In another post Bearcat answered my question about video cards but now I am finding out that the hard drive has something to do with frame rates as well. What do you recommend for a hard drive ? Also anyother recommendations you may have to improve frame rates. I am taking my machine in Monday to replase the hard drive but don`t have a lot of money to spend.
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The Staff of SOH
Rebuilding My PC
- Thread starter bobhegf
- Start date
Hi Bob,
To be honest, any modern SATA HDD will do for CFS2. If you can afford a 7200rpm speed version then that will give you the best access times, which will keep things to an optimum.
( For info - a basic install of CFS2 is only 858Mb! I run a basic version off a cheap memory stick for fun, which runs very well.)
The rest of it is common sense and applies to all computers for personal use:-
Keep your system 'lean and mean', don't add or install cr*p. Be discerning about what you put on the machine, and what programmes you really need to have running all the time.
Good husbandry of the pc, ie have a good freeware, low-resource hungry, anti-virus i.e Avast, AVG or M$ Security Essentials (please don't use uneccessary, expensive, resource-hungry anti-virus progs such a McCaffee, Norton 360 and others), fully un-install progs, run defrag once a month (M$ defrag is not that good, something like Defraggler and others are much better at it, but the standard one is free and comes installed), be careful about updating all the hardware drivers, with just a thought of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'.
Keep the pc physically clean and cool. Turn off at night so that the RAM is cleared, and you will have the max RAM for use the next time you fire up the pc, this also allows the pc to cool and electrically de-stress by discharging.
Hopefully you are going to an independant computer store, if so, they will know and understand. The biggies such as Pc World etc, will not have that personal service.
The requirements of CFS2 are very low, the add-ons and mods are what causes your computer to work harder, so again keep your CFS2 installation tidy and ordered. You can aliase sounds, panels, almost everything, to cut down size, but that will not really affect speed or frame rates.
All these things will help keep you pc running to it's optimum, and give it a longer shelf life.
Hope this helps
Cheers
Shessi
To be honest, any modern SATA HDD will do for CFS2. If you can afford a 7200rpm speed version then that will give you the best access times, which will keep things to an optimum.
( For info - a basic install of CFS2 is only 858Mb! I run a basic version off a cheap memory stick for fun, which runs very well.)
The rest of it is common sense and applies to all computers for personal use:-
Keep your system 'lean and mean', don't add or install cr*p. Be discerning about what you put on the machine, and what programmes you really need to have running all the time.
Good husbandry of the pc, ie have a good freeware, low-resource hungry, anti-virus i.e Avast, AVG or M$ Security Essentials (please don't use uneccessary, expensive, resource-hungry anti-virus progs such a McCaffee, Norton 360 and others), fully un-install progs, run defrag once a month (M$ defrag is not that good, something like Defraggler and others are much better at it, but the standard one is free and comes installed), be careful about updating all the hardware drivers, with just a thought of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'.
Keep the pc physically clean and cool. Turn off at night so that the RAM is cleared, and you will have the max RAM for use the next time you fire up the pc, this also allows the pc to cool and electrically de-stress by discharging.
Hopefully you are going to an independant computer store, if so, they will know and understand. The biggies such as Pc World etc, will not have that personal service.
The requirements of CFS2 are very low, the add-ons and mods are what causes your computer to work harder, so again keep your CFS2 installation tidy and ordered. You can aliase sounds, panels, almost everything, to cut down size, but that will not really affect speed or frame rates.
All these things will help keep you pc running to it's optimum, and give it a longer shelf life.
Hope this helps
Cheers
Shessi
rhumbaflappy
Charter Member
Hi Bob.
I was going to build my own a few months ago. but my PC died and I needed to get one asap. I went to Best Buy and bought an HP Pavilion off the shelf for a pretty cheap price. To my surprise, it has done everything I have asked of it. It has an AMD A6 processor, with the combination cpu/gpu processor, 8gb ram, and a 1 terabyte HD. It's not very upgradable... I can add another HD if I wish.
I only write this to let you know that you need not sweat over the details of your build. Even the cheapest off-the-shelf solutions are far better than the 'latest and greatest' of just a few years ago.
