My New Xidax X-2 Gaming Rig

I am not going to get a DELL Refurbished Workstation

I think this is what I am getting

$2870 less 5% discount code= $2727

If I increased the RAM to 32GB $2811

https://www.xidax.com/desktops/x-6/?saveconfig=316643

X-6
Case: Spectrum White
Motherboard: MSI MPG Z390 GAMING PRO CARBON AC
Processor: INTEL CORE i9 9900k 8C/16T 5.0GHz
Memory: Xidax Extreme DDR4 2666MHz Memory - 16GB
HDD: Western Digital Black 2TB
SSD HD: Xidax Performance SSD 1TB
Graphics Card: NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER 8GB
Power Supply: Seasonic FOCUS PLUS 850W GOLD
Wireless: ASUS PCE-AC68 AC1900 Dual Band Wireless Card
Sound Cards: Onboard Audio
CPU Cooling: Alphacool Eisbaer 3 Fan 360MM Liquid cooler
CPU Paste: Premium CPU Thermal Paste - Lower Temps 5-10° C
GPU Paste: Premium Graphics Card Thermal Paste - Lower Temps 5-10° C
OS: Windows 10 Professional 64-Bit
Windows Recovery: WINDOWS 10 RECOVERY FLASH DRIVE
Lifetime Warrantee
Free Shipping

I think the RTX 280 is wonderful but the SSD and hard drive will be slower than need be. If you look at new Dell gaming machines they have PCI NVE drives which are much faster.

I'd check the motherboard specs there should be some PCI4 motherboards available these days and that will help get the data moving more quickly between the GPU and CPU.

Have fun and can I select the assets for you to run with the sliders on max?

Cheerio John
 
I think the RTX 280 is wonderful but the SSD and hard drive will be slower than need be. If you look at new Dell gaming machines they have PCI NVE drives which are much faster.

I'd check the motherboard specs there should be some PCI4 motherboards available these days and that will help get the data moving more quickly between the GPU and CPU.

Have fun and can I select the assets for you to run with the sliders on max?

Cheerio John
Xidax responce to that: "The RTX 2080 would have nothing to do with the storage devices that you chose in the system. The storage would be to hold all your files and games and then depending on if you go SSD or HDD depends on the speeds on which the program can be loaded up. All of our motherboards come equipped with the M.2 port for the standard M.2, NVME and evo/pro. Those would be the fastest options for SSD. According to PCmag , the Samsung SSD 970 Pro is the fastest consumer-grade internal M.2 solid state drive you can buy. Which we offer in a 1TB drive.
All of our systems are capable of doing what a Dell can do + a lot more. Full custom built PC
"

Please Explain:

HDD: Western Digital Black 2TB
SSD HD: Xidax Performance SSD 1TB

Why would these be slow ?
 
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If you dig around in the forum you'll find a post where windwalker states the design goal for TS19 and TANE is to make full use of any hardware in the near future. For that reason it is designed not be used by any combination of today's hardware to give high frame rates with the sliders set to max.

Next add in Jcitron's test where he found that TANE had higher temperatures on the GPU and lower temperatures on the CPU than TS12 using the same assets etc.

Translation the CPU is not so important but you have to remember that the content is made by content creators so one asset might require more CPU than another.

Generally speaking in a game the designer is given a poly count per screen upper limit this means you get reasonable frame rates on mid range machines. This is not true it Trainz. If you're lucky the layout creator takes things into account but even then the slider settings matter.

Recently on one layout I was getting 30 fps with an RTX 2070 but on the same layout someone with a RTX 2080 TI was getting around 10-15 fps. Mine is limited to 30 fps by the way. The difference was my distance setting was set to about 2 kms their was set to max which meant two high built up areas were in the screen at the same time with enough polys to kill the performance. Everyone else was getting 30 fps on default settings. Being able to see a small asset ten kilometers away is better than my eye sight.

The price of an RTX 2080 TI on newegg.com is $1,000 that of an RTX 2070 around $450 the RTX 2080 TI benchmarks at 20% for more than twice the price. Add in the bigger power supply needed and the better designed cooling system and the price goes up even more.

A year ago the RTX 2080 was pretty well top of the line, this year its been renamed to RTX 2070 super.

On disk drives high quality SSDs that plug into an m.2 slot or the PCI bus will be the fastest. However price per gig a 6 or more gig hard drive is much cheaper. Will it affect the frame rate? Well yes but the M.2 or NVE SSD will only give you around 3% better frame rates than something like a WD black drive with 64 mb cache. The price per gig is very different though.

