PC upgrade soon

[jbanetman]

Hi all, came back to Trainz, and now considering if my 1 year old pc should get an upgrade. Thinking about getting Trainz 12 soon. I currently have an Intel i5-750 cpu at 3.3 ghz, 4 gig DDR3 1600 ram,GTX 460 1 gig video, 600 Watt power supply,and 2 Terabyte HD. I'm figuring the cpu as is is still fine as far as driving a high end video card. What I'm looking at is upgrading to 8 gig ram, GTX 580 video 1.5 Gb, and a 800 watt power supply for enough power. I'm wanting to be able to run Trainz 12, Diablo 3, and a few other recent games at as high a res I can get on my 1920X1080 42 inch tv. Any thoughts?

 

[nugget2225]

reply

4 gigs is plenty unless you are doing alot of highend video editing, trainz will never use the 4 gigs you have, at idle my windows 7 64 bit uses 1.4 gig , with trainz running it uses a total of 2.5 gig, i have a large amount of ram because i edit blu-rays,
trainz is more cpu and video card dependent than anything, upgrade that i5 to an i7 or upgrade your videocard

 

[RRSignal]

Hi all, came back to Trainz, and now considering if my 1 year old pc should get an upgrade. Thinking about getting Trainz 12 soon. I currently have an Intel i5-750 cpu at 3.3 ghz, 4 gig DDR3 1600 ram,GTX 460 1 gig video, 600 Watt power supply,and 2 Terabyte HD. I'm figuring the cpu as is is still fine as far as driving a high end video card. What I'm looking at is upgrading to 8 gig ram, GTX 580 video 1.5 Gb, and a 800 watt power supply for enough power. I'm wanting to be able to run Trainz 12, Diablo 3, and a few other recent games at as high a res I can get on my 1920X1080 42 inch tv. Any thoughts?

I don't think any of that is necessary as far as Trainz is concerned; Trainz can run very nicely on a pretty low-end PC. As nugget said, Trainz won't even use 4Gb; I have yet to see it break 2Gb, even though it's supposed to use up to 4. I don't know about the other games so I can't comment on that.

 

[fran1]

Unless your struggling now (gpu or cpu wise) I'd leave that set up alone. Plenty good enough.

 

[jbanetman]

Thanks for the replies, as for other games, just that my cousins like FPS games like COD, not me. I share my PC time with the kids(they live upstairs with their dad so come down often to my gaming pc, lol). I prefer activity games like Trainz, and flight simulators like X-plane 9. Enjoyed Diablo 2 way back, so will be getting Diablo 3 when it comes out. On the hardware, sounds like just a video card upgrade then (don't want to replace motherboard until I might go Sandy Bridge this christmas). Anyone got an opinion on GTX 560 versus 580?

 

[beckster181]

What do you need?

what trainz needs all depends on how much you have in the way of content that has to load each time you run the program.

My old TRS 2006 used all of 3 gig of ram with XP 32 bit and would crash the puter for lack of resources.

My new Games computer is as follows:

WIN 7 64 Bit Ultimate ED
AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.00 GHZ Processor
16 GIG DDR 3 Kingston Hyper X RAM
NVIDIA GT 220 with 1 GIG DDR 2 RAM onboard
Games are all located on a seperate Drive to the Operating system Drive

This is to many people OVERKILL but when you run the win7 experiance index it is only rated at 4.9 due to the graphics card being now classed as low end But it is running both my old TRS 2006 and the new TS 12 well with the graphics cranked way up and no crashing.

But i have installed almost everything available on the DLS for 2006 and some other doanload sites.

My advice is to think what you want to do with your computer and the games or other programs your using and then look at the recomended resorces required and where possible without making the national debt look like nothing get double the requirements of your most hungry program.

Hope this gives you some insight into the overall question of what you need

Beckster

 

[beckster181]

Thanks for the replies, as for other games, just that my cousins like FPS games like COD, not me. I share my PC time with the kids(they live upstairs with their dad so come down often to my gaming pc, lol). I prefer activity games like Trainz, and flight simulators like X-plane 9. Enjoyed Diablo 2 way back, so will be getting Diablo 3 when it comes out. On the hardware, sounds like just a video card upgrade then (don't want to replace motherboard until I might go Sandy Bridge this christmas). Anyone got an opinion on GTX 560 versus 580?

Think hard on the Sandy issue at this present time with the failure the early sandy motherboards had it might be wise to stick to AMD as i have just switched for this reason and the quad and 6 core cpu and even more cores are relatively cheap and they are working well unlike the hassle with the sandy boards which had a controller chip problem which was not only crashing the computer it was frying the CPU and motherboards and is why the sandys were removed from the market as they were unusable

 

[cascaderailroad]

Laptops in general are not even designed to play video games, and most low end laptops will not run Trainz, or will dispaly choppy framerates.

I have been looking at the HP DV7 laptop, which has an AMD Phenom II Tripple Core P860 processor.

I believe it has a 1Gb Dedicated Graphics Memory.

These two above factors (CPU Speed and Video Card) are the most important aspect of chosing a PC.

It has a 17" screen, 4 gb Ram, and a 750 Gb Hard drive.

I wonder if this HP DV7 laptop has good ratings ? And if it can run Trainz ?

EDIT: Graphics chip is very weak for aspiring gamers.

 

[nfotis]

@jbanetman:
My impression is that your computer is excellent for running TRS12.

After the GTX460, the next level is the 560 Ti (my very rough estimate would be a 25-35% improvement, supposing that TRS12 is GPU-limited and not CPU-limited.

You can check if the CPU or the GPU is the limit, running TRS12 at the desirable quality settings in your monitor resolution and checking with task manager or a similar program while you run it.

