I fancy a new computer - thoughts?

A good steel case.

Keeping things quiet is important to me, so in general the weight is important, the heavier it is the quieter it is. I'm not interested in blue leds lighting up the interior or plastic panels on the side.

Mine will sit on the floor and not move for five years or so so I think I'll stick to a conventional case without a plastic panel on the side.

There are two components to the price of a case the design and the cost to build. In general the larger the number of cases of a given design the lower the design cost per case and the lower the cost of production. So I prefer as mainstream as I can get provided it meets functional requirements.

Aluminum cases are light in weight so nosier and more suited to carrying around and carry a premium price.


Hi John.

Accordingly with what you said, I think you'll like this case. Take a look to this one:

http://www.hares-sistema.com.ar/catalogo/product_info.php?products_id=67

Regards.
John.
 
That said, there are ATI 'issues' with Trainz. There are 'pop-up' issues with draw distances in TS10 and I'm still not sure whether this is linked to ATI cards or not.

Paul


The LOD/scenery loading issue is present with both Nvidia and ATI and has to do with the game engine not the video card, both my 5870 and GTX 285 display this issue.

One thing I have noticed is that in OpenGL the scenery loading seems to be smoother but the frame rates are usually half of what I get when running in DirectX.
 
Keeping things quiet is important to me, so in general the weight is important, the heavier it is the quieter it is. I'm not interested in blue leds lighting up the interior or plastic panels on the side.

Mine will sit on the floor and not move for five years or so so I think I'll stick to a conventional case without a plastic panel on the side.

There are two components to the price of a case the design and the cost to build. In general the larger the number of cases of a given design the lower the design cost per case and the lower the cost of production. So I prefer as mainstream as I can get provided it meets functional requirements.

Aluminum cases are light in weight so nosier and more suited to carrying around and carry a premium price.


Hi John.

Accordingly with what you said, I think you'll like this case. Take a look to this one:

http://www.hares-sistema.com.ar/catalogo/product_info.php?products_id=67

Regards.
John.

I'm a minimum risk sort of person and I'm looking more for mainstream products. I have an Antec Sonnata at the moment so I'm familiar with Antec. Their power supplies have a good reputation and the Sonnata III comes with one of their 500 watt power supplies. I'll use US newegg prices for comparison but the current price is $120 complete with power supply compared to your suggestion of $105 without power supply. I'm still interested in value for money since this is my personal cash.

If I'd gone with an nVidia card I wouldn't have been able to use the Sonnata because of the power supply. In which case it would probably have been an Antec P183 at $149 plus $80 for an Antec earthworks 650 watt power supply.

Don't forget I get dinged higher prices in Canada and wanting to get everything from a single supplier means newegg.ca was ruled out because they don't carry the same range as newegg.com.

NCIX.com is quite reasonable and have volunteered to assemble it for $50 so at least I know the cpu, motherboard and memory will work.

Cheerio John
 
Could you not push to a 5870 John? I've got one and, touch wood, it works great. That said, there are ATI 'issues' with Trainz. There are 'pop-up' issues with draw distances in TS10 and I'm still not sure whether this is linked to ATI cards or not.

Paul

The power requirements would have been a little bit too close to the Sonnata's power supply. So upping it would be an extra $100 on the case and power supply, plus a difference of $180 between the 5850 and the 5870 that's looking at brands of 5870 I recognise. So is it worth the extra $300 plus the higher hydro cost? and that's an interesting question. I'm not a believer in at least 60 frames per second is necessary in order to match the refresh rate of the screen. It makes no sense to me if you are getting 70 frames per second that doesn't line up with 60 mhz refresh rate either. Also the frame rate with Trainz bounces all over the place anyway.

The other really interesting question is how much difference the hard drive makes. Since the new machine will have SDD, Raptor and a big slow Samsung I think the first thing to do is install TS2010 on all three in turn then run the same ECML session and note the frame rates.

I accept that a 5870 will work very well, but I'm guessing that the 5850 with the raptor, 64 bit operating system so 4 gigs of memory for Trainz and the quad core cpu will be enough to get reasonable frame rates.

Then you get the ATI /nVidia question, well I think I'll be running directx anyway for the higher frame rates and the directx standard is fairly black and white and vendor neutral so I'll live with the results. Now if nVidia had a video card with the same sort of performance and power consumption as the ATI 3850 and near the same price I would have gone nVidia.