My suggestion would be to buy a system that gives you 80% of the performance of the fastest on the planet which will cost you less than half the price of the fastest on the planet and still give you reasonable performance.

i9 can cost up to $3,000, the most expensive ones will give slightly better performance than a cheaper i9.

Realistically a Xeon or i7 processor even one costing $250 will give you roughly 98% of the performance of an i9 in Trainz.

Then you get noise levels, less heat less fan noise. Lower electric bills, generally speaking an intel server running 24 / 7 will cost more in electricity than it cost to purchase.

Dell game machines are well balanced. Some other suppliers stress their machine has an i7 or i9, well yes but which one. Look on Newegg.com and an i7 can have quite different pricing and slightly different performance.

Stay away from bestbuy etc, you want quality components for reliability the chains want to undercut everyone else on price so they go for cheaper components. No name power supplies etc. Remember that machines running Trainz traditionally run much hotter than when other software is run.

Have fun.

Cheerio John
 
It seems that one does not have to, "break the bank", lavishly splurging on an extravagant $4000 PC gaming system, just in order to run a train down a track in Trainz. An I9 CPU (as an I7, is sufficiently adequate), a 2080 Ti video card (as a 2070 is sufficiently adequate), would ALL be just be, big name, bragging rights, and 32 - 64 GB RAM might not even be touched by Trainz.

However, It does seem that spending $2000 + is somewhat helpful on a Trainz desktop PC gaming system, in order to get great framerates.
 
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I guess I have to chime in after all these years playing and just enjoying the game (yes, first post here).

I'm using an I7 4790k@4500 (I know, I know, very old tech age), and a Nvidia 2060, with 16GB of memory and a "normal" WD Red hd for data storage, only things on a SSD being the OS and the Trainz main folder.
My only complaint is the long loading time when I start a session, otherwise I have everything on max but the AA set at 4x and all is fine, no stutters and no FPS slowdowns.

Moral? As long as everything is balanced, facts are:
- 16GB are enough
- Nvidia 2060 (possibly S) is enough
- I9 processors are well-overpriced, and a last generation I7 will be more than enough; again, I'm using a 4 years old 4790K and according to benchmarks it's just 30% slower than a new 8700K, not worth the hassle to upgrade processor, motherboard and memory for one extimated grand, and not even thinking about higher spec-ed processors with their overinflated prices (and a 8700K, not even the best of the line, can't be found at less than 350-400$)

The key word is "balance": an I9 is useless if you don't have a 2080TI at least, plus high spec (and price) memory sticks and a best of the bests motherboard (with its included price tag as well).
In other words: if you have one top of the line component, all others must be on the same level or you find the classical "bottleneck".

Now for the disk, I can say it has almost zero impact on gameplay but it's everything on loading time.
I can live with a small stutter every few miles when the game loads the next set of baseboards, and I can just wait those 30 seconds when the layout is being loaded at the start...after all, it's what almost every open world game does, Train Simulator, Flight Simulator, etc.
Now if you have the absolute need to click "start" and be inside the game in milliseconds, well......get ready to dump many green paper sheets on the disk system (and controller, so a pricy motherboard at least), but if you just need performance while in game then forget everything and stick with a "normal" hd or ssd with a fair price tag.
The only advice on the disks: have two separate ones for OS and data, then you can decide to install the main game folder in the data disk if you want - and that's related to organization, not to speed.

I hope I have been clear and removed most of your problems :)

And have fun playing the game, not hunting for the last frame per second!!!
 
I read guite a lot on SSD's, and someday, if not today, a Physical Disc HDD will be totally un-needed, as a properly maintained large quality SSD can last 10 years, and is much faster than a Physical Disc HDD. The smaller SSD's have a hard time repairing themselves, if their space is almost maxed out. They say you should buy a SSD that is much larger than you will ever need, so it has room to repair it cells. A SSD should never be defragged, but there are many freeware SSD repairing/maintenance programs, that maintain a SSD's health.

A physical disc external HDD, connected via USB may be bottle necking Trainz performance framerates. A SSD should have it's data backed-up on another external SSD, or external HDD, to prevent catastrophic data loss.
 
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A physical disc external HDD, connected via USB may be bottle necking Trainz performance framerates.

