What stock PC is best for Trainz 2019?

[Srobertson1956]

If possible please comment in minimal computer speak.

I am currently running TS2019 on a 2015 iMac. Performance is limited as you might suspect. Instead of just upgrading my Mac I am thinking about just buying a PC dedicated to just run Trainz 2019 or 2022. I use Trainz primarily to design/build modest size model railroads with lots of graphic detail. However, the max board size is not greater than two, with most being designed within one board. Currently, as I build in more detail, performance becomes jerky even with shadows turned off and other performance settings reduced. Video capture is also not very smooth. I am not into building gigantic routes consisting of real world areas or hundreds of miles of track, etc. so I do not need a computer that is ready for use a Industrial Light and Magic…LOL.

After reading many Trainz forum posts about computer builds I come away spinning from the techno speak being thrown around. I know many of you are into this sort of thing, but I am hoping someone could steer me in the direction of a decent off the shelf PC (versus IMAC) that would handle my modest route design needs, and define it in such a way I could understand. I could then take that information and purchase what I need and just have fun. Note, I am not computer savvy when it comes to “building” a gaming computer so please keep that in mind with your response, as I am not going to be piecing together various hardware or delving into the inner workings of a computer. I am sure there are many like me who just want to enjoy the game simulation without needing to understand the background technical specs.

My needs are simple:
1. Be able to design modest size model railroads with lots of content detail with smooth graphic representation as I drive trains.
2. Be able to video capture my designs so that trains look like they are running smoothly and clearly.
3. Be able to run, At minimum, TS2019 Platinum edition for at least the next three to five years.

I assume I will need info regarding,
- minimum computer memory storage
- minimum RAM (to drive the model design?)
- minimum graphics card/memory
- other?

Should I just go to a computer store and tell the sales guy what type of game simulation I am running and let him/her steer me toward a PC setup?

Will I be able to transfer my route builds from my IMac to a PC? Is this just a matter of finding those files and loading them on a thumb drive for transfer to a new computer?

Lots of questions I know. Any insight you can provide is much appreciated.

You can view videos of some of my recent route builds at my YouTube site…….scottrobertson56. In my opinion these routes should be cleaner and smoother that depicted in the videos. I assume this is because I have pushed the limits of my hardware/software capability.

Thanks in advance.

 

[RetroRails12]

STAY AWAY from Prebuilt PC's as they can not run a game like trainz 19 or Trainz 22 for that matter. Prebuilt PC's are Low end home office machines and the ones i would go with is a Custom Gaming PC from your PC Guru and give them a budget and gaming spec to run the games mentioned in your post.... Custom Gaming pc's have a longer lifespan if taken care of( I have seen alot of the custom builds make it 15 years and that is pushing it with yearly parts upgrades as they fail which they tend to do). Never skimp around on PSU, CPU, RAM, HDD & SSD, and GPU parts, thus if you skimp on these parts they will cause you alot of pain down the road. Alot of trainz players and Computer gamers tend to make the big mistake of buying a prebuilt PC and then when it fails complain about it in the long run... If you build the right PC you can do alot of things with it.. Most gaming builds now cost about $1,200 to $1,500 USD on the Mid Level Gaming PC's with High End Gaming PC's being about $3,000 to $5,000 USD with todays prices and inflation. Hope this helps give a point a view on the gaming builds

 

[johnwhelan]

Keeping it simple dell.com select anything with an RTX 4070 TI graphics card would be my sweet spot. I'd take the disk up to 2TB SSD and probably go with the 1 TB hard drive but the preconfigured version isn't bad and it is cheaper. Add in an external SSD on the 3.0 USB port and you're fine.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php

There are more powerful GPUs but they don't give a lot more practical benefit and tend to run hotter.

Why Dell prebuilt? DDR5, reasonable quality, good cooling and a quality power supply.

Custom or build your own? It depends how much knowledge you have and how willing you are to open the box. These days I wouldn't bother.