Thanks for the thought.

Cheerio John
 
Their power supplies have a good reputation and the Sonnata III comes with one of their 500 watt power supplies.

Not all Antec PSU’s have a “good reputation” some have been junk. Some of the ones that have been decent in the past have been based on SeaSonic PSU’s which are very good.

Here is an excellent source of information on power supplies –

http://www.jonnyguru.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=3

http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Review_Cat&recatnum=13


It makes no sense to me if you are getting 70 frames per second that doesn't line up with 60 mhz refresh rate either. Also the frame rate with Trainz bounces all over the place anyway.


It’s never going to “line up with 60 mhz refresh rate” (it’s 60Hz not “60 mhz” by the way), that’s the purpose of v-sync. You want a frame rate that consistently matches or is slightly above the refresh rate of the monitor if you are going to see a benefit from v-sync.
 
If you don't mind me piping in with a question.....I'm shopping a new machine right now so I can come back to Trainz after awhile and have a question on HD's if I may. I'm probably going to go with 2 drives as I expect a lot of storage besides Trainz, I will probably be using Flight Sim, some strategy games as well as storing a lot of music and photos. I am considering a 750GB-1TB second drive for storage. What size is recommended for the system drive? And would all programs run from it including games, or should they be run on the second drive?
 
If you don't mind me piping in with a question.....I'm shopping a new machine right now so I can come back to Trainz after awhile and have a question on HD's if I may. I'm probably going to go with 2 drives as I expect a lot of storage besides Trainz, I will probably be using Flight Sim, some strategy games as well as storing a lot of music and photos. I am considering a 750GB-1TB second drive for storage. What size is recommended for the system drive? And would all programs run from it including games, or should they be run on the second drive?

Boc,

Go for the largest you can afford. The 2TB are around $149.00 right now, which is pretty next to nothing compared to the size of the drives with what you have to pay for them. http://www.newegg.com/Store/Category.aspx?Category=15&name=Hard-Drives

In my system I have 3 1TB SATA drives. One drive for the system, another drive for backup data, and one drive for Trainz.

John
 
If you don't mind me piping in with a question.....I'm shopping a new machine right now so I can come back to Trainz after awhile and have a question on HD's if I may. I'm probably going to go with 2 drives as I expect a lot of storage besides Trainz, I will probably be using Flight Sim, some strategy games as well as storing a lot of music and photos. I am considering a 750GB-1TB second drive for storage. What size is recommended for the system drive? And would all programs run from it including games, or should they be run on the second drive?

I have found that formatting your C: partition as FAT-32 and keeping it around 80 Gb (and keeping it at least 1/3 empty) seems to work well for performance under Windows XP. I do believe the FAT32 system has slightly less overhead than NTFS and I've noticed a difference on low-end machines. Note, however, when I refer to "low-end", I mean a machine that's several years out-of-date yet still fully capable of running TS2010 like butter. YMMV.

As for the storage drive, well, it really doesn't matter. Trainz with a huge amount of content might run about 100-150Gb or so. FS maybe a couple dozen gigs at most (I'm stuck on FS9 as FSX is a hot mess.) Your music*, etc. will probably take up far more space than your sims and games.

*If you're backing up your own music, please be aware of the differences between lossless and lossy compression, and the implications the latter have on the future.
 
I'm probably going to go with 2 drives as I expect a lot of storage besides Trainz, I will probably be using Flight Sim, some strategy games as well as storing a lot of music and photos. I am considering a 750GB-1TB second drive for storage. What size is recommended for the system drive? And would all programs run from it including games, or should they be run on the second drive?


The usual recommendation when setting the machine up to run performance applications is to use one fast drive for the OS and another separate fast drive for applications.

Although this guide is geared toward setting up a system to run FSX the recommendations work for other games also. One thing I’ve found over the last few years is if it works for that hideous game engine FSX uses, then it will work with every other sim/game I have also.

Scroll down to the section “ABOUT STORAGE PERFORMANCE” -

http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=29041



Right now with SSD technology still rapidly improving and with the SATA III spec right around the corner it’s kind of a bad time to invest money in new hard drives.

