Maingear's latest PC is built for flight simulators
It supports triple monitors and can handle a yoke, throttle, rudder pedals and panels.
Maingear has teamed with flight sim outfit Honeycomb Aeronautical on a desktop PC designed for flight simulator nerds. "Honeycomb by Maingear" is built to handle the complex demands of airplane sims, with triple-monitor support and a built-in USB hub to handle your yoke, rudder pedals, throttle, panels and other sundry sim hardware. It comes installed with X-Plane 11 and everything is set up to ensure a plug-and-play experience, the companies say.
Despite the death of Microsoft Flight Simulator almost a decade ago, the flight-sim community has never been more active. They're increasingly popular these days for pilot training, too -- as a private pilot, I can verify that good-quality SIMs can keep your skills sharp and help you prepare for tricky cross-country flights and instrument approaches. That said, setting up a flight sim can be a pain, so the bundle makes sense for a lot of users.
The PC is a variant of Maingear's Vybe desktop model, embellished with a Honeycomb logo. The base model, which starts at $1,499, will come with an NVIDIA RTX 2060 video card and Intel Core i5 CPU that should provide plenty of performance for a typical flight sim. It also includes pedals and Honeycomb's pilot-designed yoke, which which the uses "genuine aerospace components and the same internal mechanics used in premium certified simulators approved by the FAA for flight training use," Honeycomb says. There's no word yet on when the bundle will come to market.