Dick
I was going to build my own a few months ago. but my PC died and I needed to get one asap. I went to Best Buy and bought an HP Pavilion off the shelf for a pretty cheap price. To my surprise, it has done everything I have asked of it. It has an AMD A6 processor, with the combination cpu/gpu processor, 8gb ram, and a 1 terabyte HD. It's not very upgradable... I can add another HD if I wish.
I only write this to let you know that you need not sweat over the details of your build. Even the cheapest off-the-shelf solutions are far better than the 'latest and greatest' of just a few years ago.
Dick
One of my biggest problems with CFS2 is the fact that there are very few trees and grass when you are on the ground. From 6000ft. it looks great. When flying low or you are on the ground it has very little depth. Adding this type of infrastructure tends to slow the game down even when you add it to the GSL. Using mostly stock infrastructure and Leroy 10s low poly count 256 trees and stock AI ac I have been able to keep the frames rates up. On a good day on my old PC I was only able to pull about 85 Frames a sec. with everything clean. I don`t like putting my game pc online and do my best to keep it offline which helps keep it clean. I use cds to transfer downloads from my online pc to my game pc.I do the samething when I upload missions. I have been able to use up to 137 stock AI AC in one mission doing combat at the same time. This one mission was the fighter mission flown from Midway during that battle. Another problem I have are clouds and black smoke. those two things really kill my frame rates. During the Guadalcanal campaign weather played a huge part in the day to day air combat. Putting the dark clouds and all the black smoke from the bombs kills my frame rates. I want to correct this and the other problems with the rebuild of this pc. With all the land class changes and all the new things coming out for CFS2 as well as correcting the problems I have had in the past I need the highest frame rates I can get. I want to thank those that have answered this post and those that are I hope going to answer. Lets keep this post going because it will not only help me but others that have the same problems.
Bob:
Providing your computer can handle them, you may want to consider getting a USB flash drive to xfer data between machines. They are SOooo handy for temporary file xfer, storage, etc. Quite a bit easier than burning even re-writable
CDs.
Our local Wal-marts have SanDisk 8GB flash drives for $5.00 each in a Back-To-School bin. You might check yours.
I like to get a few of them and super-glue them back-to-back (like the old .30 carbine banana clip magazines) to create 16GB sticks. I have my entire music CD collection mounted on one stick.
Just some thoughts.
Providing your computer can handle them, you may want to consider getting a USB flash drive to xfer data between machines. They are SOooo handy for temporary file xfer, storage, etc. Quite a bit easier than burning even re-writable
CDs.
Our local Wal-marts have SanDisk 8GB flash drives for $5.00 each in a Back-To-School bin. You might check yours.
I like to get a few of them and super-glue them back-to-back (like the old .30 carbine banana clip magazines) to create 16GB sticks. I have my entire music CD collection mounted on one stick.
Just some thoughts.
To optimize performance for older games, there are a couple of things to consider:
-Because cfs2 is single threaded, you're not going to benefit much from multi-core CPU. A dual CPU is great, because your PC will be able to perform background tasks without interrupting the game. More than 2 cores doesn't benefit performance at all. Raw CPU speed is very important, so it's better to get a 3GHz duo-core than a 2.7GHz quad-core for instance.
-Since cfs2 does most rendering by its CPU instead of the GPU, the PC's RAM memory speed is very important; more important then the amount and speed of memory in your graphics card.
-Because cfs2 is single threaded, you're not going to benefit much from multi-core CPU. A dual CPU is great, because your PC will be able to perform background tasks without interrupting the game. More than 2 cores doesn't benefit performance at all. Raw CPU speed is very important, so it's better to get a 3GHz duo-core than a 2.7GHz quad-core for instance.
-Since cfs2 does most rendering by its CPU instead of the GPU, the PC's RAM memory speed is very important; more important then the amount and speed of memory in your graphics card.
kelticheart
Charter Member
Thanks for this info, Sander!
It will be a great guideline for future hware investments.
Cheers!
KH :ernae: