Owners guide to the Porsche 996 Carrera 4

iRacing is CPU limited with HD6870 and AMD Athlon 620 processor

I recently upgraded my iRacing rig to a ATI HD6870 GPU and a 900W power supply and I can now drive triple monitors at 1920x1080 resolution. I was at 3x1280x1024 before. But, I was disappointed with the frame rate of around 35fps worst case at Road America. I'd read I should be getting 70. After some research I'm pretty sure the problem is my CPU. I have an AMD Athlon x4 620 which is a quad core 2.6Ghz chip with no L3 cache. I tried overclocking it to 3.2Ghz last night and the frame rate rises to around 43fps.

It looks like an Intel i5/i7 setup is best for iRacing at this resolution. Road Racing on triple screens uses a lot of CPU and Intel chips are simply faster. If you want the best frame rates, buy Intel for now. That said, I'm not about to buy a new motherboard, RAM and processor. So, I bought a new processor. An AMD Phenom x4 BE 970. This is a quad core chip at 3.5Ghz with 6MB L3 cache. It just drops in to my ASUS M4A785G motherboard and I like that about AMD a lot.

My Nvidia GT240/Matrox Triplehead2go/AMD 620 rig was plenty fast frame wise BTW if you're happy at 3x1280x1024.

I bought it at newegg for 190. The AMD 6 core chip is 230 but only clocks at 3.2Ghz so I figured i'm better off with faster cores and fewer of them since iRacing only uses 2 cores right now, maybe 3 cores in an upcoming release according to rumors.

The chip should arrive this week and I'll post the numbers.

GT4 and the Logitech Steering Wheel Review

Well,

I bought GT4 for my playstation 2 (PS/2) during the week and the new Logitech Driving Force Pro steering wheel. US210 dollars in Best Buy. Expensive but I bought them. I previously had GT3 and the older Logitech Steering wheel, the Logitech Driving Force. I found that with GT3, the Driving Force was unusable. It was aweful. The Force Pro was supposed to be realistic and as the owner of a Porsche 996 Carrera 4, I was interested in seeing how real it really was.

First, the Force Pro works amazingly well with the game. A friend of mine (Ferrari owner) and myself have been playing with it for a couple of days now and we both agree it's awesome. I found driving the RUF GT3 detuned to 300hp and at max weight was very close to my car in terms of feel. The new wheel is a leap ahead in driving simulators.

Then, I had a nagging feeling, whats the old wheel like with GT4? Oops, it's the same, it's awesome now also. The problem wasn't the wheel, it was the game. We can't tell any difference between the Pro and the old wheel. You don't use the full lock etc on the Pro. So, good news, if you have the Logitech Driving Force then try it out.

The main difference between both products is the switch locations. I found it was very easy to press the controller buttons when using the old wheel. One of the buttons (circle) is full brake so it's interesting hitting that by accident.

The old wheel has paddle shifters, the new one has a sequential shifter, like tiptronic on a Porsche. I'm now liking the shifter more than paddles but it'll be a personal choice. Recently, I reprogrammed the buttons to let me shift using the buttons rather than the shifter so it's like my car which has Tiptronic.

So, is the new wheel worth 150 bucks and tossing your old one, probably not. It's clear now that the problem wasn't the wheel, it was the game. You'll get loads of enjoyment from GT3 and the old wheel. The new wheel moved the buttons away from the wheel and so I like that as you can't hit the buttons by accident. The 2.9 turns lock to lock doesn't make a difference for us. You never turn the wheel that much anyway.

So, GT4 is awesome and both the Logitech Driving Force and the Logitech Driving Force Pro are incredible with it.