Updating My Current Setup

[Rougespear7mm]

Hey there everyone,

I just bought Trainz 2009 and installed it on my laptop. It does run, albiet not very well. I think I may just got ahead and upgrade my tower a little bit, so...

Currently running on - Laptop Specs:

AMD Turion 64 (2.0 GHZ)
250 GB hard-drive
4 GB of Ram
nVidia 7150M - 64mb shared graphic

Tower Specs:

Athlon XP-M 3000+ processor
ECS 761GX-M754 motherboard
768mb of ram
128mb of onboard graphics
80 GB hard drive

So I'm thinking of upgrading my tower to this:

Athlon XP-M 3000+ processor
ECS 761GX-M754 motherboard
2 GB of DDR400 RAM
512 video card
80GB hard-drive

I'd like to be aiming for a decent running of Trainz 2009. I don't expect it to run perfectly with all the settings turned way up; hoping for acceptable performance at medium settings. That being said, I'm not sure what I should get for the video card? I'm on a budget here being a student, but can people suggest a decent card that will allow me to play Trainz nicely?

Any other suggestions are great considered... just remember I'm on a horrible budget! LOL

Thanks, Brent

 

[rassman48]

Your tower spec looks ok, I think you could save yourself some Stedent Beer money by just upgrading the RAM and the graphics card.

The 2009 spec reads like this,

MINIMUM SPEC

• Pentium IV 2.2GHz (or equivalent)
• 1GB RAM
• 64MB 3D Graphics Card (NVIDIA GeForce2 or equivalent)
• Windows XP Service Pack 2
• 1024x768 display resolution

RECOMMENDED SPEC

• Intel Core 2 Duo (or equivalent)
• 2GB RAM
• 256MB 3D Graphics Card (NVIDIA GeForce7 Series or equivalent)
• Windows XP Service Pack 2
• 1024x768 display resolution

Your tower spec is

Tower Specs:

Athlon XP-M 3000+ processor
ECS 761GX-M754 motherboard
768mb of ram
128mb of onboard graphics
80 GB hard drive

So your CPU is good. a 2Gram costs (uk prices) £20-00
Amazon has high spec GEForce video cards for £50 (remember to check the interface that matches your current motherboard, you have PCI Express x16 x 1 • PCI x 3 ).

It looks like the worst part of your motherboard is the graphics, for an otherwise decent motherboard the built in graphics is pretty dire .

There, save you a fortune.

 

[Rougespear7mm]

Yep, my local computer guru told me to do just that - update my graphics card and add some more RAM. He said that the processor was fine, but from reading around here, maybe the processor is really not fast enough...

Does anybody have any thoughts on how well the AMD XP-M 3000 'should' perform?

Cheers, Brent