PC Upgrading Discussion

[Ben Tusting]

The first question everybody will be asking is:
How much will you be willing to spend on the PC,Steering wheel,

 

[Mike Hill]

new gear on its way!

Well, I placed the order for the new kit today, due to be delivered tomorrow from Ebuyer. I had to go the AMD route in the end as the vital elements of the Intel package were out of stock or seriously gone up in price.

On its way are:

AMD Phenom X4 9950 2.6GHz Black Edition Socket AM2+ 125W 4MB L2 Cache (512KBx4) Retail Boxed Processor

MSI DKA790GX 790GX Socket AM2+ onboard VGA DVI HDMI 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard

2x OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 800Mhz/PC2-6400 GOLD XTC Memory Kit CL5(5-5-5-18)

XFX HD 4870 XXX Edition 1GB GDDR5 Dual DVI HDTV Out PCI-E Graphics Card

Total cost of £506.22 including saturday delivery.

I am anticipating having to get a new CPU fan at some point. Any recommendations on a decent one for this CPU?

 

[Damian Henderson]

The stock CPU cooler will be fine, unless you want to overclock in the future or the noise is to much for you, but I strongly advise not to overclock that Phenom 1 , they are really poor at it and you won't gain many if any mhz, the Phenom 2's on the other hand overclock very good.

If you plan on getting a better cooler I strongly recomend the Andy Samurai Master. I researched allot coolers in the £30 price range and this had by far the lowest noise and had the best cooling / price / performance going for it.


http://www.eclipsecomputers.com/product.aspx?code=HFS-ANDSAM&af=50

 

[Mike Hill]

Thanks Damian, I must admit, I have no plans to overclock this setup. Its not something that I am comfortable messing about with!

 

[Damian Henderson]

You should be fine then unless the noise is a bit to much from the fan.

 

[Mike Hill]

Well, the new gear arrived at 10.15 this morning. I have it all set up now and its running real sweet. The only thing I've got to work out now is how to transfer my programs/settings from my old IDE disk with Windows XP on it to the new SATA with Vista 64 Ultimate installed. Any ideas anyone?

 

[Robert McColl]

Mike just seen your post now do you by any chance use Skype?

 

[Christopher Aponte]

Mike try to see if local computer store sells a external hd case
I have one to use for my old HD or at least other persons old hd to transfer the files than via usb

 

[Mike Hill]

yeh, Ive got it set up in an external case and connected via USB already. However I was hoping that I would not have to lose all the applications that I had installed on the old disk when it was the main drive for my old setup. Looks like that isnt going to be possible though

 

[Christopher Aponte]

most likely you need to reinstall everything
you can copy paste....but if not mistaken some files have registered keys installed on old harddrive (for them to work properly), and searching for them all sometimes can be a pain in the but

 

[Damian Henderson]

Some might work just copying them though.

 

[carver]

Thanks Ben,
I'll be building a quad core PC with 12G RAM running 64B Windows 7/Vista and dual 512M vid cards to a quad 24" vid display.
I'll prob. run a DVI-HDMI cable to a 52" LCD for the sim work.
I was assuming a G25 with modded pedals for feel, but am new at the sim setups so feel free to suggest things.
Didn't know if there were any PC/wheel/pedal component tricks/pieces that would help further.
Either way, it's a lot cheaper than what the real track costs.

 

[Dave Stephenson]

Comp = good
G25 = good. Might find you want to change the layout a bit as they are quite flat compare to reality, as you mentioned.

Software = would probably depend on what sort of cars you like. Many of the major US tracks are available for evo and rFactor. They are third party though so I couldn't comment on their accuracy. There is a new simbin release due in the comming months that is to include some american tracks. We can quite safely say that 2 of them will be Laguna and Road America as they've just released them for 360.

 

[carver]

Thanks Dave,

I appreciate your confidence that I can afford to trailer the car to Wisconsin,
but I'm not that baller of a racer.....

I've read about guys "buying" additional tracks, don't know if it was on a
version of GTR or one of the online vendors. But I def. need the west coast ones.
I'd prefer to have a hard drive based software vs. an online one simply
because it doesn't make sense imho for my situation to pay a subscription
fee to simply practice the same tracks over and over before going out.
Unless that is, you can think of a realism/other reason to use an online vendor
over a stand-alone PC based software.
Thanks.

 

[Dave Stephenson]

You can export your registry from "Regedit" - type regedit in the run box. File > Export...

Then either use imaging software like Norton Ghost or similar to make a copy of the drive and write it to the new one.

