New STEM training program hardware questions

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We are an aviation based not for profit in the St Louis area. We are conducting a STEM training program for 25 high school aged students this summer. (2 sessions of 25 each). We want to expose these beginners to aviation and hope to use your software for that part of the class. Our students will need only the simplest scenarios/planes as they are all beginners.

I am tasked with preparing the technology for this effort, which will involve loaning each student the hardware/software necessary to complete the course. I was thinking laptops because of the remote/dispersed nature of the students. This is a remote learning class.

After reading the forum a bit, I see that laptops are not really recommended. Desktops will be an issue with distributing and setting up the devices at student homes (they should be able to do most of this).

So, recognizing that we will need only the simplest of setups, here are a few questions:

1. Will an earlier version be more applicable to our students and what we are trying to accomplish? I'm thinking of lower, more achievable
hardware requirements. I have to source, set up, and deploy 26 of these.

2. Can we reduce the load on the hardware by restricting our scenarios to make them as simple as possible?

3. Could the following machine work on a basic very simple scenario level. Assume the following would be upgraded to 16 gb ram
AMD Ryzen 5 5600H 3.3GHz Processor; NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 4GB GDDR6; 8GB DDR4-3200 RAM; 512GB Solid State Drive

Thanks in advance for advice!

[Sky_King]

This is my opinion answers (in order of your questions):

1. For reason 3 below, I would recommend version 4.5 rather than 5.
2. Absolutely and you will probably need to since your VRAM is only 4Gb.
3. Yes, v4.5 is DX11 based and has less VRAM requirements that v5.x does.

Do you know what version of Windows you will be running? If it is Win7, you won't be able to run versions higher than 4.5 without updating to Win10 (due to DX12 being built-into Win10). 4.5 runs fine with Win7 (if that is what your laptops require).

Be happy to help a non-profit at anytime! Feel free to post anymore questions......

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Thanks for the quick reply!

These machines will be purchased for this effort and hopefully this will be an ongoing STEM training program.

The machines will have Win 10 Home on them, as that is what they come with. We could upgrade them to Pro, but prefer not to with this many to set up in a few weeks.

I am not familiar with the functionality of the versions of this software. Further, I am not the instructor for this class.

Hopefully someone can help me with the advantages/disadvantages to going with v4 or V3 even.