xbox marketing head Aaron Greenberg, who dropped the tidbit in a Clubhouse room yesterday evening where my colleague Taylor Lyles was listening.