Cheerio John

 

[dangavel]

STAY AWAY from Prebuilt PC's as they can not run a game like trainz 19 or Trainz 22 for that matter. Prebuilt PC's are Low end home office machines and the ones i would go with is a Custom Gaming PC from your PC Guru and give them a budget and gaming spec to run the games mentioned in your post.... Custom Gaming pc's have a longer lifespan if taken care of( I have seen alot of the custom builds make it 15 years and that is pushing it with yearly parts upgrades as they fail which they tend to do). Never skimp around on PSU, CPU, RAM, HDD & SSD, and GPU parts, thus if you skimp on these parts they will cause you alot of pain down the road. Alot of trainz players and Computer gamers tend to make the big mistake of buying a prebuilt PC and then when it fails complain about it in the long run... If you build the right PC you can do alot of things with it.. Most gaming builds now cost about $1,200 to $1,500 USD on the Mid Level Gaming PC's with High End Gaming PC's being about $3,000 to $5,000 USD with todays prices and inflation. Hope this helps give a point a view on the gaming builds

Well I run 2022/2019 on a acer Nitro 5 laptop with a 6gb 1660t1 with zero problems and I make very detailed large routes using it. If you arent using HD OR running 4K screens a decent prebuilt will be perfectly fine and it will knock the imac into the ground. Of course if you can afford a better rig go for it, but there are many prebuilds you can buy that will run the vast majority of Trainz routes more than adequately.


I note that retrorails thinks my reply is hilarious, I suggest that he really hasn't got much of a clue , there are a huge number of prebuilt rigs for sale online that will run trainz adequately, you do NOT need to customise these as they are already specified to game as long as you don't want to go into using over the top resolution, not all of us want to game at 4k level Retro ! I can run my current 60 mile ultra detailed route on ultra settings on my lowly laptop which I bought off the shelf, but ensured it had a top specs with a very decent card and 16 gb of ram , but of course if you want to start using trainz hd, then you will need to shell out a LOT more shekels .

Do note however that the OP stated " I use Trainz primarily to design/build modest size model railroads with lots of graphic detail. However, the max board size is not greater than two, with most being designed within one board. Currently, as I build in more detail, performance becomes jerky even with shadows turned off and other performance settings reduced. Video capture is also not very smooth. I am not into building gigantic routes consisting of real world areas or hundreds of miles of track, etc. so I do not need a computer that is ready for use a Industrial Light and Magic…LOL.:
He doesnt need anything that costs the earth does he ? Retrorails didn't seem to take that into account....

 

[dangavel]

I have used both Mac and Pc, you should have no issues moving your mac routes over to the PC, I did this last year. As for the build , at least 6gb on your gpu, 8 is better, at least 16 gb ram, you will need two drives ,preferably ssd's ,one to store the database and another for backup . Something like this ought to be fine, of course it would be far cheaper in the states . https://www.scorptec.com.au/product...MIj5KV5YbvgQMVYBWDAx3pUgxYEAQYASABEgKi-_D_BwE
the trouble is, for Mac users ,is that there are so many options available its very hard to chose ..... or you could buy a mac studio but I doubt the gpu will come up to performing as well as a PC and its impossible to find reviews of them being used with Trainz to ascertain if they are a good buy or not. I would imagine a used m1 max mac studio would do the job, but I dont know anyone who used trainz who has one, I know it runs well on the Ultra, but that's far too pricey and they cant be upgraded either, for longevity , if you get ther right rig that can be upgraded easily , I'd go with the PC .

 

[pdkoester]

If money is nothing to be concerned about, I'd suggest Intel's i-9 14900K CPU, Nvidia's RTX 4090 GPU, 64GB of DDR5 RAM, and a high end Samsung SSD (NVme or whatever) that uses PCiE4/5 speed.
That would probably last you another ten years or more.

 

[johnwhelan]

If money is nothing to be concerned about, I'd suggest Intel's i-9 14900K CPU, Nvidia's RTX 4090 GPU, 64GB of DDR5 RAM, and a high end Samsung SSD (NVme or whatever) that uses PCiE4/5 speed.
That would probably last you another ten years or more.

Yes but you're moving out of mainstream then. Staying mainstream means fewer undocumented features also you get more cooling problems.

Normally a 3d score of 10k is considered to be acceptable for trainz. RTX 4070TI is 32k, RTX 4090 is 39k. https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php

price wise a Dell RTX 4070TI is around $1,800, an RTX 4090 is around $4,000 and I don't think you'd notice much difference running Trainz. You're doubling the price for a 25% increase in performance.

For comparison I'm happy with an RTX 2070 which has a score of 16k.

