Hmm, looks like I can wedge a corsair 750watt power supply in a precision ws with a cable adapter anyway… and it’s a good power supply to base your build suggestions below around if I decide to do that in the end.
Thanks, appreciate all the info.
Yeah you can use an adapter for the motherboard power connector, not something I’d recommend personally but it should be fine.
Actually am using an optiplex at the moment that I can stick a bigger PS in with no cable adapter that is pretty similar and already has the i7 and 16GB of memory and SSD, so that’s my fall back with the corsair 750 watt PS I think.
Think I may try that first – I’ve got some much computer stuff around here from the last office clear out I’d like to use what I can! Thanks again for the research… you’ve been a huge help!
No worries, it’s good fun messing about with old bits. People think you need to spend a fortune but it’s not true at all. That’s why 4th gen is the best, it performs really well in Zwift but at i5 and particularly i3 level the parts are really common and unfashionable, and therefore cheap.
Just a shame about graphics cards right now… 
Let us know how you get on. 
Bill, you can refer to benchmarks reports
For Zwift, I think, you need your processor to have a good score in single thread performance category.
With graphics card, if your power supply provides the needed power, you should be fine with the GPU which you ordered, although I did not test it first-hand. The situation today is even worse than two years ago, all high end GPUs are sold out and one can find them only at highly inflated prices, if at all. And you do not need a top of the line GPU for Zwift anyways, albeit you need a good GPU, preferably north of 10,000 on the passmark scale.
And this is a link to GTX 970 manual (when you click on it, it will download a PDF file with the manual).
It requires two 6-pin power connectors and double-slot in your PC.
NVIDIA states, minimal system requirements are
System Power Supply
Minimum 500 W or greater system power supply with two 6-pin PCI Express supplementary power connectors.
Yep.Between mining and semiconductor shortages:-(
Bill Dossett
Yeah, I got my GTX1660Ti last year for 180 bucks. The Dell workstation with a i7-6700k, 16gb of RAM and NvME SSD ran me 300 bucks.
That GPU is selling for 500 bucks on eBay right now. Wish I’d bought a bunch of them…
Just musing…. Has anyone tried turning off cpu VT to see if it makes any difference.
Supposedly it doesn’t on most fronts as far as I have read, but your statement about the best performance single threading makes me wonder…
I am going to disable it anyway to start with and maybe see if I canfind anything that would quantify it…. Got my graphics card and hopefully the PS arrives today.
If referring to hyperthreading, I typically run Zwift on 2c/4t or quad core CPUs without hyperthreading (including my own rig) and as far as I’m aware there’s little or no benefit to any configuration. Worth a try, but benchmarking CPU bottleneck scenarios in Zwift - in a truly repeatable format to determine actual differences that aren’t margin of error - is very difficult.
Well got it all working, 4K ultra looks sweet and there’s even a little bit of the case left after dremelathon! Think this will do me for a while, thanks for all the advice!
Bill Dossett
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Hi Dave…. Did my first real ride today… I noticed kind of jaggy outlines on the left of my rider… sort of like trace lines or something on the drawing of the picture.
I’m using a 4K tv at the moment, I’m going to put a 4K monitor on it to see if it occurs there… also, very weird – I did the UCI lap in Innsbruck and it seemed like I only saw them for about the first 20 minutes, like it was getting warmed up – but this isn’t the days of tubes/valves etc… but it did seem like it got better by the end of the ride?
Just wondered if you had any thoughts on that? It’s a fairly cheap and nasty 4K tv, so it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the culprit but is there any tweaking to be done on the nvidia adapter that I should look at? I tried a bunch of different picture modes on the tv, all of them but I like vivid as it’s the brightest and colors look the best to me.
Anyway, if you have any thoughts advice on that, let me know.
Thanks
Bill
Were you doing a workout? 
No I wasn’t.
Bill Dossett
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Ah. Not sure what jaggy outlines you’d see. It’s possible the graphics card has a faulty or failing component (probably VRAM), that’s all I can suggest. They can definitely be iffy and get better as they warm up, I’ve had that before on a card I returned to Amazon.
Think win 10 had set magnification to 150% as it is liable to do some times- seems ok now, was noticing some frame drop, turned off hypertheading and speedstep in bios and seems good this morning anyway 
Bill Dossett
Frame rate drops below 60fps are due to one of two reasons:
- Loads of foliage and/or dust (worst places being Watopia jungle and New York). GPU is maxed out and literally can’t give any more.
- Loads of riders nearby which creates a CPU bottleneck. GPU is under-utilised and prevented from maxing out.
Reason 1 can be improved with a faster/stronger GPU or by dropping the resolution setting in game. Reason 2 can only be improved with a faster/stronger CPU (single thread performance), with GPU and resolution setting being irrelevant.
well, I finally got everything today and put it all together and its fantastic. Really smooth, haven’t noticed any drops at all. The small form msi computer is just perfect sits on the base of my tv stand which I got for 86 bucks - so I’m only in this house for 3 months and then moving somewhere else - so this makes it all easy to move, other than I have to take one leg off the bike as it won’t fit up the basement stairs in this little victorian house… dave thanks again for all the advice, this is just perfect. And I am getting a little M1 mini to use as my main personal computer for the Mac fans out there I just believe this is about the best setup I could have got. Not cheap but all in all the whole thing, bike table computer tv is about half the price of the bike I used to have on my wahoo kikr! I think all I am missing is a fan right now! Thanks All!
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