While I stand by my assertion about a disk (SDD or physical) not having any impact on any game FPS, unless it's used as a swap disk together with a VERY low system memory amount, I only want to point at the fact that a USB3 port bandwidth is the same as a SATA3 interface bandwidth, and you can almost run a diskless system out of an external USB3 HD or SSD, plus you won't find many motherboards without a full battery of USB3 ports nowadays.
I say "almost", because we all know that the USB ports share the bandwidth with a lot of other internal components so it's impossible to achieve the full speed they are capable of, in spite of this a physical HD won't be throttled down by an USB3 connection.

So, assuming the external enclosure is an USB3 device, an external physical HD won't be a bottleneck, it would work just like any internal physical HD given its much lower bandwidth.
(I'm leaving out the obvious information about the port bandwidth being shared between all the devices connected to the port itself, again assuming the disk is the only device connected to such port).

A SSD should have it's data backed-up on another external SSD, or external HDD, to prevent catastrophic data loss.

Actually, ANY disk should have its external backup if it contains important data, not just SDD's.....anyway, good advice considering the amount of data stored by Trainz :confused:
 
I'm currently running an i5-4670K @3.4 GHz; nVidia GTX770 (both overclocked mildly); 16Mb RAM with Trainz installed on a SSD (late addition to the system, WIN 10 is on a conventional HDD)
Gigabyte Sniper M/B with Creative sound system onboard.

1) Running the Rocky Mountaineer (with TurfX and Shadows high) and a reasonable (<4000m view) I'm getting a consistent 30+fps on 1920x1080 monitor. The SSD has significantly improved the loading time and reduced the pauses when scenery loads.

The one thing that I dis take care about was to have water cooling for the CPU and use the Palit version of the GPU - it has multiple cooling fans - TS 19 really causes the GPC to work hard. I lost a previous CPU to Trainz overheating it, so I'm probably compulsive about cooling!
The other thing to consider is the PC Case - I have a Fractal one which has multiple cooling fans - don't spend out on expensive components and skimp on the case or motherboard. The case design for cooling is important - many components will throttle back if their sensors detect overheating and running a long Trainz route is a good candidate for a stress test!

Hope that assists your choices,

Colin
 
I will never be running any other video game other than Trainz.

And I have been told by Xidax Computers, that Trainz TS19 comes nowhere close to, in need of a 2080 video card, so a 2070 will serve me well enough, and even a 2070 is still a bit overkill.

My choice PC:
https://www.xidax.com/desktops/x-6/?saveconfig=318969

Xidax recommends for Trainz:$2283 (5% discount =) $2169

Motherboard: MSI MPG Z390 GAMING PRO CARBON AC
CPU: INTEL CORE i7 9700K 8 CORE 4.9GHz
RAM: DDR4 3200MHz G.SKILL Trident Z RGB- 16GB
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER 8GB
SSD: m.2 SSD: M.2 Solid State 1TB (They suggested a 120GB M.2, I bumped that up to 1TB)
HDD: Western Digital Black 1TB
Power Supply: Seasonic FOCUS PLUS 850W GOLD
Alphacool Eisbaer 360MM Liquid cooler

Xidax are only interested in getting your money. They have no idea of the requirements for Trainz.

I can build a layout that even with an NVIDIA TITAN V will run in single digit frames per second.

It all depends on the content you choose to run and the slider settings you have set.

Basically a scene has a given number of ploys in it. For most games the people who build the scenes have a poly count budget per scene. There is no such restriction in Trainz.

A 2080 for Middleton for laptops would be overkill. For other layouts it would not be.

I'd avoid the liquid cooler. Then are fairly expensive and if it goes wrong or leaks it is a major problem.

Compare it to the Dell G5.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/gam...rationid=7f4ddd65-f859-4f6a-840a-4562a9be2f68

leave the CPU on the minimum i9, select an RTX 2080, and add a 2tb harddrive and you're well under $2,000 $1,879.99 when I checked a few seconds ago.

Cheerio John
 
The one problem is Shipping

Where I live it is common that packages "NEVER EVER" arrive, as expensive items are either: outright stolen right from your doorstep, or they never even make it to the UPS delivery truck.

And too, our package carriers actually (in all essence of the words) "DROP SHIP" everything, so when you get your package, that was at one time was rectangular, it is now so extremely beat up, with holes punched in the cardboard, and the package is not even rectangular anymore, and is now in the shape of a do-deca-hedron like, many faceted ball, as if Ace Ventura himself, threw, dropped, and kicked the box, all the way to your house.