PassMark Video Card (GPU) Benchmark Charts - Model List

Video Card Benchmarks - Over 200,000 Video Cards and 900 Models Benchmarked and compared in graph form - This page is an alphabetical listing of video card models we have obtained benchmark information for.

www.videocardbenchmark.net

Cheerio John

 

[Srobertson1956]

STAY AWAY from Prebuilt PC's as they can not run a game like trainz 19 or Trainz 22 for that matter. Prebuilt PC's are Low end home office machines and the ones i would go with is a Custom Gaming PC from your PC Guru and give them a budget and gaming spec to run the games mentioned in your post.... Custom Gaming pc's have a longer lifespan if taken care of( I have seen alot of the custom builds make it 15 years and that is pushing it with yearly parts upgrades as they fail which they tend to do). Never skimp around on PSU, CPU, RAM, HDD & SSD, and GPU parts, thus if you skimp on these parts they will cause you alot of pain down the road. Alot of trainz players and Computer gamers tend to make the big mistake of buying a prebuilt PC and then when it fails complain about it in the long run... If you build the right PC you can do alot of things with it.. Most gaming builds now cost about $1,200 to $1,500 USD on the Mid Level Gaming PC's with High End Gaming PC's being about $3,000 to $5,000 USD with todays prices and inflation. Hope this helps give a point a view on the gaming builds

Yes thank you for your insight.

 

[Srobertson1956]

Keeping it simple dell.com select anything with an RTX 4070 TI graphics card would be my sweet spot. I'd take the disk up to 2TB SSD and probably go with the 1 TB hard drive but the preconfigured version isn't bad and it is cheaper. Add in an external SSD on the 3.0 USB port and you're fine.

https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php

There are more powerful GPUs but they don't give a lot more practical benefit and tend to run hotter.

Why Dell prebuilt? DDR5, reasonable quality, good cooling and a quality power supply.

Custom or build your own? It depends how much knowledge you have and how willing you are to open the box. These days I wouldn't bother.

Cheerio John

Thanks

 

[Srobertson1956]

I have used both Mac and Pc, you should have no issues moving your mac routes over to the PC, I did this last year. As for the build , at least 6gb on your gpu, 8 is better, at least 16 gb ram, you will need two drives ,preferably ssd's ,one to store the database and another for backup . Something like this ought to be fine, of course it would be far cheaper in the states . https://www.scorptec.com.au/product...MIj5KV5YbvgQMVYBWDAx3pUgxYEAQYASABEgKi-_D_BwE
the trouble is, for Mac users ,is that there are so many options available its very hard to chose ..... or you could buy a mac studio but I doubt the gpu will come up to performing as well as a PC and its impossible to find reviews of them being used with Trainz to ascertain if they are a good buy or not. I would imagine a used m1 max mac studio would do the job, but I dont know anyone who used trainz who has one, I know it runs well on the Ultra, but that's far too pricey and they cant be upgraded either, for longevity , if you get ther right rig that can be upgraded easily , I'd go with the PC .

Thanks for your insight.

 

[Srobertson1956]

Yes but you're moving out of mainstream then. Staying mainstream means fewer undocumented features also you get more cooling problems.

Normally a 3d score of 10k is considered to be acceptable for trainz. RTX 4070TI is 32k, RTX 4090 is 39k. https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php

price wise a Dell RTX 4070TI is around $1,800, an RTX 4090 is around $4,000 and I don't think you'd notice much difference running Trainz. You're doubling the price for a 25% increase in performance.

For comparison I'm happy with an RTX 2070 which has a score of 16k.

PassMark Video Card (GPU) Benchmark Charts - Model List

Video Card Benchmarks - Over 200,000 Video Cards and 900 Models Benchmarked and compared in graph form - This page is an alphabetical listing of video card models we have obtained benchmark information for.

www.videocardbenchmark.net

Cheerio John

Good info. Thanks

 

[JCitron]

STAY AWAY from Prebuilt PC's as they can not run a game like trainz 19 or Trainz 22 for that matter. Prebuilt PC's are Low end home office machines and the ones i would go with is a Custom Gaming PC from your PC Guru and give them a budget and gaming spec to run the games mentioned in your post.... Custom Gaming pc's have a longer lifespan if taken care of( I have seen alot of the custom builds make it 15 years and that is pushing it with yearly parts upgrades as they fail which they tend to do). Never skimp around on PSU, CPU, RAM, HDD & SSD, and GPU parts, thus if you skimp on these parts they will cause you alot of pain down the road. Alot of trainz players and Computer gamers tend to make the big mistake of buying a prebuilt PC and then when it fails complain about it in the long run... If you build the right PC you can do alot of things with it.. Most gaming builds now cost about $1,200 to $1,500 USD on the Mid Level Gaming PC's with High End Gaming PC's being about $3,000 to $5,000 USD with todays prices and inflation. Hope this helps give a point a view on the gaming builds

FALSE!

