Looking at upgradeing from asus eah4870 512mb

[macneil]

At the moment I have a asus eah4870 but I woul like to upgrade to something better as the card I have now is not handling trainz very good. What would be a good card in the $250-$350 Australian price range.

 

[fran1]

It may be better to post your system details as your card might not be the only bottleneck.
I did the same a while ago and found out my processor (cpu) wasn't up to much.

 

[macneil]

Hear they are.

CPU Speed : ~2.40 GHZ : Passed
CPU supports SSE instructions : Passed
System Memory : 3326 MB : Passed
Hard Drive Space: 156.42 GB Free : Passed
OpenGL : Version 3.3 : Passed
DirectX : Version 10.0 or later : Passed
Desktop Mode : 32 bit colors : Passed
Card Type : ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series : Passed
Video Driver's Age : 3 months old : Passed
AGP Memory : 1407MB Free : Passed
Total Video Mem : 1913MB : Passed
Stencil Buffer : 8 Bits : Passed
Multi-Texturing : 8 Textures : Passed
Texture Compression DXT : Passed
Texture Combiners : Passed
Vertex Shaders : Version 1.1 : Passed
Pixel Shaders : Version 2.0 : Passed
Bump Mapping : Passed
Spherical Environment Mapping : Passed
Cubic Environment Mapping : Passed
Vertex Buffers : Passed
NVIDIA driver compatibility : Passed
Monitor: No compatability problems detected : Passed

 

[fran1]

Is it a core duo CPU ? Also is the card AGP slot or PCI express, should be the latter.
Trainz needs DX 9c, have you got that ?

 

[shadowarrior]

Go to this link and download Cpu-Z. Run it, and in the About tab, create a Text report. Copy paste that report in here.

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

Also what Power Supply do you use? (Brand and Watt?)

 

[macneil]

Thanks for the help the report didnt fit in the reply box it was to long so hear are the bits you needed its a intel core 2 quad q6600 its pci express trainz diag says I have direct x 11 and I have a antec 650w power supply.

 

[shadowarrior]

and what are the details under the tab Memory?

ddr? ddr2? or ddr3?
Size?
Channels#?

Edit:
Oh and also, what resolution are you playing the game in.

 

[macneil]

Type ddr2

Size 4096

Channels dual

Resolution 1023 768

 

[shadowarrior]

hmmm....
you seem to have a good enough graphics card, decent CPU and good enough RAM to play Trainz.

What about your hard drives? The drive where Trainz is installed, is it IDE or SATA? And what size is it?

 

[macneil]

I think its a sata I have a sata cable slot at the back of my computer and its a 500gb if the graphics card is not the problem and its the hard drive could that explain why the computer is slow at loading and opening c drive .?

 

[djt]

I think its a sata I have a sata cable slot at the back of my computer and its a 500gb if the graphics card is not the problem and its the hard drive could that explain why the computer is slow at loading and opening c drive .?

Or the fact that it just might be time for a fresh OS install. What’s the condition of the OS?

 

[shadowarrior]

Sata drives are connected with thin red cables to the motherboard, while the IDEs are connected via the broader cables.

Yep. Different hard drives have different spin rates...aka how fast can they read and process data. So IDE drives have the slowest. And even in SATA, bigger the drives, more time they would take to start up your computer or launch an application.

Some people suggest installing your operating system (C drive) on a faster drive, the Western Digital Black drives for example.

Having said that, one of my computer has its operating system on a IDE drive, the other on a Sata 1tb drive Western Digital Green drive.

Check if you have excessive programs running in your background.

Try something.
Click Start, click Run, type MSCONFIG, click on the tab Startup.
Uncheck all the boxes there, (Disable All), click Apply, Click Ok, and restart computer.

See if it speeds up your computer's loading times, and has any improvement in running Trainz.

Those programmes you unticked are applications/programmes which load up when your computer boots up.

You can always go back to MSCONFIG and then StartUp tab, and tick the ones which you recognize as needed.

But remember, startups programs like Microsoft Office, etc doesn't really need to be there, you can always manually start MS Office from Program files.

If you see something which you are unsure about, you can keep them ticked. (However, some unsure ones in that list could be potential spywares running on your system)

Let me know how it goes. I'll be online for a while.

 

[macneil]

Windows runs good havnt noticed any problems but when I play games it can take a while to load and game play is jerky and sometimes when I zoom out and go to a different part of the map the textures don't ahowproperly for a few seconds while playing I use a program called gamebooster which shutsdown unneeded programs and that helps a bit.Thank you everyone so far for your advice.

 

[lewisner]

Macneil if you download (free) Belarc Advisor it will scan your PC and give you full details of it. http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

 

[clam1952]

Try using DirectX instead of OpenGL which these days doesn't seem to work well on some cards, or if already using DirectX try OpenGL.

 

[fran1]

Off the track a bit here, when did you last clean the inside of the computer? Could be an accumulation of dust etc causing GPU to overheat a bit.

 

[lewisner]

Off the track a bit here, when did you last clean the inside of the computer? Could be an accumulation of dust etc causing GPU to overheat a bit.

With my old computer I didn't clean it for about 2 years. When I came to the CPU I decided to remove the heatsink and found brown dust packed in ilke cotton wool.

 

[djt]

Windows runs good havnt noticed any problems but when I play games it can take a while to load and game play is jerky and sometimes when I zoom out and go to a different part of the map the textures don't ahowproperly for a few seconds while playing I use a program called gamebooster which shutsdown unneeded programs and that helps a bit.Thank you everyone so far for your advice.

It runs good as far as you know, right? When is the last time you reformatted with a fresh OS with the latest updates and drivers for your hardware?

Other than games what else is the machine used for, internet surfing maybe?

If the OS is healthy and was properly installed you shouldn’t have to use “gamebooster”, unneeded programs shouldn’t be starting to begin with.

 

[shaneturner12]

Apologies if I offend anyone here, but Game Booster also is able to stop certain Windows services which can slow it down (including on Vista/7, the service that deals with the fancy graphics etc)

Shane

 

[macneil]

I cleaned the inside about a month ago I had the dust problem causing overheating once before I have not done a reformat before but I always keep drivers up to date the windows came with the computer already installed.