Hi Guys, Sadly my little old Dell Optiplex 7010 has cooked and killed my NVidia GTX 1050i GPU. Before replacing said GPU I found a PC for sale and just wondered about it's suitability for TSC? I don't do any other gaming (apart from the odd dabble with FSX) Just thought I would seek some advice from you more knowledgable folks before diving in. Many thanks in anticipation. Dell G5 Gaming Desktop 5090. 9th gen Intel Core i5 9400 with 4.1Ghz Technical details: NVIDIA Geoforce 6TX1650 4GB DDR4 8GB (obviously would add more) 1TB 7200 RAM SATA 6GB Dell multimedia keyboard in black 9th gen Intel core i5 9400. 4.1 GHz
Don't buy a Dell. Loads of propitiatory stuff in there that makes upgrading a nightmare... non-standard motherboards, PSUs etc, so if it breaks, its usually e-waste. Ethically they are just dodgy as well, and will charge you for things you don't ask for, such as warranties, even if you tell them you don't want one. Loads of people with Dell machines will just come and shout me down and tell you they're great though, so feel free to ignore me. You really need a SSD with train sim. 8GB is useless, and Dell often fill all slots with small DIMMs, so upgrading my not be a given... check. The 1650 isn't a great GPU, and and even low end RTX30xx/40xx would be a much better option. In fact, just to show you how spectacularly LOVE the 1650 is, here's a video showing it getting its arse spanked by a 3050 In fact, if you want even more context... here's a video of it being shown the door by my GPU, which is 9 years old LOL. You need a CPU with the best single core performance you can get really, as TSC is not really a multithreaded application. The i5-9400 wasn't a great chip... no hyper-threading. Not that this matters much for TS, but I'm assuming you may want to do something else with it one day. It's single core performance is not stellar. Unless it's really cheap, I'd not bother, and I've no idea what your budget is to recommend anything else.
Considering it was a $600 configuration two years ago, I would generally avoid it as-is. For someone old or young it could do. RAM is definitely insufficient today. As for TSC, you could run (10+ years) old content on it, and have some fun. Probably. It's a fair start, not spectacular, though. But calling a PC gaming because you can run Freecell and Minesweeper on it... Almost bad advertising. I get it, though, people don't have money these days and big thanks to crypto, hardware is expensive, so we all settle for second best. Practical problem is that you'll likely stress it and wear it out. Like those 3 cylinder cars with 20bhp on the highway.
