New Rig, New Start

[simonmd]

This week has seen the completion of my new PC. My old one suffered a fatal motherboard failure a couple of weeks ago and instead of replacing the MB, I decided it was time for an upgrade. This should hopefully mean that I can play Train Fever much more often and with larger maps for longer without it grinding to halt. My old system wasn’t exactly shabby, an i7 920 2.6mhz CPU, ASUS P6T md, Radeon HD 6950 card and 4GB RAM. However, even this had trouble running TF, much to my annoyance as I genuinely love the game.

Now, Train Fever has no excuse and HOPEFULLY, will run much better;

AMD FX6350 6 core 3.9mhz cpu

MSI 970 Gaming motherboard

Same Radeon HD 6950 card

8GB DDR3 1600mhz RAM

All with a new 1tb Hard Drive. Fingers crossed that my posts here can be more positive from now on as all I seemed to do before was rant about how the damn game kept shuddering to a halt!

[kimmaz]

Just dont upgrade your graphics card to a Radeon R9 290. I did that and my old HD 6970 was much better in every way. even had better frames before on some games it feels like. If it wasnt for that i gave away my old graphics card id swap back ^^

[simonmd]

Thanks for the tip. Although the card is 4 years old now, it’s still a very high perfomer so I won’t be changing it just yet. The main upgrade was of course to the CPU and RAM which will benifit games like this hugely as I enjoy simulation games as a whole (already pre-ordered Cities Skylines! 🙂 ). It was also more than capable of playing games like Crysis, Fallout 3, Battlefield 4, etc. so I think it’ll serve me for a while yet.

[kimmaz]

Do you also use a 1TB drive for your system(C:)? I am looking for some cheap way into a SSD upgrade but the 1TB ssd is so expensive and I’m afraid of whats gonna happen if i cant fit everything onto it.

[olahaldor]

I’d recommend something like 240GB SSD for your system drive. Install games and store big files on anything but that SSD.

[simonmd]

I may well look into SSD in the future, right now I have a new 1TB a 500GB (the main drive from my old system) and two 1TB USB3 external hard drives for backup and transfers.

Whats the main advantage of having the system on the SSD?

[kimmaz]

Read/Write is about 10x the speed on any SSD compared to a hdd. So whatever is on it will load faster. When I get one I’ll put my most used games and programs installed on it and of course install windows on it.

For my own use i think a 240GB is to small. I know you can install steam games on 2 different locations. But you dont gain any better loading on a game if you install it on d: or any hdd even when the os is faster to boot. I got 56 of my 133 Steam games installed (not half of them) and Steam/steamapps/common takes 330GB alone. I may get a Kingston 480gb as it is cheap compared to the other brands (175 euro). Or i might wait and see if there are any price drops =P

[olahaldor]

I have a 240GB SSD for Windows (including documents, temp downloads etc) and it’s filling up. So I see the concern.

I have a second 240GB SSD for Steam and games alone. Loading times are blazing fast compared to what I would get on regular HDDs.

I don’t know about the prices where you live, but two smaller SSDs are usually cheaper than one huge SSD.

[kimmaz]

Well this makes me mad. Take the top selling SSD out there,  The Samsung 850 EVO 250gb. It costs 119$ on amazon, cheapest price i could find online in my country is 160$. Or a budget 500gb, Crucial mx100 512gb, 189$ on amazon, is 235$ over here.

And Sadly the thing about 2 smaller ssd’s being cheaper than a larger one, well it might be a smaller investment twice but its not cheaper if you compare buying 2 at the same time vs one large one.

[simonmd]

Interesting, i’ll keep an eye out for one for the future but I CAN’T suffer another re-instal, not so soon after getting this one built, it’s as bad as moving house!

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