So my garmin dongle and laptop arrived Time to get zwifting!
I am using Garmin 510 with HR chest strap, Garmin combined speed and cadence sensor, Garmin Ant+ dongle and a Cycleops Jet fluid Pro.
My Laptop have i7 core and a Nvidia GeForce GT840M GPU, which is hooked up to an LCD 32" TV via laptop HDMI output.
Everything was so easy, i plugged everything in, loaded the game synced HR and speed/cadence sensor and it all worked seamlessly Well done developers.
I spent an hour and a half going round the island with no issues at all, as far as i could tell. I am not the fittest person in the world so i took it easy around most of the island conserving energy to attack he main climb each lap. I was very impressed with how the metrics from my ant+ devices sync with the onscreen avatar and it seems like the speeds are pretty accurate on the flat and dialled down nicely for the hill.
I was so impressed that after a couple of laps, i got immersed in the game and when attacking the hill i sort of forgot i was on a trainer and kept pushing right up to the KOM flag, which is great and should really help in the real world.
I like the island loop aswell, it makes a nice training loop. For me at the moment it takes about 12 minutes to get round, which equates to 10 min spin, 2 min max effort up the hill. It will be great when more maps are added and i can have a shorter duration between hills (hard efforts), which will in effect give a different workout effort, with less recovery time. Similarly it would be great if in the future i could develop my own maps (or choose from available maps) with flat and hills at intervals that could be based on whatever specific training i am aiming for.
My only slight criticism at the moment is the boosts you get, i understand its a game and these sort of things make it a bit more exciting, especially if it helps you chase down a rival. However in he real world you dont get boosts, only hard work and effort count. I may change my mind as i play more but for now i wont be using boosts as i want a consistent lap time, hill climb etc so i can gauge how well/much i am improving.
I do have one question, does the game automatically take over my Nvidia graphics card or are there things i need to do in order to get he best graphics possible.
Thanks for any comments and replies.
Jonny Cooke