MSTS & PC Hardware

40058 · Post by **40058** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 11:09 am

Maybe a little off topic but.....

this year I did a little upgrade (1.7GHz & Win ME applies to both)

from....

nVidia GeForce 3 Ti 200 64mb gfx card
256mb memory
SB 5.1 Live (this card is probably 5 years old)

to...

nVidia Geforce Fx 5600 256mb gfx card
768mb memory
and originally a SB audigy sound card which gave out nice smooth intro's on all games but sound became distorted on MSTS and it eventually locked up...
So I reverted back to a newer SB 5.1 Digital (now get "choppy" intro's and occasionally "gameplay")

So I feel I'm no or only a little further on from where I started....

Has anyone got any suggestions on upgrades especially gfx and sound cards or is it time for a new PC?

Cheers,

40058.

LucaZone · Post by **LucaZone** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 11:24 am

Im not far off maxing the game out on my machine

AMD XP2000 (1.67Ghz)
1Gb 2100 DDR-RAM
Samsung 40Gb HDD
SB Live 5.1
nVidia GeForce3 Ti500 64Mb

Not sure single components make any difference when upgrading. Its a combination of components that gets increases in performance. It could therefore be that the combinations u have or have changed too, havent had as much effect as you thought they might have.

My system must be a year old now. Well at least since the last upgrade i made on it.

40058 · Post by **40058** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 11:34 am

LucaZone wrote:Im not far off maxing the game out on my machine

AMD XP2000 (1.67Ghz)
1Gb 2100 DDR-RAM
Samsung 40Gb HDD
SB Live 5.1
nVidia GeForce3 Ti500 64Mb

Not sure single components make any difference when upgrading. Its a combination of components that gets increases in performance. It could therefore be that the combinations u have or have changed too, havent had as much effect as you thought they might have.

My system must be a year old now. Well at least since the last upgrade i made on it.

Hmmm...

Mines about 2 years old now (it's a Dell Dimension 4300) I've heard that the nVidia Ti based cards are faster than an FX or MX so I guess that a Ti based GeForce 4 would be a lot faster..

I know the SB Live cards are really a budget based card...

It's all got complicated now it used to be about processor speed only now
its card speed and memory, HD speed, and if you've a high end sound card that helps too and off course memory !! I've also been told that Windows ME dosen't support anything above 512MB any thoughts on that ?

Cheers,

40058.

40058 · Post by **40058** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 11:37 am

By the way Lucazone, what Windows operating system do you have ?

Cheers,

40058.

jonhewes · Post by **jonhewes** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 12:53 pm

[quote="40058..

I know the SB Live cards are really a budget based card...
40058.[/quote]

The Soundblaster live series of cards is not aimed at the budget market at all. They are predecessor to the audigy.

If you want budget, you're talking about PCI 128s etc.

40058 · Post by **40058** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 1:35 pm

jonhewes wrote:[quote="40058..

I know the SB Live cards are really a budget based card...
40058.

The Soundblaster live series of cards is not aimed at the budget market at all. They are predecessor to the audigy.

If you want budget, you're talking about PCI 128s etc.[/quote]

Right then...we're getting somewhere

Choices are:

GFX cards - ATI Radeon 9800XT or GeForce 5950 Ultra
Sound - SB Audigy 2
O/S - Is Windows XP worth getting ??? and upgrade version or
full version?

Cheers,

40058.

LucaZone · Post by **LucaZone** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 3:25 pm

im running the Xp Home upgrade from Win98se.

Plus i dont see why ur soundcard would cause reduction in performance. I was using an SB pci16bit card before my Digi 5.1 and the only difference was the sound channels. it doesnt cause me any problems with any games i have. If there arent enough channels for the sounds playing, it simply doesnt play all the sounds. It never causes slow down or bad sound quality.

TBH are u really going to be able to tell the different when u have 1024 different channels playing? or not? I dont think anyone but an orchestra conductor is going to be able to hear any difference.

If ur sound card really is causing problems, then there is a problem with ur system overall.

Just my oppinion, but if u upgraded ur gfx card to an nVidia FX, and now ur going to upgrade to an Ultra, simply because MSTS didnt increase as much as u wanted, then ur wasting ur money a bit........

was also thinking, it might not be any of the upgraded components thats the bottle neck on ur system. it could be the motherboard. u might have fat data transfers on ur system, but the mobo wont let them talk fast with each other.

40058 · Post by **40058** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 3:57 pm

LucaZone wrote:im running the Xp Home upgrade from Win98se.

