tubemad wrote:I dunno, I got the GT 630 for about £80, just about what can put up with spending, and tried it on here, runs a lot of routes clear as day, boosts MSTS Frames up no end too. Don't know if it would overclock his machine though.
So basically an x50 should give it a very good balance? I'm looking at spending £80 on changing towers, £40-ih for a new one and £30 for them to move the kit over, as I've not done that before.
Changing the graphics card isn't going to overclock anything - that's something you choose to do yourself, through the BIOS (basic computer settings accessed when you first switch on).
By 'balanced', I mean that you're aiming to make full use of both CPU and GPU. If one is significantly slower than the other, that will be the limiting factor for how many frames per second (fps) you get in a sim; and the more powerful one will just spend half its time twiddling its thumbs waiting for the slower one to finish processing each frame.
The specs you posted list a pretty decent CPU, so in my judgement (for what that's worth!) an x50 is probably the
minimum spec you want. If you can stretch a bit further, say to a 560 or 560 Ti, that will probably be better.
To give some idea, my system seems fairly balanced with a processor benchmark (
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html) of around 1200 (slight overclock) and a video benchmark (see earlier) around 1100. It also has a memory bandwidth (just google "GTX 260 specs", or the appropriate model number for the card you're looking at) of 112 GB/sec, which ultimately determines the framerate x resolution (see
http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... 9&t=118819):
Here is a rough calculation to see how much Bandwidth you need to see here, in order to turn on the new shadows in TSX:
Code: Select all
Bandwidth (GB/s) = (Screen Width * Screen Height (in pixels) * 25) / 1,000,000
(Also, if you hope to run 'proper' antialiasing, multiply it by another 4 for 2x2 SSAA - assuming I've understood the whole thing correctly!)
Now, your i5-2320 scores nearly 1700, versus my 1200, so you'll ideally want a graphics card with a proportionally higher benchmark score, say 2000 or so.
This isn't necessarily exact, but if you check the benchmark score and memory bandwidth before buying, hopefully you'll stand a better chance of ending up with a system that runs as well as it can.
Any specific input on this subject from the resident computer experts would be welcome, too (gptech?)