I would have to have it shipped to a UPS warehouse, and hand pick it up when UPS informs me of delivery.

The other thing, it seems that it has only 460W power supply
 
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The one problem is Shipping

Where I live it is common that packages "NEVER EVER" arrive, as expensive items are outright stolen right from your doorstep.

And too, our package carriers actually "DROP SHIP" everything, and when you get your package that was at one time was rectangular, it is now so extremely beat up, with holes punched in the cardboard, and the package is not even rectangular anymore, and is now in the shape of a do-deca-hedron like, many faceted ball, as if Ace Ventura himself, threw, dropped, and kicked the box, all the way to your house.

I would have to have it shipped to a UPS warehouse, and hand pick it up when UPS informs me of delivery.

The other thing, it seems that it is only 460W power supply

And strangely enough a 460 watt power supply will do fine. Power supplies are odd things. Some brands are better than others. Toms tested a number and some no name brands wouldn't deliver their stated outputs and some named brands were quite happy outputting more than they were rated for.

Dell have engineers who sit down and do the calculations for you. Both heat and how big the power supply should be. Use them. For comparison my newer machine draws about half the power of the old machine even though the GPU is 50% faster and the CPU has a few more cores. The newer GPUs and CPUs draw far less power than the machines of old.

Cheerio John
 
I Just DO NOT trust DELL

And my PC would be nice and pertty White:

I used to be responsible for a few thousand PCs and what we found was the Dells were actually more reliable than the other brands. They were conservatively built with a lot of thought about cooling and the placement of components. That's where Dell made their reputation on solid reliable machines in the corporate environment. They buy in quantity so their prices are often lower than other suppliers who might not be purchasing ten thousand GPUs at the same time. I might not trust Cyberpower but I would trust ASUS. The thing about the big volume suppliers is they have the time to select the parts and configure the machines correctly. The assembly lines have an advantage in that things are not hand built. These days hand built means mistakes happen.

Smaller more specialised suppliers had their place in times gone by but these days an RTX 2080 GPU is an RTX 2080 GPU and the rest of the machine doesn't make a lot of difference apart for the white case of course. If you can accept you're paying a thousand dollars for a white case and are happy then I suggest you go for it.

The only reason I dropped in an RTX 2080 was that Dell could do it for under $2,000.

Have fun

Cheerio John
 
Is an I7 CPU, just as good for Trainz, as an I9 CPU, and an I9 is just good for bragging rights, and an I9 is just totally overkill ?

2162
 
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Is an I7 CPU, just as good for Trainz, as an I9 CPU, and an I9 is just good for bragging rights, and an I9 is just totally overkill ?

2162


An i7 will get you 2% more frame rates than an i5, an i9 will gain you another 1% but remember these are estimates only.

Cheerio John
 
In your expert best estimation, is an I7 CPU all that you will ever need for running Trainz ?
 
In your expert best estimation, is an I7 CPU all that you will ever need for running Trainz ?


There are no black and white rules. It all depends on the content you want to run the number of pixels on the screen and which version of Trainz you are running.

TS2009 uses the CPU heavily, TANE and TS19 use the GPU more heavily. On my system I get better frame rates with TANE than TS2009.

TS12 and TANE running the same content typically runs the GPU at a hotter temperature and the CPU runs cooler. Scripting is done on the CPU so if you have lots of scripted assets then that will use the CPU more than if you aren't running any. It's basically about balance, what combination gets reasonable frame rates per dollar and for that look at the Dell gaming rigs and the recommendation would be go with their GPU, CPU and SSD combination.

I think we're just repeating ourselves here.

Cheerio John
 
I have been told that Trainz does not require a top of the line expensive desktop PC

$ 1617 (minus 5% discount) $ 1536
Motherboard: MSI MPG Z390 EDGE AC
CPU: Intel Core i5 9600k 6 Core 4.6GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 6GB
RAM: Xidax Extreme DDR4 2666MHz Memory-16GB
Power Supply: SEASONIC FOCUS GOLD 550W
HDD: Western Digital Black 1TB
SSD: Xidax Performance SSD 1TB
CPU Cooling: DARK ROCK TF 220W CPU AIR COOLER
CPU Paste: Premium CPU Thermal Paste-Lower Temps 5-10° C
GPU Paste: Premium Graphics Card Thermal Paste-Lower Temps 5-10° C
OS: Windows 10 Home Premium 64-Bit
 
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