I'm running TRS22 Plus on a water-cooled i9-12900K 64GB RAM, and an RTX3080. They sell an upgraded system, their XPS 8960 with much better specs. My complaint with this now older system is heat dissipation, but the hardware itself is more than capable. The newer model, the XPS 8960 has updated specs and if you don't want to go NVidia and team red, you can do that too.

 

[FootplatePhil]

FALSE!

I'm running TRS22 Plus on a water-cooled i9-12900K 64GB RAM, and an RTX3080. They sell an upgraded system, their XPS 8960 with much better specs. My complaint with this now older system is heat dissipation, but the hardware itself is more than capable. The newer model, the XPS 8960 has updated specs and if you don't want to go NVidia and team red, you can do that too.

I agree with johnwhelan. My tip for buying a Dell is to go for a mid-range config, not the all bells-and-whistles model. That should avoid the worst of the heating issues the brand has become notorious for. I have a two year old water cooled i7-11700F, RTX 3060ti, 16 Gig RAM and all SSD drives with a 1000 watt power supply. It is more than capable of running Trainz at sufficiently high performance settings. Admittedly the Dells provide limited upgrade potential. Just keep it until it is no longer meeting current gaming performance standards, which should be several years. Then upgrade to a new system, and hand your old system on to a family member who has less demanding requirements. If you apply my tip 2 (below) this approach is quite cost effective long term.

Tip number 2 is to wait for one of their frequent on-line specials for your target config. This makes them very cost competitive.

 

[ricomon35]

@Srobertson1956 - Have a peek at this MSI branded desktop. It has a 4000 series RTX graphics card, (Zotac) a mid-high end MSI motherboard, with a nice Ryzen 7 CPU, an NVME mounted SSD card to run the OS on, several more M.2 slots to allow running all SSD drives, 32gigs of DDR5 RAM (I'm assuming it runs at pretty fast clock speeds), a 2 terabyte drive for installing Trainz, (spins at 7200 rpm, could be a pretty decent drive) and a very nice case by MSI, plenty of ports, ventilation and a glass side panel, and I'm assuming the water cooling unit is a an MSI CoreLiquid 240 setup, with two lighted intake fans up front and 1 output in the rear. Should run very cool !

EDIT: As @johnwhelan noted, Trainz would run best on an SSD drive, due the high data throughput they have compared to SATA III drives. It's highly like you could contact Newegg and request a respec with an additional NVME SSD drive. So, one for the OS and other associated apps and one for Trainz only. You could leave the SATA III drive in for other types of applications, or games that don't require super fast throughput to run well.

MSI GUNGNIR 110R LIQUID COOLED AMD 8 core - Ryzen 7-7800X3D 4.20GHz - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070Ti 12GB - X670 Chipset - 2TB HDD + 1TB NVMe - 32GB DDR5 (2X16GB) - 850W - Windows 11 Gaming Desktop PC

Of course, you'll need a mouse, keyboard and a new monitor. I'd suggest a 21:9 ultrawide by Sceptre, maybe a 27 or 30 inch. If you don't have a wide enough desk then one of their 24 inch 16:9 units would be nice too.
Your keyboard will depend on whether or not you'll be playing other games, and or doing work on the computer. Alot of keyboard oriented gamers prefer a mechanical keyboards, but they are pretty noisy compared to normal keyboards.

Rico

 

[JCitron]

I agree with johnwhelan. My tip for buying a Dell is to go for a mid-range config, not the all bells-and-whistles model. That should avoid the worst of the heating issues the brand has become notorious for. I have a two year old water cooled i7-11700F, RTX 3060ti, 16 Gig RAM and all SSD drives with a 1000 watt power supply. It is more than capable of running Trainz at sufficiently high performance settings. Admittedly the Dells provide limited upgrade potential. Just keep it until it is no longer meeting current gaming performance standards, which should be several years. Then upgrade to a new system, and hand your old system on to a family member who has less demanding requirements. If you apply my tip 2 (below) this approach is quite cost effective long term.

Tip number 2 is to wait for one of their frequent on-line specials for your target config. This makes them very cost competitive.

Normally I would've built a machine myself and a mid-high end one at that to get more of my share out of it, but my machine outright died at the height of the highest prices and component shortages ever. During January 2022, the mid-range wasn't very mid-range and closer to the top price wise, so in the end I went for the upper end anyway. Out of all the companies, I chose Dell due to my familiarity with their products. Over the past 20-plus years, I had installed and supported thousands of them and all ran solidly compared to other brands.