Or

Copy the files over manually. In this case there are 2 options, using a win98 boot disk and booting into a dos RAM drive so that no files from the drive are in use. Copy from one to the other keeping the filestructure. This would need a batch file or several dos commands and a lot of time.

The other option is to use a Linux liveCD, Ubuntu has full NTFS read/write support so would be ideal, many others do but thats the one I have so the only one I can confirm. then you can just drag and drop like you would do in windows all from one to the other.

Once done Import the registry info and bobs your fathers brother.

Ideally, though this can be done it is always advisable to start fresh. doining the steps above would move over your old system drivers and any redundant info that has accumulated on your system through general use. If you do want to copy programs allone that should be fine but you will need to search the internet to find the locations of just the specific registry keys that refer to those, and only export the relevant ones. All in all it can be a bigger pain in the ass than re-installing if its something your not familiar with.

 

[Dave Stephenson]

Well,

Only sim I know that you have to buy additional content for is iRacing, which is subsription based although has excellent reviews on the physics front. You'd have to search the forum for more information its not something I have the cash to have tried. The cars and track list is here: http://www.iracing.com/carsTracks/index.php

As for Simbin/rFactor, the addon content is almost always community produced, and freely available for download. rF has probably the larger selection as its designed from the ground up for modding, although the list is growing very fast for Evo too. Both a based on the same physics engine so are similar in many ways. Having both titles is not really out of the question as rF can be picked up cheap on ebay. I've seen them go for as little as £6.

With regards to the content, I've posted some links below that have the majority of mods/tracks on them for you to browse. My US geography isn't to good so I'll let you decide whats west coast or not

EVO - Tracks - http://www.nogripracing.com/files.php?subcat=61
EVO - Cars - http://www.nogripracing.com/files.php?subcat=83

rFactor - Cars, Tracks, and just about anything you could possibly think of - http://www.rfactorcentral.com/

Demos are available for both, allong with info of all the official content here:

http://www.rfactor.net/
http://www.gtr-evolution.com/

 

[carver]

Hey thanks for the info Dave,
I'll have to look into all of it and see where that leads me. (further questions :rotfl
Any other advice on setting up the G25 for realistic feel/application?
Also, if I were in the UK I'd prob. get lost, crash and go to jail...in no particular order.....

We're lucky in L.A. as there are 8 great tracks all within about 7 hrs.
We're also screwed because there are 8 great tracks all within about 7 hrs.
to sink money into the go fast crack pipe to go broke over.......heh

 

[Dave Stephenson]

hehe,

Theres many schools of thought on setting up the G25. The FFB in Simbin titles is much better than the stock rF one but there are a couple of addons to improve it, people shre their settings for each particular mod on rFactorCentral.

As for Simbin ones its pretty good out of the box once you set the rotation properly, but most people tweak it at some point. Since you go driving in reality you'll be able to find your own link to how it feels in-game and RL.

Theres about 50 million threads discussing G25 settings everyone seems to have a different take on it. I did have some of the better ones written down somewhere but I can't find it but a list of them is here http://www.google.com/cse?cx=006471296525021372215:um8qlpoigce&ie=UTF-8&q=g25+settings

 

[Lee Downham]

lus1: on what Dave says in his "ideally though" section ... you might get some stuff across and working OK, but my guess is that the headaches doing this will cause you will take longer to sort out, and eventually drive you so completely and utterly mad with frustration that you will end up re-installing everything from scratch anyway :wink2:

 

[Lee Downham]

System sounds great there carver ...

RE: your intended setup, some people think that the FF in games is not realistic or makes you slower ... I don't concur to this school of thinking personally, and think it adds to the realism and feel of the whole thing for me, esp in RWD cars.

So ... examples of other high-end wheels (and pedals) to consider if you have the money are such like as Ecci (non-FF) and Frex.
There is also the option of going for something like this http://www.jlvrh.de/JL_Wheel_UK.htm ... which is a modded G25.
Shifter ... Lightening SST seems to be The One :wink2:

Cockpits mate ... you want realism ... you sound like a man with a bit of cash to burn, you want a cockpit too :jump:
There is stuff that folds away or permanently set up ... check out the show your cockpits thread here for more ideas

Also check out this Matrox Triple head to go (TH2G) - allows for 3 x monitors to be used in game as one (eg 3 x 19" or 3 x 22" side by side) ... althought with a 52" TV, not sure this is of any use to you.

One other thing that struck me reading your posts ... you can almost drive the whole of mainland UK in 7 hours if you based yourself very centrally, and would have way more than 8 tracks to go at if you based yourself around there