Hardware opinions again, sorry!

[niclouse3]

Hello everyone,

May I first apologise for the amount of hardware questions that I have asked within my time at UKTS.

It is soon to be my birthday on the 25th April, for this reason I have decided to update my 5 year old PC.

I am wanting to run TS2013 with TSX with good detail and decent FPS around the 20-40 mark.

Now, I have found these two PC's which I am interested in. But am not sure if they are suitable?

https://www.vibox.co.uk/promotions/vibox-precision

https://www.vibox.co.uk/student-pcs/stu ... ibox-bravo

I have seen this thread, would be interested in the PC show but am slightly put off due to the onboard graphics system.

http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... 1&t=130600

Once again may I apologise for the amount of hardware threads I have created.

Thanks guys
Nick

[gptech]

Just had a quick look, and first impressions are they're all much of a muchness . Will have a proper look when I'm at a PC rather than the phone but don't let on chip graphics put you off----whilst not being great for high quality gaming it does work and fitting a *real* graphics card is a few minutes work.

[niclouse3]

Many thanks for your reply.

Thanks for the information regarding the graphics, I am tempted to go for the Medion E4057 which is shown in the other thread.

Thing is not knowing much about computers means i'm not really sure what to do!

Nick

[gptech]

Sorry I was a while....life got in the way

Both the CPU's used in the vibox machines are based on Bulldozer, which is great for multi-threaded work but not really for gaming. The A10-5700 in the Medion machine compares favourably, and the integrated graphics really are quite good. All 3 are budget end, and in real terms for playing TS2013 would probably perform equally, so if the budget is tight go for the cheapest, which is the Medion. The integrated graphics it offers seems to be keeping bigstewart happy so you wouldn't have to splash out on a new graphics card immediately.

There are alternatives, more than enough alternatives to make your head spin for a few days actually, so I'd advise that you work out how much you can afford, how much you'd stretch that to, and settle on the figure in the middle as being your budget
Once you know that you can look around properly.

[niclouse3]

No worries, thanks for taking the time to help.

Unfortunately my budget is relatively low, I am pretty much persuaded with the Medion E4057 currently.

Many thanks for the information regarding the Vibox machines, very helpful and has helped me make my mind up.

Once again, thanks very much for all the help.

Nick

[kirkheath]

What would you say is your top budget? Would you consider keeping your current PC tower?

A way you could do it, Is acquire a few pieces at a time, that way allowing you to get more quality items. E.g. Pay 400 for that lot at once, or build up components spread over a few months e.g. buying a dedicated GFX card for £200 and a CPU, mobo, memory. Tower next month, and HDD and SSD month after for example. Ok, so you are spending more, but you are spreading the cost of it.

But for TS I would really reccommend a good grade CPU and SSD.

[niclouse3]

Around, £430. And i'm not really a fan of keeping my old tower really, thanks for the idea though.

Ideally I am looking for something ready to run.

Cheers
Nick

[sng60007]

One thing i would note is although a ssd may be preferable as you are on a tight budget i would recommend getting a pc with a decent hard drive to use initially as ts2013 will still work fine but make sure it has the relevant sockets so you can add a ssd later as funds permit.

[gptech]

For around the £430 mark you could get http://www.aria.co.uk/Systems/Gaming+Ra ... ctId=53184 which is certainly more powerful than anything else we've looked at in this thread. As I said earlier, the stuff is out there and now you have a figure in mind you can happily go searching. Of course it'd be wise to do some research before clicking the buy button, not just about the PC itself but also the retailer.

I do wish SSD's hadn't been mentioned...I'll have to get all argumentative again...

They're quick, seriously quick, but other than loading Windows and/or the game in about 25% of the time it takes a conventional spinning HDD they would seem to do little to alleviate stuttering in game, think long and hard about the return on such an expensive investment.

[peterfhayes]

That's a good rig that Gary has selected and should give TS 2013 a run for its money.
AMD have fast clock speeds but mediocre (IPC) Instructions Per Cycle results, so they are usually never as fast in gaming as an Intel variant clock for clock.
SSD's are fine if you have the money and programs do load faster but they don't run faster.
They do seem to stop that texture loading lag, however.
Apropos of nothing: I once did an experiment with a 1TB 7200 HDD (which can buy for around $75 in the Antipodes) that if you partitioned it to say 300GB (never using the rest) it gave similar read and write results to a VRAP drive which is no slouch (this was for FSX which is much more HDD intensive than say TS2013). I was probably deluding myself but it felt good not spending $300 on a VRAP.
Regards
pH