Planning a fully enclosed simpit with built in PC (looking for advice, opinions, and assistance)

[King Radical283]

Hello all, first time posting here and looking for some advice and help. The very instant I became an old person (I am 27) I became fascinated by simulator games (flight sims, space sims, driving sims, trucking sims, and so on), and I have a room opening up in my house soon and in the space I want to build a fully enclosed simulator cockpit with a triple monitor display and my HOTAS and driving wheel both mounted inside. I'm going to pay someone local who actually knows what they are doing when it comes to woodworking to do the physical building as I am not experienced with such things. What I'm looking for here though is some opinions on the PC parts I'll be building into the cockpit and some opinions on the layout of the parts with regards to airflow. I'm going to attach some images from my rough proof of concept in SketchUp as well as the .skp if anyone wants to play around with it. 

 

As far as the PC parts I intend to only really run sim games in it. I have a regular gaming computer that I use to play general gaming titles, this will only be to play sims. In general these are less graphically demanding games, the most graphically intense game I imagine it will be playing is Elite: Dangerous which by this point is a few years old and is generally well optimized in my experience. However on the flip side it will need to drive the three monitor setup without issue so I feel like I need to consider relatively carefully. The three monitors will be 1080p each, not sure the monitor yet but I'm thinking maybe the AOC i2777fq as its slim bezel, the size I'm looking for, and 1080p. My idea for parts so far is as follows: Ryzen 5 1600, GTX 1060 (6gb), 16gb of whatever reputable DDR4 RAM I can find for a good price, and a regular SATA SSD. I've been wanting to try out a Ryzen build and I know that the game I play most, Elite Dangerous, makes pretty good use of multiple threads so the 6 cores might treat it well. But what are peoples thoughts? Is this underpowered for the proposed use? overpowered? I mostly have experience with NVidia GPUs but I'm not opposed to going with an AMD one if anyone thinks that would do better/ has any recommendations. My main concern is hitting 60fps with the triple monitor resolution, so any advice will be welcome. (as you can see there is an additional fourth monitor mounted above which I'm going to make able to fold up and down for additional things outside the game like netflix, spotify, or like a twitch dashboard if streaming but its going to be a small 1400x900 monitor I already have lying around at home that I don't imagine will add much overhead to the system, no pun intended) 

 

The second major piece comes down to airflow and cooling which is where the attached images come in. The model I have worked up in SketchUp is rough and in some areas isn't even scaled right or things are not centered and so on so its just a proof of concept for me to visualize the idea. You can see, however, in the attached image showing the PC internals that I have all the parts mounted to one of the exterior panels, the parts in the model are not the parts listed above, they are basically just random parts of the correct size to show how it would fit in the space. Right now I threw in some full watercooling stuff but in the final build I may just go with an AiO to save money, I just wanted to test fit it and see how the maximum space usage would work out if I went that route. But ultimately my concern is overall airflow and where to add additional fans. Right now I have the fans for the radiator (which I assume would be intakes) as well as a hole for the power supply fan (which is also an intake unless I have been thinking about power supplies very wrong). Where should I place some exhaust fans in this very large compartment so that I'm creating the best airflow design for it? Are any additional intakes needed? No cabling is shown at the moment because I didn't know how to model it basically, but I'm sure with the amount of room I have that wont be a problem. 

 

Lastly some extra things I am planning to do that aren't shown on the model:

1. There should be a mouse and keyboard tray that slides out under the wheel, it is not shown in any detail because I am not competent enough to add it.

2. The chair is going to be mounted on a track like in a car so that you can move it forward and backward to get in and out of the chair (thinking of trying to get an actual car seat and its track from a junkyard and mounting it).

3. There will obviously be a door somewhere to get in and out of the it, and the idea is that on the front the whole lower panel will be on a latch to provide easy access to the PC parts and cabling.

4. Lighting internally will be some type of low profile LED strips that will be enough to see and move around but wont be too bright.

5.I want to do some type of external I/O as well such as just a couple USB ports and an HDMI port on the outside, this is for 2 reasons. One I'd love to be able to hook my pico projector in and let people outside see what was happening in game on the inside (thinking this will be done with a splitter coming off the cable for the center monitor and an HDMI extension cable as the center screen will show most of the action) as well as being able to potentially diagnose problems and stuff from the outside without having to get inside. 

6. Mini fridge for drinks in the open space on the right hand side? Just spitballing here. 

 

Thanks guys! I know this is an ambitious project but I'm going to be saving money and stuff in prep for it till at least November so I have time to get all this hammered out. 

PS: Also as I said the model is pretty rough, if anyone out there has significant SketchUp Skills and would be willing to turn it into something professional looking and properly scaled that I can actually use as plans for the physical build I would be willing to pay some reasonable price for the work. Message me and we can talk about it. 

 

PPS: .skp was too big to upload so here's a google drive link