If your CPU load is noticeably less than 50% (Driver supposedly runs up to 2 cores, so the maximum expected load with TRS only running would be around 50% in a 4-core box), then the GPU is your limit and an upgrade should help.

Similar, in a 2-core box if you see typical loads much lower than 100% while playing (so the CPU still has juice available), then the GPU limits the game.
At least, that is my impression, I hope that I didn't misrepresent grossly anything.

Regards,
N.F.

 

[SuperFudd]

It is my understanding that an i7 is no better than an i5 with Trainz and probably any game, clock speeds being equal.

 

[jbanetman]

Hi, I am still running TRS2010 in compatibility mode, haven't bought 12 yet. So, as a test I loaded the Maine central route, with a long Amtrak X2000 consist, and let it run. Res is 1920X1080. My CPU usage was up to 75 percent on core 0, and up to 25 percent on cores 1,2,3 for my Quad core i5-750. Framerates was from 20 to 70, with 35 being average for my GTX 460 1 gig.
Ram use was 2.16 gig. Any opinions on how my system did?

 

[jbanetman]

BTW, Is there any optional settings I need to set to optimize my Trainz 2010. I remember previous versions needed the scenery ram cache adjusted, among a few other settings. I'm running directx with all settings maxed except fog is at default.

 

[nfotis]

Hm, my feel is that (maybe) the game in this high resolution would benefit from the GF 560 Ti.

Or you could overclock the 460 GTX a bit, in order to get some more performance from the GPU department.

The CPU is not your limit, as far as I can see.

Now, regarding optimizations, there are various permutations available.
Look at Trainz options file, and you may get some improvements:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz/Trainzoptions.txt

It will take some experimentation before you settle into a 'good enough' experience.

Another idea would be to leave antialiasing off in Trainz, and ask for hardware antialiasing from the card - this would help in lower-performance CPUs, I suppose
(I think that you can make a game profile especially for Trainz)

Hope this helps,
N.F.

 

[jbanetman]

Thanks. I did set the Resource memory to 512 meg, which helped with caching of content. I'm pretty pleased with how Trainz has smoothed out with this 2010 version. Now a consist runs pretty smoothly, compared to previous versions, which would be a little jerky at times. I'll probably get a 560 or 570 video card before christmas, and that should set me up good for Trainz 2012. I could also upgrade my cpu to an i7, but may see how the AMD bulldozer cpu does in benchmarks when they come out this summer. More cores would be good, for when a future Trainz would take advantage of them, I hope.

 

[nfotis]

I think that upgrading the CPU now would be a waste (hey, you're not even utilizing two cores fully at the moment).
After all, 2-3 cores are the probable maximum use today, and a 4 GB RAM would be more than adequate for Trainz and other games.

Maybe in a year or so, when Bulldozers and Ivy Bridge processors are available, we'll get higher performance in CPUs.

I feel that would be better to upgrade the graphics card department first.
But not now.
With some tweaking, the current rig looks capable enough.

The jerkiness has maybe to do something with background loading of assets and scenery from the hard disk - here, a fast hard disk (or even an SSD) would be very beneficial.
If the Resource Memory helps in smoothing the scenery, that sounds good.

N.F.

 

[mikey186]

well in case if your graphics is slow, you can set your Graphics to DirectX so that it can smooth it out. but i cant be sure what computer part i need to upgrade.

here are my specs:

• Windows 7 Professional 32-bit
• AMD Sempron 3400+ 1.80Ghz processor
• 1.25GB RAM (1024 MB Kingston (PC2-4300) & 256 MB Micron Technology (PC2-4300))
• nVidia GeForce 8400 GS w/512 MB RAM
• 2TB Hard Drive (Ive just moved TS2010 & TRS2004 into the new one like a week ago)

 

[Gandalf0444]

well in case if your graphics is slow, you can set your Graphics to DirectX so that it can smooth it out. but i cant be sure what computer part i need to upgrade.

here are my specs:

• Windows 7 Professional 32-bit
• AMD Sempron 3400+ 1.80Ghz processor
• 1.25GB RAM (1024 MB Kingston (PC2-4300) & 256 MB Micron Technology (PC2-4300))
• nVidia GeForce 8400 GS w/512 MB RAM
• 2TB Hard Drive (Ive just moved TS2010 & TRS2004 into the new one like a week ago)

Sadly I think that an entire new computer should be in order.(With the exception of the hard drive if it is at least 7200RPM and possibly the OS, pending if you want to spend the money on it and reinstalling everything)
The processor is very dated and slow, and the RAM is barely enough to keep windows happy let alone any other application(s).
The graphics card maybe able to be salvaged and save a few bucks for a little while, but ultimately should be replaced as well.

 

[RRSignal]

Actually I ran an 8400GS until recently. It ran pretty good, but a $35 GT240 hardly ever dips below 60fps was probably the cheapest, most effective upgrade I made.

But, yeah, you're right, probably the only thing worth keeping is the HDD and OS, and that's questionable.

 

[mikey186]

Sadly I think that an entire new computer should be in order.(With the exception of the hard drive if it is at least 7200RPM and possibly the OS, pending if you want to spend the money on it and reinstalling everything)
The processor is very dated and slow, and the RAM is barely enough to keep windows happy let alone any other application(s).
The graphics card maybe able to be salvaged and save a few bucks for a little while, but ultimately should be replaced as well.

well the hard drive should be fast as 7200RPM (It doesent say on the box, but its really really fast)

 

[nfotis]

Personally, I feel that keeping the drive should be the least of your worries
(you know, bad sectors etc. may develop in the near future)

I agree that building a new computer is the best solution.
Give us a budget and we'll be able to give some ideas.

Regards,
N.F.