Hey guys! I checked this morning the memory support list of my current M3N72-D motherboard, and looks like it only supports 2GB stick. I would have thought 4GB support was now possible thru bios update, but it doesnt look like so. I have 1 memory socket that is bad, so the maximum I can have is 6gb, which isnt so great. Plus, I would need to order 2x4gb kit, losing 2gb on it. I have looked at motherboard/cpu/ram combo on ebay, and found these two: COMBO AMD X4 640 QUAD CORE CPU +8GB DDR3 RAM+ BIOSTAR A780L3C AM3 Motherboard COMBO AMD Athlon 645 Quad Core CPU+BIOSTAR A780L3C AM3 Motherboard+8GB DDR3 RAM So I would spend about 60-80$ more, but would get 8gb, and probably a substantially faster cpu. What would you do? The pricing of the 4gb ddr2 kit is 61$ at corsair (but is the slowest 667mhz), and around 70-80$ on ebay. Funny thing, it seems cheaper directly at corsair. NOTE: Hmmm, just noticed tho that the cpu is an Athlon x4.. I got a Phenom x4 9650 (first gen Phenom).... would I see a difference in performance in the Athlon x4, as the Phenom series is a better one? I've been away from the hardware scene for a while now, and pretty lost on what is good value for price at the moment. I stopped following that stuff after my last computer upgrade, when I was still working in a computer store, back in 2009 or so.
I would suggest not going for an Athlon Series CPU, even the Phenom ones can be a pain. I know that because i used to have a Phenom II X4 840 ( 3.2ghz quad ), but it was a bottleneck to the rest of my equipment because it didnt have level 3 cache. Phenom II's are a good choice price-wise though, just make sure it has level 3 Cache ( as far as i know, as long as the 3-digit number is above 900, it has ). Dont know about the Biostar Mainboards ( i usually prefer Asrock or Asus ). Definately go for 8 GB of Memory too. Its enough though, no need for more than that. edit: i checked your ebay out, i would suggest this combo: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/COMBO-AMD-95...152796044?pt=Motherboards&hash=item1c3544f58c
I know money may be tight for things like this, but I would really wonder about sticking with older sockets. Still, that seems very cheap, and if it is all you can absolutely afford then maybe. Memory is listed as Kingston OR Major Brand...get some actual specs and product ID's from the seller... What do you run in your computer now? Many SATA devices? Any extra slots being used? (PCI/PCI-E) Definitely I'd be replacing the current MoBo, I would be too happy with having one memory slot not functioning. @Hermmie: A lack L3 cache isn't going to horrendously bottleneck much at all. I agree with the memory, 8GB should be ample. What I would do is save my money for a good decent upgrade, piecing bits together from where you can get them the cheapest. What the exact parts are, well thats just up to the budget really. I don't see it as wise to invest money in older sockets as an upgrade. But like above, if thats all that is possible, then you have to make do and go with it.
6GB is plenty of memory for playing rF2. I ran some performance tests and on my new pc build and rF2 (only) maxed at around 3GB. In terms of upgrading for a build I'd recommend getting the latest CPU/Mobo available. i.e. Haswell and a Z87. One 8GB memory stick will be plenty. A good base to build on. A 660Ti can be had for under $250 and does a great job of running rF2 as well. Even if you need to space this out over time it will be worth it. Another thing to consider is buying a complete used PC on ebay. e.g. I'll probably post my X51 Alienware soon, it has 8GB of memory, i7 3.4ghz, GTX555, blu-ray, etc. and I'll be lucky to get $600. You couldn't build one for that cheap so something to ponder. I see a number of them available on ebay at any given time. Cheers.
I'm no expert on this, but recently upgraded from a Phenom II X4 840 ( 3.2 ghz quad, no level 3 cache ) to a Phenom II X4 965 ( 3.4 ghz quad with level 3 cache ), and gained 35-40 fps average, so far i can be pretty confident that this was my bottleneck.
