Rebuild PC

leksie

Active member
Hi all ,

On the moment i'm using a PC with these content :

Asus : P8P67
CPU : 3.31 GHz.
Memory : 4 Gb.
Graphics : AMD Radeon HD 6900

All in W7

I want to buy some new hardware to make Trainz faster and smoother running.

Any suggestions ?
 
Definitely some more RAM would help - 8GB would be an ideal starting place. Make sure your operating system is 64 bit, too.

Kieran.
 
Staying with the same theme, I would go with 16GB. This would give T:ANE plenty of memory room and get the OS out of the way.
 
TS12 uses a max of 4 gigs, only TANE is capable of using more. If you're thinking TANE then think in terms of GTX 970 or GTX 980 the 980 certainly is a very large card that might not fit your case, and TANE seems to care bore about the GPU than the CPU. You may wish to wait until the next service pack is released after which it might be a little more friendly to AMD cards.

Cheerio John
 
TS12 uses a max of 4 gigs, only TANE is capable of using more. If you're thinking TANE then think in terms of GTX 970 or GTX 980 the 980 certainly is a very large card that might not fit your case, and TANE seems to care bore about the GPU than the CPU. You may wish to wait until the next service pack is released after which it might be a little more friendly to AMD cards.

Cheerio John

I'm a bit confused now , so 4 Gb is the limit for TS12 . TS 12 does not use more then 4 Gb ?
I'm not very technical with computers but is it better to buy a larger graphic card or get more CPU ?
 
I'm a bit confused now , so 4 Gb is the limit for TS12 . TS 12 does not use more then 4 Gb ?
I'm not very technical with computers but is it better to buy a larger graphic card or get more CPU ?

TS12 uses 32 bit instructions so the maximum memory it can use is 4 gigs, add in .5 gig for the operating system and that TS12 probably will never use more than 3.5 gigs and you end up with anything more for TS12 is just heating the room.


TANE uses 64 bit instructions so is slower but can address more than 4 gigs of memory. TS12 doesn't off load as much work onto the GPU as TANE so the discussion then becomes more about do you want to improve performance for TS12 or TANE? They are different. TS12 doesn't make as much use of a GTX 980 as TANE does. TS12 works comparatively better than TANE does on AMD cards.

You'll need a 64 bit operating system to get the most out of TS12 or TANE, Win 10 should give you slightly better frame rates in both.

It sort of depends how much money you want to throw at it.

Cheerio John
 
I'm using TS12 with 64 bits.
The trouble is running more (heavy) trains .

I would like to spend max. 500 euro's .
 
Last edited:
I'm using TS12 with 64 bits.
The trouble is running more (heavy) trains .

I would like to spend max. 500 euro's .

I'd probably suggest a GTX 980 amazon.fr have them for 450 euros, however they may not fit you computer case take a tape measure to it first. A GTX 970 comes in at 360 by the way and maybe shorter. These cards are better suited to TANE I picked up a Dell refurbished workstation T5500 it has a XEON quad core processor which equates to an i7 with 16 gigs of memory its ECC but works fine but more importantly enough room for a GTX 980 and a solid power supply.

What I'm not clear about is which CPU you have at the moment. Its a nice motherboard but it can take anything from a i3 through to an i7.

TANE has its issues but with a high end nVidia GPU it will run with better frame rates than TS12 but it seems to like nVidia rather than AMD. With TS12 a high end GPU will help.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

Belarc might give more information on your CPU and operating system is it 64 bit?

My guess would be a GTX 970 will give you a boost in TS12 but also be very useful in TANE, check the size of the card before buying to see if it will fit your case. Also check your power supply I think it will be fine for a GTX 970.

Cheerio John
 
Hi John ,

My CPU , not mine but the PC , is 3.31 ghz. and wit the syst . W7 64 bits.

3.31 is the speed if you like of one of the cores, but these days more depends on the cache and how many cores are available.

One of the limiting factors in performance is how fast you can shovel data in and out of the CPU. In general an i7 is better at throughput, it does this by using quad cores and also by hyperthreading which is a way of putting two queues through one core. An i5 is normally a quad core, without hyperthreading and normally smaller caches, an i3 is normally dual core but many of its members have hyperthreading so appear to have quad cores,

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html gives a rough comparison of CPUs. Besides the i3, i5 and i7 there are also Celeron which is the low end, Pentium which are generally a bit faster than the Celeron, and the core 2 which are a little faster again though below the i3.

TANE doesn’t use as much CPU but is able to use more cores, TS12 as far as I can see uses only two cores in driver so dual core works fine. Because TANE is not so CPU dependant and can make use of hyerthreading etc that’s why a refurbished Dell T5500 workstation works well. The xeon processor is roughly an i7 and the box is solid with plenty of room for a high end GPU.

Belarc will tell you exactly what you CPU is.

If you’re only interested in TS12 performance then a fast dual core CPU with decent caches is fine, having more than two cores doesn’t buy you anything. If you are thinking of going TANE sometime in the future then an i7 type processor is more important.

Cheerio John
 
John ,

Thanks for the extensive explanation , you did a lot of work .

i'm happy with the information .

Regards Lex
 
John ,

Thanks for the extensive explanation , you did a lot of work .

i'm happy with the information .

Regards Lex


If it makes sense to you then that's the important bit. TANE under Win 10 has a lot of promise the drivers are better than under win 7 but TS12 works so its a difficult call.

Cheerio John
 
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