Plus i dont see why ur soundcard would cause reduction in performance. I was using an SB pci16bit card before my Digi 5.1 and the only difference was the sound channels. it doesnt cause me any problems with any games i have. If there arent enough channels for the sounds playing, it simply doesnt play all the sounds. It never causes slow down or bad sound quality.

TBH are u really going to be able to tell the different when u have 1024 different channels playing? or not? I dont think anyone but an orchestra conductor is going to be able to hear any difference.

If ur sound card really is causing problems, then there is a problem with ur system overall.

Just my oppinion, but if u upgraded ur gfx card to an nVidia FX, and now ur going to upgrade to an Ultra, simply because MSTS didnt increase as much as u wanted, then ur wasting ur money a bit........

was also thinking, it might not be any of the upgraded components thats the bottle neck on ur system. it could be the motherboard. u might have fat data transfers on ur system, but the mobo wont let them talk fast with each other.

Some very good points there....

I certainly don't want to pay Â£380 just to get a few extra FPS's on MSTS,
although SB Audigy gave some significant improvements on the following
games plus their respective cut scenes..

Neverwinter Nights,
Dungeon Siege,
C & C Generals..

Which incidentally had music throughout the games.

I think with my older SB Live 5.1 card (choppy sound) would therefore be relavant to your final point

Which all in turn has made decide to "keep my money my pocket"

Cheers for that Lucazone,

40058.

LucaZone · Post by **LucaZone** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 4:36 pm

now i can understand C&C Generals

the amount of noises and voices is ludicrious hehe. but again i wouldnt say that was the Soundcard, but more the ram or the CPU struggling to do them all and run the game at the same time.

Lad491 · Post by **Lad491** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 6:23 pm

the Audigy soundcard has a lot of problems, causing lockups with sound screeching amongst others. I bought one and spent ages trying to get it to work before I checked the Audigy Community Website and saw that millions of others had the same problems. Its pretty well regarded as a pile of **** now. I went back to the Soundblaster 5.1 and im completely happy.

buffy500 · Post by **buffy500** » Mon Dec 08, 2003 7:25 pm

LucaZone wrote:now i can understand C&C Generals the amount of noises and voices is ludicrious hehe. but again i wouldnt say that was the Soundcard, but more the ram or the CPU struggling to do them all and run the game at the same time.

Generals Yay !

rufiky4 · Post by **rufiky4** » Tue Dec 09, 2003 4:35 pm

Sliding further off topic, would Generals run on a GeForce Mx440 based card? Only I'm thinking of buying it and I'll have to pay for a DVD drive as well, and I don't want to lay down all the cash and not have it work!

Cheers
Chris

chazcozens · Post by **chazcozens** » Tue Dec 09, 2003 5:36 pm

Going back on topic - the biggest change you can make to your PC (given the already reasonably impressive spec) is to check and/or change the hard drive.

Train sim loads from disk practically constantly (as does flight sim) - this is a result of having an ever changing landsacape! Fast disk seek and access times are therefore absolutely critical.

Have a look in your machine - does the HDD cable have coloured ends or plain black? If they are plain black then you are probably not even using the existing drives to their full potential because that is almost certainly not a UDMA cable!

If your disks are running in UDMA mode and you're still having trouble, a number of manufacturers are now introducing game orientated drives with significant drive caching on the disk itself - this will help with repeated objects, but will not be nearly as useful on something like SVR or S&C 1920's with their hundreds of unique objects.

The single biggest change you can make is to install fast SCSI drives - you will not believe the difference it can make to a PC's performance! (Indeed these days SCSI is often the only thing that differentiates a server form a workstation!). This is not cheap, but performance always comes at a price, I'm afraid.

Whilst you still have IDE drives - if your CD is on the same IDE channel as your HDD, don't play audio CD's whilst playing trainsim - this has a significant effect on HDD performance.

LucaZone · Post by **LucaZone** » Tue Dec 09, 2003 5:54 pm

Eh? the biggest change u can make to a pc is the Motherboard......that requires a complete system rebuilt. Changing HDD's takes froma few mins to a an hour or so depending on how important the drive is to windows.

chazcozens · Post by **chazcozens** » Tue Dec 09, 2003 5:59 pm

I meant the biggest performance change, given the spec he's already quoted I would think that the motherboard would be reasonably up-to-date to support it - it would therefore appear that he's got the hardware to run MSTS comfortably, once it's loaded into memory - however many of the problems he describes can be attributed to relatively slow drive access, and I was suggesting that that is the next area he addresses.