Actually, I'm not really looking for extra performance, that isnt why I want to upgrade. The only thing, I want more RAM to handle the full Nords scene in 3dsmax correctly, without crashing at least twice per hour. And since my MB has already a dead slot, and bad usb sockets, it would be a real waste buy 3x2gb stick to get 6gb max I could have. When that thing is gonna die, I'll have wasted around 120$ on memory I wont be using anymore. So going for a mb/ram/cpu upgrade would be the wisest, since I can have one of those for around 80$ more than the DDR2 ram I wanted to buy. And since my power supply and gfx card arent as old, been replaced about 1 year ago, I would have a computer that would theoretically last a couple of years without problems. Our situtation doesnt let me chip in any more than what I will get with donations, and obviously I dont want to wait 2-3 months in hopes I could get something more up to date (and therefor much more expensive). The 200$ combo listed by Hermmie sounds really nice. I will be honest, I have gotten around 220$ so far, so I'm close to be able to buy it (its around 40$ shipping it says)... My current windows hard drive is failing, got about 20mb of bad sectors (got a corrupt 3dsmax file a week or so ago because of this, the excess trashing has worsened it quite a bit) But I got another newer hard drive than I was using to store my movies. But I can free some space and install win7 64 on it, so I will be fine for a couple more years with it. It mostly was used when I moved the files on, and as I was running out of space, occasionally put stuff on... so its in good shape. (The thing is, its a linux partition, since I was running Ubuntu prior to playing rFactor 2 ) Yup rF2 made me re-install windows after 2 years I came to know about rFactor 1 by playing it with wine, then when I wanted to try the 2, I couldnt get it to run in wine, mainly because I couldnt buy it, the launcher wasnt working) So I'll wait a few more days, until early next week to make a decision and see if I can get to the amount I need for the combo suggested by Hermmie, otherwise I'll look for something similar with a slower cpu a bit... So the Athlon series isnt any better now than it was? I should go for a Phenom x4 something (2nd gen)? Thanks all for the suggestions and taking some time to help me make a good decision. And a huge thanks to all donators. It has really fueled me with additional motivation! I'm currently reimporting everything since I had turned off smoothing in the importer script, since I didnt knew what it was, and thought it would actually smooth (like the smooth function) the polygons. But it turns out that it actually somehow weld vertices together, and make better objects. After doing a quick test, I found out that unsmoothed objects usually have 4-10 times the number of vertices, compared to when you weld them all together. But when you simply select all vertices in an object, and weld, 2 times out of 3, there are some little glitch happening, you see the shades changes.. sometimes it was still fine, even seems to fix stuff sometimes, but I often had to find the problematic vertices and unselect those, and weld the rest. I had a bad feeling about this. After trying a smoothed object, I noticed there was a lot less vertices to weld together... I didnt tested of as many objects as I were going to do otherwise, but it looked very promising. Didnt had twice the numbers prior to weld... sometimes only reducing by 10-20... and not once did the look changed when it weld. So, since I wanna start from the best base I can have, and make the best final product I can manage, I'm reimporting everything again, smoothed! It might even add a couple extra fps down the run! Cant wait to see what difference it will make in rF2! Thanks again all!
When working with 3d editing programs having fast and plenty of ram helps a lot. I have 6GB at home and I do fine with btb, 3dsimed and sketchup but not as fine as at work where I have 16Gb and a nvidia quadroM GPU. I would suggest waiting for the suggestions mario, feels or tuttle can advice... Enviado desde mi GT-I9505 usando Tapatalk 2
I would also leave some money for Marios tool (if you decide of course). I think he has helped you a lot and can make your job much easier from what I've heard. Enviado desde mi GT-I9505 usando Tapatalk 2
I was really interested in getting them as well. My initial goal was to at least get a 3dsimed license, since there is some stuff I'm more comfortable doing with than 3dsmax. Mostly editing mats. Since I can right click an object and edit its mat right away... with 3dsmax, it seems a lot more troubles. Plus I cannot seem to find the alpha blending, alpha chroma selection for texture blending, so I always do this in 3dsimed since its easily selectable. But I would also like to get the tools from Mario as well. I was reading about them the other day, and looks like a must have. Plus I'm already using gmaterial tools which is really nice! The rf2 importer script would also help as well! Someone offered me a very nice alienware computer in PM, and with the gfx card and hard drive removed, it would cost me 280$. So I'll see how it goes next week, if I see that I'm close to 280$, this would be a very good deal, since it is a core i7 at 3.4ghz, with 8gb ram, so it would be a very nice system. The shipping was included at the price, so its not that much more than what I was looking for on eBay.
Can't help you make your choice except to Donation Link (thru Paypal) I'm here for '66 Classics. Thanks for Nordschleife!
In my opinion you can easily manage that max scene without any exotic amount of RAM. If you want you can try this procedure; 1 Create a new .max empty scene 2 In the Display section of 3dsMax set the Object Color shading instead the Material Color. 3 Start importing as Merge your old scene sorting the procedure per type of object, then move those objects into a new layer. 4 Give a proper name to the layer and freeze it. 5 Go To point 3 until the end of the importing/merging. At the end of this process check all gMats stages are pointing to existent texture locations and save the scene as your main new scene. Unfreeze/Unhide just those objects you need to work with. Activate the Material Color just when you need to work with maps.
I'm currently re-importing everything as properly smoothed in the importer script. The way I was doing it with containers, I was importing each groups of objects into a max file (have 17 groups/containers), so 17 max files, then when all this done, I was creating a new max file, importing each of the 17 max files as merge, and moving them into containers, and saving them finally as maxc files. There are drawbacks to this tho, as I found out yesterday, when I enabled two open instances on both the road and road surroundings, the textures of the second open I did replaced a few from the first one. I wasnt aware of layers, freezing and unfreezing stuff... so basically, it's a bit like containers? So when you freeze stuff, its displayed but not editable and not taking resources? Once I'm done with the 17 max file, smoothed, I'll check out your procedure to see how it goes! But nevertheless, 3gb is still a bit small, as the disk is literally trashing itself... not counting the frequent crashes. Its to the point where after working on 5-10 road sections, I'll save everything, quit max, and restart it to prevent crashing and possibly losing work.
It doesn't sound like you are going to stay with your current board anyway, but I just wanted to caution you that you could not run 3x 2GB DIMMs in dual channel mode.
Containers and xref are a nice way to manage a complex scene, especially when you've to share/split your work with other artists...so you're doing a smart thing. Layers are very useful to keep your scene clean, safe and fast as much as possible. You can load/unload, freeze/unfreeze, Hide/Unhide etc...a massive amount of sorted objects with just few clicks. This release your viewer (and your entire system) to render unnecessary stuff. This is something I'd recommend everyone, no matter the power under the hood. Btw, the most demanding situations working on a 3Dscene+gMat (DX9) on a low end system are; 1) Using more than 1 viewports opened at the same time, especially if they're rendering on smooth+edges. 2) Using Edge Faces on viewports 3) Using the Material Shading instead the Object Color Shading. 4) Opening a scene with missing textures (sometimes ends in a unresponsive max session) 5) Forcing the Antialising in the Viewport 6) Enabling Hardware Shading 7) Other demanding softwares running at the same time 8) A very large amount of materials 9) Errors/Flaws in 1 or more objects loaded in the Scene. Keep in mind your viewport is loading mainly your GPU, the RAM usage, in standard modeling operations, is more important for renders and/or bakings into large textures, and - of course - if you're working on multiple demanding softwares at the same time. (EG: Max+photoshop) Our "problem" is we're working with gMats and this affect the overall performance of 3dsMax, this is why using the Object Color instead the Material Color helps a lot during the modeling process and the viewport workflow.
Very good info there! Thanks a bunch! I have just finished importing all objects as smoothed in my 17 max files, and successfully imported all of them in 17 layers now. Actually, I think I will like layers better than containers! Containers was a real mess when max crashed and all files werent saved, or saved at the same time. Well, it was for me, since I was detaching stuff from containers, and it was ending up in the main max file, and until I was gonna be finished, I didnt wanted to move them back to the container every object. The autobackup thingy is likely to be a very good thing indeed! I should have went thru the options a little more! I only followed the rFactor 3dsmax setup tutorial by freew67 on youtube, which was good, but should have really mentioned that part. I was searching on the net for 3dsmax always crash, and after entering always, google completed it for me Tells you how much search results there is Most of times related to not enough memory... Can you be a bit more specific about object color? I didnt wanted to ask for this, but I can't find a display tab in max prefs, I went to viewport config and didnt see this, and search the help and found nothing, and even searched google for how to enable object color. Where do I find this? I also went into driver config in the viewport, and I'm not using AA, and already using the smallest textures and have the checkbox ticked.... things look really ugly! Was already using 1 viewport, and 2 when I needed a view with materials to know exactly what I'm detaching or if I want to see the result of welding, since sometimes it seems to mess up stuff. I havent tried such an object in rF2, but I guess that if the shading on an object changes drastically after welding, its not a good thing. I'm also not using hardware shading, I'm running with only total commander open and a browser at the most. I have cut down my service big time by the black viper services guide, i'm at almost bare bone level, keeping only the strict minimum. EDIT: Another good thing with layers, I can increment save again now... I like to do this, since it often happens that you notice an error a bit too late, and need to go back in time, having multiple saves is very useful then! I tried increment save on containers version but it was a mess...
Hmmm I must be doing something wrong here. Sorry if this is actually off topic, but dont think its worth creating a new thread for this, as it will likely end upon your next answer. After I imported everything and saved, I wanted to start work and detach the road. So I enabled a second viewport with smooth view, and I was shocked to see a uniform green mess. No textures was right. A quick look in the mats editor revealed it empty. I was gonna ask for help, but then I remembered that you mentioned to verify the gmats before saving, which I didnt. So I imported them all again, and also, this time I didnt hide them, as you didnt mentioned in your steps. So I really followed carefully 2nd time. After importing all 17 files, I went to mats editor to check the textures, and it was still empty. A quick switch to smooth view revealed the same green mess. When I import each file, it tells me that it found a material of the same name (multimaterial) what I want to do, I selected use merged materials... that seemed right to me.
I did more testing, and looks like there is something wrong with import as merge. Looks like my container version of the max file containing the 17 containers is having the same problem. A quick look at the mat editor shows it empty. Earlier it was displayed just fine, and now it looked wrong as well. I just dont get it. I just tried importing 1 max file and go to mats editor right away, and it was showing empty again. If I open that same max file by itself, the mats editor is just fine. I'm using the right rf tools, which is rf1 version...
Sorry Tuttle, I think I figured out my problems! First the container version was overwritten when I saved the layers version, I named it the same and there it went! So I was looking at the very same file when I checked it Sigh! After trying an import again, I noticed the mats editor showed empty, however using the pick material from objects revealed the object mats I clicked on... so the mats are in the scene, not in the editor... odd. But anyway, all my mats stuff I do with 3dsimed, I'm more comfortable with, and dunno how to set the options the same way as in 3dsimed in 3dsmax. So after trying an import with 2 max file, selecting use scene materials instead, now the second import used the first import textures. The green mess I was seeing earlier was a result of everything showing as the last texture imported, which was the grassline one. A third try, now selecting auto rename mats did it right. Is this how its supposed to be? Also, why when I import the .gmt the first time using the script, the mats editor window is full of mats. When I save that same file, and reopen, the mats editor is still full. When I import as merge that file, the mats editor of the imported version is empty. So I'll go on and continue to import all files again using auto rename and see how it goes. As long as I can export the file back when I made the changes to the mesh fine and then change my mats in 3dsimed, i'll be happy. But I'm still curious to know why the mats editor is empty on import.
Just want to confirm that importing all 17 files as auto rename seems to have worked. I have just unfroze three layers, and all three were showing properly. Now I can get to work, finally! So if you can only tell me how I select object color and why the mats editor shows empty, then I'd be most happy! Sorry for all this off topic! If you think the information contained in our conversation about this would be helpful, you can always get those post moved to a new thread called help importing large scene in 3dsmax or something? EDIT: Maybe its because i'm french, but the reason why I selected use merged materials, was because I thought max was gonna merge the imported mats into those already in the scene. Seems like it is what it is.. it uses the merged mats...
