Railworks America

Wish I could say my new FX4100 Bulldozer made a big difference with RW, but it hasn't. Overall, the new CPU is a lot quicker than my Phenom II 970 (a really good CPU in it's own right) I went to the socket AM3+ CPU to get the full 1866Mhz out of my new DDR3 RAM. The Phenom II socket AM3 would only do 1600. I did this minor upgrade (heck, the new CPU was only $109USD!!!!!) just because I wanted to, not just for RW.

Man, this CPU went from 3.6Ghz stock to 4.2Ghz with no sweat. I'm normally not one to over clock but I just wanted to see, and this chip is great. No muss, no fuss. Next reboot I will most likely put it back at stock. Very happy with this new chip. Heck, very happy with this new rig!

Yeah I didn't notice any difference in RW with my cpu, memory & motherboard upgrade either. Going to Win7 64 on a SSD did nothing as well. Just drained my wallet. Returned all that and went back to my 6 year old AM2 setup. The only upgrade you can do that'll show some real improvement with RW is a high end graphics card such as the GTX680. It is far more cost effective to do that than to waste your time and money dinkin' around with the rest if it.

Well, I decided to go with the 8 core FX8150. I'm not happy at all with this FX4100. I lags quite a lot just running Folding @ Home on the video card, surfing the Internet, and playing a music CD. My Phenom II 970 was a better chip, but it died along with a new board I put it in when I got this FX4100. So I pulled the string, the 8150 should be here tomorrow. Just have to wait and see how this CPU works.

And as I always say, don't upgrade just for RW because chances are it won't help. I'm just doing this for the heck of it.

Well, the board "sees" the chip correctly, so the BIOS is fine. Now, I'm gonna put it to the test. Run Railworks. Best test I can think of!

Forget it. I went back to my Phenom II 970 CPU. Bulldozer is as broken as RW is. 8 cores don't mean crap if the chip is crap. Oh, that 970 wasn't toast, I found a bent pin! Easy fix!

railworks is one of those games that wont benefit much from cpu upgrades. its heavily GPU based, and theonly way to increase in game performance in RW is to upgrade the GPU. Nowwww, in fSX, that 8 core would scream, and does for a lot of people, but fsx doesnt rely on the gpu as much as the cpu.. Me? Well, I'll just stick to my old q6600 and gtx260 :)..

NKP1 wrote: Going to Win7 64 on a SSD did nothing as well.

Good to know... I have been wondering that for a while now... based upon some comments in various posts. I guess I'll put a nice graphics card on my Christmas/Birthday/Anniversary list.

Don.