hello
i have been gone awhile because my old super puter died in june with all my 2/3 complete DURANGO & SILVERTON SUPERDETAILED DEM ROUTE content inside it can be saved (transfered) but i now have the funds to build a really powerful system so what should i get?
BUDGET 3,000 - 4,000
THINK THE BEST!
THINK OVERKILL
THINK BEST FRAME RATES POSSIBLE
whats the best power supply?
what is the best processor?
whats the most ram?
whats the best new video card?
what else is needed for "CLASSIC"?
HELP ME PLEASE
long lost john
Let's start with the basics. If a computer runs too hot then the failure rate goes up, this is generic any sort of game console, computer, Unix server etc. Most off the shelf computers are designed to keep the system cool enough when the cpu runs about 5% utilisation. If you are word processing, web browsing etc. that's about what you use on average. Trainz will run one core at 100% cpu utilisation. The cpu will run much hotter than normal usage.
If you look at the cooler reviews at tomshardware you can see the temperature difference at different cpu utilisation.
So the optimum Trainz computer is one that has components that Trainz can make use of but no more since anything extra means more heat inside the case and lower reliability.
Computers like to be fed clean power, put an APC UPS in between the power socket and the computer.
Some bright spark sat down and looked at what you see when you look at a screen for HDTV. The idea was to show as much as possible that the eyes could register but to keep the processing and bandwidths down by eliminating unimportant bits of the screen. They spent a lot of time and money working out that 16:9 is the optimum shape. So wide screen is better. 1440 by 900 on an LCD screen at 60 hz needs roughly 16% more resources than 1024 by 768 by 75hz so a good 2ms lcd screen makes sense. SAMSUNG do a reasonable 19 inch one 906BW . 2ms is the sort of refresh rate, manufactures can be very creative when measuring this 2ms is very good, 25 ms is very bad for Trainz but fine for word processing. Stick to major brand names in monitors, even HP and the reviewers end up with different numbers one HP monitor came up as 15-25 ms when measured. There are only about three major LCD manufacturers, Samsung and I think LG are two, practically every one else is a relabel so read more expensive.
If you increase the screen size above 1440 by 900 accept your frames per second will decrease.
Trainz can use a maximum of 2 gigs of memory, 32 bit XP can use roughly 2.7 gigs of memory, anything else is wasted, the addresses are used for other hardware bits so 3 gigs memory is good. XP will hide in the memory above the 2 gig mark. These days most memory modules are 1 gig so you may end up with 4 gigs.
Having said that there is a way that a new version of Trainz could access 4 gigs of memory under Vista 64 bit in the future so a motherboard that can be expanded to 8 gigs might be sensible.
The way that the chips are made makes a difference. The closer the components are the shorter the distance the electrons have to travel. So in general 45 nm fabrication is better than 90 nm fabrication. It's trickier to build but will give off less heat (the limiting factor on all computers) so it can have a higher refresh rate. You can get more cpus out of the same silicon wafer as well so its cheaper to make as well.
AMD made some good designs but the dual core and the new 45 nm cpus from Intel run cooler and faster, see Tomshardware .com. Here you have to make some guesses but a good motherboard that takes a dual today will probably take a quad in the future should Trainz start to run on more than one core. 45 nm parts should be more easily overclocked if you wish to go this route. Look for specialist gaming boards with extra cooling on the northbridge etc its not only the cpu that gets hotter when you over clock.
Technically DDR3 main memory can be faster than DDR2. This is very new and at the moment much more expensive than DDR2. You will need to look closely at the benefits and costs here at the moment.
On video memory Maddy came up with a figure of 700 mb in textures for one scene, for optimum performance 700 mb of memory would be nice. ATI's new cards are built on 55 nm as against 65 nm for the nVidea cards so they run cooler however the nVidia cards are faster at the moment. nVidia have just released the 8800 GT with 512 mb of memory, look for a new card from them with more memory shortly.
The case will be important, cooling is important, overclocking means more heat so more noise for cooling fans. Quiet cases that cool well are not the cheapest, many come with a very reasonable power supply built in.
That should be enough to think about for the moment.
Note nVidia in expected to bring out a new video card with more the 512 mb of memory and Intel is about to announce their new 45 nm cpus. Buying this week will get you lower performance products.
Cheerio John