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  • Please see the most recent updates in the "Where did the .com name go?" thread. Posts number 16 and 17.

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OT: New PC Opinions

Threedp

Threedp

SOH-CM-2025
I've asked this in the FB group but I thought I'd ask here too. For anyone who likes to play with PC configurators . .

For reasons I won't bore everyone with, I'd like to use CLX (although I'm not absolutely married to them) for a new PC. Given that:

- My current rig is 10 years old (AMD FX-4300 Quad Core Processor).

- My current graphics card is 6 years old (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER 4GB).

- I have 16 GB of DDR3 RAM.

- I'd like to keep my expenditure as close to $1000 as possible.

- My main objective CFS3-wise is to improve load times (especially ETO) and smoothness of play.

Is what I have below really an improvement? How does it look? AMD vs NVIDIA graphics for Ankor's shaders? I've always had ASUS MBs, are ASRock & Gigabyte reliable? Suggestions to meet the above and save money (upgrade this, but downgrade that) are welcome!

www.clxgaming.com

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Current hardware is more advanced than CFS3 knows what to do with, so past a certain point (and I don't know exactly what point that is), the returns for nicer hardware get less and less, but they are still there. For example CFS3 will not use near the full capacity of the VRAM on latest cards even with high settings and a lot of activity, but the general improvements in speed and bandwidth with newer cards will still have an effect. And of course if you are also playing newer games they will benefit more than CFS3 will. But looking strictly at CFS3, 16GB of system RAM should be the minimum you should consider, but also fully adequate. CFS3 only uses 4GB max, but you need extra for all the overhead of running the rest of your system, which is taking more and more RAM. At 8GB you would have problems. The faster RAM you get and the faster SSD you get will help with smoothness and load times.

I would expect a pretty decent improvement using the RX 7600, especially for using a 1080p monitor. If you are running at higher resolution, you might consider saving up for a higher level card. There are rendering issues for some scenery in CFS3 (such as WOFF/WOTR) for AMD cards that I don't think have been resolved yet. Nvidia does not have these issues.
 
What are thoughts on an NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX™ 3050 6GB GDDR6? Good improvement over my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER 4GB?

And how do MBs compare? Are there any to avoid? At CLX, I have ASRock, MSI, Gigabyte, and ASUS options. I lean toward the latter, but could save some cash with the others.
 
ASUS is very reliable. Counted 18 sec. to fully load the ETO ,(loaded with tons of stuff). 32 GB of RAM, plus a high seed SSD, will have a big impact on load times and smoothness of CFS3. The RTX 3050 is a very good choice. MSI makes a very good version of this video card.
 
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