PC Upgrade question....

Railhead001

New member
Hello gents,

Looking at the following for an upgrade... [h=1]Intel Core i7-6700 Skylake Quad-Core 3.4 GHz LGA 1151 CPU, GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-UD3 1151 MOBO[/h]
Currently I have a dated FX-6300@2.5 with 16GB ram and a 6GB Geforce 1060 Gpu. Keeping the vid card but need new processor/mobo and was wondering how the performance oF an I7@3.4 is for TMR17/Tane running with details on highest or close to it.

Thanks,

RH001
 
I agree with John, yes there will be some improvement but whether you would think it's financially rewarding in respect of Trainz I would have thought is quite debatable. While I appreciate you have a current GPU here in the UK for a similar outlay you could upgrade to a GTX 1070 which would show an obvious improvement over the 1060 however I think in the some situation I'd be more inclined to invest the monies and wait for something currently in development which would provide a more meaningful performance step in the coming months. Peter
 
Now one of these "NVMe SSD" look it up on newegg.com might be interesting. Go for a highly rated one. The throughput is about three times that of a conventional SSD.

Cheerio John
 
Railhead001 - There's a huge difference in IO performance between the Intel i7 7600 and AMD FX 6300 which will mean it will feed your competent GTX 1060 much more reliably.
T:ANE SP2 makes better use of all available CPU cores and threads than previous versions, so whilst the simulator is extremely GPU-centric, you'd still notice the difference in the speed at which it runs scripts and processes instructions.
Check out this CPU comparison review here:
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/364/AMD_FX-Series_FX-6300_vs_Intel_Core_i7_i7-6700.html

In general, the Intel i7 series of CPUs are great for gaming and general computing tasks because of their higher clock speeds, fast onboard caches and hyper-threading capabilities.
Another benefit of upgrading your mobo to run such a modern CPU is the improved chipset and port offerings. It will have M2 support for SSDs and extra PCIe lanes for the blazingly fast NVMe SSDs that johnwhelan mentions above.
 
Railhead001 - There's a huge difference in IO performance between the Intel i7 7600 and AMD FX 6300 which will mean it will feed your competent GTX 1060 much more reliably.
T:ANE SP2 makes better use of all available CPU cores and threads than previous versions, so whilst the simulator is extremely GPU-centric, you'd still notice the difference in the speed at which it runs scripts and processes instructions.
Check out this CPU comparison review here:
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/364/AMD_FX-Series_FX-6300_vs_Intel_Core_i7_i7-6700.html

In general, the Intel i7 series of CPUs are great for gaming and general computing tasks because of their higher clock speeds, fast onboard caches and hyper-threading capabilities.
Another benefit of upgrading your mobo to run such a modern CPU is the improved chipset and port offerings. It will have M2 support for SSDs and extra PCIe lanes for the blazingly fast NVMe SSDs that johnwhelan mentions above.

Yes if you're starting from scratch but how cost effective is it with TANE? Are you really going to see that much difference? Currently I have a layout running on a laptop with a steam loco on an i5 with series 4000 integrated graphics and I'm getting more than 20 frames per second. Are you going to see that much difference?

Cheerio John
 
Reckon replacing an older motherboard and CPU with a more potent CPU and chipset when other existing components (such as RAM and Video Cards are up-to-date and supportive) is still a valid and very cost-effective way to upgrade your computing experience.
The i7 6700 is nearly twice as fast as the Railhead001's ageing FX 6300, so there would indeed be a noticeable increase in overall system performance.
T:ANE is a very demanding railroad simulator and would clearly demonstrate the benefits of the OP's proposed upgrade with faster loading & saving times, greater overall IO responsiveness, better support for his capable GPU and improved storage performance overall.
 
I would say for for a few $$ more, you can get a 270 mobo, and get a 7700K. I recently upgraded my whole build now running TANE at 50-60FPS most of the time.
I have:
Intel i7-7700K running at 4.4 ghz
EVGA GTX1060 6GB
16GB DDR4 RAM
ASUS ROG Strix H270 mobo
It's a beast and plays pretty much any game I want to on ultra high settings at 60FPS at 1080P. It's money spent that you won't be kicking your behind for the performance.
 