With the exception of the Marvell 6.0Gb/s controller on some of the recent Intel chipset based motherboards (which I look at as just a temporary solution) we still don’t have native SATA III support yet, which is something else to think about. That is supposedly going to come in the form of new chipset revisions from Intel one of which will be the X68 with the new ICH11 (a SATA III controller).

AMD’s new 890 FX chipset will also feature a 6.0Gb/s controller and should be out soon.

I’m not sure what you are using for a motherboard or the rest of your specs but I did see that Western Digital has 6.0Gb/s hard drives available -

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0150014 50001306 1035950147&name=SATA 6.0Gb/s


If you are going to use a motherboard with a SATA II controller I’d recommend using a WD VelociRaptor 150GB drive for the OS and may be one of WD’s 64MB cache, TB + drives for applications/storage.

I haven’t jumped on the SSD bandwagon yet (still waiting for SATA III) and I’m currently getting great performance with both of my sim/gaming setups using the 150GB VelociRaptor’s for the operating systems and 300GB VelociRaptor’s for applications (sim/games).
 
I have found that formatting your C: partition as FAT-32

Definitely not recommended.

Note, however, when I refer to "low-end", I mean a machine that's several years out-of-date yet still fully capable of running TS2010 like butter.
That would highly depend on what the user considers “running like butter”, lol.
 
Definitely not recommended.


That would highly depend on what the user considers “running like butter”, lol.

Granted, I could do like yourself and pay several thousand dollars to get roughly same level of performance I get from my $400 POS.
 
Granted, I could do like yourself and pay several thousand dollars to get roughly same level of performance I get from my $400 POS.


“Roughly the same level of performance from your $400 POS”, I highly doubt it.

Let’s see some examples of your “level of performance” with TS2010, FS9, RailWorks or any other sim/games you might have.

Care to post some screen shots?
 
If you don't mind me piping in with a question.....I'm shopping a new machine right now so I can come back to Trainz after awhile and have a question on HD's if I may. I'm probably going to go with 2 drives as I expect a lot of storage besides Trainz, I will probably be using Flight Sim, some strategy games as well as storing a lot of music and photos. I am considering a 750GB-1TB second drive for storage. What size is recommended for the system drive? And would all programs run from it including games, or should they be run on the second drive?

How are you going to back things up? You have two conflicting requirements one is high performance for the operating system and demanding SIMs the other is cheap disk space.

Are you going Dell or build it yourself or even buy the components and get someone such as NCIX.com to put it together for you and install the operating system?

If you go do it yourself, or spec NCIX to do it then you can do something like SSD, or Raptor, plus a large 2 terabyte drive but only if you are going 64 bit Win 7. XP and 2 terabyte drives don't mix well.

The large drives don't perform to badly as they store a fair chunk of data per track, translation you don't need to move the heads as much from track to track so data reads and writes are faster.

Having a fairly small system partition makes sense in that if you suspect the machine is infected with malware it's a lot easier to reformat a small boot disk than reformat a large disk with all your data on it.

Unfortunately putting two partitions on a hard drive means you have two separate zones C: and D: and the head has to move from one zone to the other so you get a performance hit. C:op system, D: application, then back to C:. Track to track is usually given as an average value, but track to adjacent track can be .5 millisecs whilst inner to outer can be 20 milliseconds on a drive that quotes 8 milliseconds average access time.

What you need to do is balance cost against performance. If you have 6 gigs of memory then you'll cache in memory more and do less disk access than if you run with 256 mb of main memory.

It's getting the balance right that's difficult. In general disk access is measured in milliseconds, memory in nanoseconds, there are 10,000 nanos in a milli so hard disk speed can have a greater impact than cpu speed but it depends a bit on the application. Does it use a lot of disk or mainly cpu. For a database server disk speed is much more important than anything else, for a SIM it could be the bottleneck is the video card. PERFMON can help but we don't really have enough data its just educated guesses at the moment.

The new machine should get here in about ten days time if you can wait until then I can run some comparative benchmarks on the different drives.

Cheerio John
 
“Roughly the same level of performance from your $400 POS”, I highly doubt it.

Let’s see some examples of your “level of performance” with TS2010, FS9, RailWorks or any other sim/games you might have.

Care to post some screen shots?