 

[ColPrice2002]

I doubt that you can build a PC that will run Trainz at all "Ultra" settings - at least not within a reasonable budget!

I'm running an older PC and it's capable of running TS19 at "High", TS22 at "medium" settings:-
CPU is an i5 - 4670 overclocked from 3.4 to 4.2 GHz
16 Gb RAM
GPU RTX 2060
Windows 10

Something above that spec will give you an acceptable performance. I'd suggest (as always) making sure that whatever you get, there is better than stock cooler for the CPU, and good airflow inside the case.
Using SSD for Trainz will help the response/loading times a lot!

Colin

 

[johnwhelan]

@Srobertson1956 - Have a peek at this MSI branded desktop. It has a 4000 series RTX graphics card, (Zotac) a mid-high end MSI motherboard, with a nice Ryzen 7 CPU, an NVME mounted SSD card to run the OS on, 32gigs of DDR5 RAM (I'm assuming it runs at pretty fast clock speeds) a 2 terabyte drive for installing Trainz, (spins at 7200 rpm, could be a pretty decent drive) and a very nice case by MSI, plenty of ports, ventilation and a glass side panel, and I'm assuming the water cooling unit is a an MSI CoreLiquid 240 setup with two lighted intake fans up front and 1 output in the rear. Should run very cool !

MSI GUNGNIR 110R LIQUID COOLED AMD 8 core - Ryzen 7-7800X3D 4.20GHz - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070Ti 12GB - X670 Chipset - 2TB HDD + 1TB NVMe - 32GB DDR5 (2X16GB) - 850W - Windows 11 Gaming Desktop PC

Of course, you'll need a mouse, keyboard and a new monitor. I'd suggest a 21:9 ultrawide by Sceptre, maybe a 27 or 30 inch. If you don't have a wide enough desk then one of their 24 inch 16:9 units would be nice too.
Your keyboard will depend on whether or not you'll be playing other games, and or doing work on the computer. Alot of keyboard oriented gamers prefer a mechanical keyboards, but they are pretty noisy compared to normal keyboards.

Rico

Yes but then you get into disk access times and throughput on the hard drive. Traditionally the CPU is fed from static cached RAM not DRAM with access times measured in nanoseconds. Hard drives are measured in milliseconds (10,000 times slower) for access so getting data off a hard drive and into the CPU will be a bottleneck. SATA III hard drive which has a max throughput of 600MB/s while NVMe drives provide speeds up to 3,500MB/s. I'd go SSD or NVME for trainz rather than a hard drive.

Use hard drives for word processing and such where the transfer rate isn't so important.

Cheerio John

 

[Christopher824]

I use a laptop, Alienware M15 with RTX 2070, it works very well. You can get a M18 with an i9, 1tb ssd, RTX 4070, 32gb ram for about $2500 direct from dell.com

 

[ricomon35]

Yes but then you get into disk access times and throughput on the hard drive. Traditionally the CPU is fed from static cached RAM not DRAM with access times measured in nanoseconds. Hard drives are measured in milliseconds (10,000 times slower) for access so getting data off a hard drive and into the CPU will be a bottleneck. SATA III hard drive which has a max throughput of 600MB/s while NVMe drives provide speeds up to 3,500MB/s. I'd go SSD or NVME for trainz rather than a hard drive.

Use hard drives for word processing and such where the transfer rate isn't so important.

Cheerio John

I agree of course, the mobo has these M.2 slots:

* 1 x Gen5 x4 128Gb/s slot

* 3 x Gen4 x4 64Gb/s slots

Original post amended.

Rico

 

[johnwhelan]

I use a laptop, Alienware M15 with RTX 2070, it works very well. You can get a M18 with an i9, 1tb ssd, RTX 4070, 32gb ram for about $2500 direct from dell.com

The mobile version of the RTX 4070 has a 3D score of 20k or above my RTX 2070 with a score of 16k. The problem is you get one crack at this. Performance depends very much on what combination of assets you're running and what you can live with on the sliders. What is acceptable to one person might not be to another who prefers to run urban layouts with a few sketchup buildings.

Buy something that is overkill and you just waste a bit of money, buy something that isn't up to the job and you've wasted a lot of money. Realistically a RTX 3060 TI with a 3D score of 20k is probably enough, but if it isn't then you're out $1,300, an RTX 4070 TI will almost certainly be sufficient and costs around $1,700 minimum risk strategy would be the RTX 4070 TI. Besides the way the poly counts are creeping up what is good enough today might not be next year when someone brings out another high detailed asset.

Cheerio John