I just attempted this exact combo. The MOBO is incompatible with the 7th gen processor. It can be used,if you can insert a 6th gen (Skylake) proc.first,then reflash the BIOS and then build with the &th gen (Kaby Lake) proc. I used a Gigabyte Z270XP-SLI instead and had no issues. Ask me how I know:confused: Randy.

Edit. My Bad. I tried this upgrade with a 7700 Kaby Lake Proc 3.4 ghz Proc. that combo did not work. This combo should be A-OK. Sorry. Randy
 
Last edited:
Update:

So this past weekend I took the plunge and went for a MSI Z170A M7 mobo with a I7 7700@4.2 Kaby and 16GB of DDR4. Paired with my GTX-1060 (6GB)....hopefully will be installed in the next day or so and will run some benchmarks.
 
Railhead001 - Excellent - I'm absolutely certain that you'll notice a significant difference in performance from the old AMD FX-6300! :)
Keep us informed of your experience when it's all brought together and fine-tuned.
 
Update:

So this past weekend I took the plunge and went for a MSI Z170A M7 mobo with a I7 7700@4.2 Kaby and 16GB of DDR4. Paired with my GTX-1060 (6GB)....hopefully will be installed in the next day or so and will run some benchmarks.

I predict you will see a substantial difference.
 
I'm unsure why you've opted for a Z170 motherboard when the Z270 chipset has been available for some time. Be aware that the board MIGHT require a BIOS flash before it can even post with an Intel 7000 series part.

Jack
 
I'm unsure why you've opted for a Z170 motherboard when the Z270 chipset has been available for some time. Be aware that the board MIGHT require a BIOS flash before it can even post with an Intel 7000 series part.

Jack
Supports 6th Gen Intel® Core™ / Pentium® / Celeron® processors for LGA 1151 socket

flash the bios from usb stick and now it works fine without Temperatur problems that most of the 200 mobos have :)
 
UPDATE:
Ok, so the motherboard turned out to be defective not only defective but a refurbished passed off as "new" from a big box store which I replaced with an ASUS MoBo (works fine)...anyway then along with that nonsense I managed to also get a defective sim of (New Corsair) DDR4 memory leaving me with a working 8GB......so before I exchanged the memory at the same place...I ran another game I enjoy besides Trainz..Arma 3.............gorgeous...all settings were "Ultra" except for 2 at "Very High", consistent solid 60fps at 1080p.....I was lucky to get in the mid 30's on my FX-6300 with only a couple Ultra settings....Now onto Trainz..........my modified Brazemore Yard Layout is a fps killing monster at times because I decided to redo mostly all those ugly spine bushes with more realistic looking ones which took a long time to plant over those ugly ones. My buildings and others scenic items hardly caused a fps hit but with the new plants and running in summer time with high foliage showing I was getting teens to low 30s if even that. Now with the 4.2 I7 7700 and 8GB DDR4 I was getting high 20s (28-29) to 57fps which is a decent improvement. I used 2 trainz, the Amtrak roadrailer I posted in the Trainz Model Raildroad section and on youtube consisting of 2 locos and 30 roadrailers plus a P40 with 5 Amfleet cars......unfortunately as I said before the Trainz software is not optimized correctly....I still saw a stuttering motion at 57fps which should not occur..only for a few seconds but still there. Going to see what the additional 8GB ram will do for the sim now that both modules are working....but pretty satisfied.
 
Love those Asus motherboards! You'll find the step up to 16Gb RAM from 8 very worthwhile (and noticeable) in T:ANE.
Some busy routes I'm using at the moment go to between 11 and 12 Gb of DDR4 RAM utilisation, so if I only had 8Gb as before, the system would using the Swapfile and virtual memory a lot more, leading to choppy performance.
 
Love those Asus motherboards! You'll find the step up to 16Gb RAM from 8 very worthwhile (and noticeable) in T:ANE.
Some busy routes I'm using at the moment go to between 11 and 12 Gb of DDR4 RAM utilisation, so if I only had 8Gb as before, the system would using the Swapfile and virtual memory a lot more, leading to choppy performance.

Amazing step up for me.....................fps averaging in the 60-70s with a spike up to 96 in some areas of my Modified Brazemore Layout after changing Shadow setting from high to low........I apologize for any nasty comments I made about intel prior :D.................
 
Back
Top