Sure, I'll post screenies when I get home. However, this is not a contest, although some people certainly seem to feel the have to compensate for their, uh, inadequacy with hot rod computers...

I'm only pointing out you can get excellent performance without spending lots of money.

I only run three sims: FS9, TS2010, and MSTS. All run smoothly except TS2010 has been noticeably affected by the SP2 update, which I have to rollback when I get some free time.
 
Sure, I'll post screenies when I get home. However, this is not a contest, although some people certainly seem to feel the have to compensate for their, uh, inadequacy with hot rod computers...

I'm only pointing out you can get excellent performance without spending lots of money.

I only run three sims: FS9, TS2010, and MSTS. All run smoothly except TS2010 has been noticeably affected by the SP2 update, which I have to rollback when I get some free time.

I think I agree you should be able to get reasonable performance in Trainz with an inexpensive machine provided to pick the content and don't max the performance sliders. At $400 though the cost of the operating system even oem starts to take a chunk of the money.

Cheerio John
 
I think I agree you should be able to get reasonable performance in Trainz with an inexpensive machine provided to pick the content and don't max the performance sliders. At $400 though the cost of the operating system even oem starts to take a chunk of the money.

Cheerio John

Let me correct the price then, it cost me about $130 more, IIRC. I was not counting the cost of the OS because I've owned retail copies of XP since 2002.

All my performance sliders are maxed on all my sims, except TS2010, where I keep anti-aliasing about mid-range. However, I didn't notice a performance drop the one time I cranked it all the way to the right, nor did I notice any benefit. Maybe I'll tinker with it again.
 
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Sure, I'll post screenies when I get home. However, this is not a contest, although some people certainly seem to feel the have to compensate for their, uh, inadequacy with hot rod computers...

Lol, what inadequacy, this excuse usually comes from someone who has to justify their computer budget, period, or is upset because someone else has brought better toys to the sand pile.

Computer hardware is a hobby for me and I build high end gaming setups as a side business so wringing out as much performance out of given combination of components is what I do.

Instead of coming up with BS that a $400.00 machine is going to provide “excellent performance” compared to a high end setup why not just come out and say, “I built a machine that I can afford and this is what I get for performance”.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by RRSignal
Sure, I'll post screenies when I get home. However, this is not a contest, although some people certainly seem to feel the have to compensate for their, uh, inadequacy with hot rod computers...

Lol, what inadequacy, this excuse usually comes from someone who has to justify their computer budget, period, or is upset because someone else has brought better toys to the sand pile.

Computer hardware is a hobby for me and I build high end gaming setups as a side business so wringing out as much performance out of given combination of components is what I do.

Instead of coming up with BS that a $400.00 machine is going to provide “excellent performance” compared to a high end setup why not just come out and say, “I built a machine that I can afford and this is what I get for performance”.

That's probably the difference then, many here are more interested in a box that runs Trainz and only Trainz sufficiently well at a reasonable price than go faster pin stripes down the side.

Cheerio John
 
That's probably the difference then, many here are more interested in a box that runs Trainz and only Trainz sufficiently well at a reasonable price than go faster pin stripes down the side.

Cheerio John


Sorry I’m not into “pin stripes”, that’s probably why I choose high quality, conservative cases like the Lian Li and SilverStone’s I mentioned before, no LED fans or “see-through” side panel windows here.

As far as performance goes it the same old story it’s always been with gaming on the PC, if you want to play you’ve got to pay.
 
Lol, what inadequacy, this excuse usually comes from someone who has to justify their computer budget, period, or is upset because someone else has brought better toys to the sand pile.

Computer hardware is a hobby for me and I build high end gaming setups as a side business so wringing out as much performance out of given combination of components is what I do.

Instead of coming up with BS that a $400.00 machine is going to provide “excellent performance” compared to a high end setup why not just come out and say, “I built a machine that I can afford and this is what I get for performance”.

You certainly do have adequacy issues, judging from your posts. In any case, I can get a $400 rig to do for me what takes you $2,000 grand to do. Sorry that you're butthurt but perhaps if you spent less time thinking about the hardware and more time tweaking the system, you wouldn't need to spend so much.

Then again, some people just like to spend money for the illusion that they're getting something better. That's why they'll spend twice as much for a Lexus even though it's really a Toyota.
 
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