Need Suggestions On Building A Desktop For Trainz

Title says it all, my Windows 8.1 ASUS ROG GL551JM-DH71 laptop of almost three years ended up running into severe technical issues the past week and subsequently crashed. I took it in to get it fixed and keep it around as a backup computer for whenever I travel, but I'd prefer to move up to a stable desktop system that allows me to run Trainz for more than an hour without issues arising.

One thing to get out of the way is that as far as deciding on an operating system goes, I'm hesitant to upgrade to Windows 10 due to the uncertainty of Gmax 1.2 and the Trainz Asset Creation Studio working on it. I was able to successfully get both working on my laptop, albeit there were several setup issues and a few restrictions on the zoom functions. I know many content creators use either Blender or Autodesk 3DS Max due to Gmax being obsolete, but I already spent almost a year training and using it, therefore I'd prefer to stick to a program I know rather than learn a new one. That said is there any recommendations on the OS I should pick or any other system specs.

Thanks, Joe.

The current fashion is start with a GTX 1070 and windows 10. After that an i5 or i7 and say 8 gigs of memory. People have got GMAX etc to run under win 10 and if you bug me I can find out what they did, but these days Blender is more flexible and yes there is a learning curve but with video tutorials etc its not too bad.

Having said that I'm having fun at the moment running TANE on a refurbished Dell laptop, i5 with series 4000 Intel integrated graphics. It's challenging and I'm having to create some quite special content to do it plus you don't get full shadows etc but I'm getting more than 20 frames per second out of it.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html is useful, I suggest going nvidia on the GPU. A GTX 1050 is about as low as I'd like to go.

Cheerio John

Gmax etc works perfectly well in Windows10.

I'm a Blender user but did have GMax and TACS installed on Win10 64bit. It seemed to work OK although I didn't use it much.

Ben Dorsey uses GMax on a very modern and fast computer with a couple of hi spec video cards and puts out new assets continually.

The only blip on the horizon for GMax is when, or if, N3V drop support for IM formatted meshes in favour of the FBX (Trainzmesh) format. I think that will be a long way off and may not even happen.

Consider AMD Ryzen CPU's as well as the AM4 platform. The Ryzen R5 1600 being a sweetspot 6 core, 12 thread CPU at a reasonable price that effectively makes the Intel i5 range redundant.

LNERlover5 said:

Consider AMD Ryzen CPU's as well as the AM4 platform. The Ryzen R5 1600 being a sweetspot 6 core, 12 thread CPU at a reasonable price that effectively makes the Intel i5 range redundant.

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A couple of points, the first is nVidia have a program that assists people such as N3V get the best out of their hardware. N3V almost certainly make use of it and most of their hardware is nVidia. The second is Intel has a very good optimising complier which optimises for Intel CPUs. Finally how many cores does TANE use in driver? Running on two cores adds overhead on more you have even more overhead keeping everything in step. My personal preference would be the slowest i7 available that way you get the i7 caches and with hyperthreading that gives you 8 cores even if four are virtual. I'm not sure that TANE in driver makes much use of more than two cores.

Cheerio John

johnwhelan said:

A couple of points, the first is nVidia have a program that assists people such as N3V get the best out of their hardware. N3V almost certainly make use of it and most of their hardware is nVidia. The second is Intel has a very good optimising complier which optimises for Intel CPUs. Finally how many cores does TANE use in driver? Running on two cores adds overhead on more you have even more overhead keeping everything in step. My personal preference would be the slowest i7 available that way you get the i7 caches and with hyperthreading that gives you 8 cores even if four are virtual. I'm not sure that TANE in driver makes much use of more than two cores.

Cheerio John

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Uses all Cores here John.

clam1952 said:

Uses all Cores here John.

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Now that is interesting I wonder who has got their hands on the ladybird book of computers.

Thanks John