I’m in the process of trying to build out the best possible Zwift setup both for my bike and treadmill. From my research running Zwift on a desktop to TV in 4k currently seems to be the best options. Is anyone currently doing this? And if so, what recommendations do you have both for the desktop and any connections necessary to maximize the experience.
Thanks!
Depends on your definition of ‘best possible’ and budget. Search FB for ZPCMR.
Thank you. Unfortunately, I’m not on any social media accounts.
Discussed here.
Not a bad thing! Drop me a PM if you want emailing any of the documentation I’ve put together.
Thanks everyone as always!
WAS or NAS drive?
For the most part, the platform doesn’t matter.
You’ll get better performance from a PC if everything works, but your best bet for stability is probably going to be the iOS or iPad app because Zwift can actually test releases on a reasonable number of device + OS combinations, whereas for PCs it’s practically impossible. It’s not unheard of that something just doesn’t work on a particular combination of PC parts, and debugging it is a pain.
On the other hand, you lose ANT+ connectivity, and Bluetooth can be fussy at times.
Pretty much any PC will work fine inasmuch as it does. 4K adds basically nothing on the game side, you could just as well run it at 1080p and upscale it on the TV or possibly your vidcard. Or use 4K if your machine is up for it.
ANT+ dongle with a USB cable (no longer than 3 m/9 ft) so that you can place the dongle right next to your power source.
Use a discrete graphics card, not integrated.
Other than that, it’s up to whatever else you might want to do with the PC. If it’s just Zwift and maybe a media server/player, a small form factor is probably preferable to anything else. If it’s your gaming PC, then just plug the dongle in. Intel + Nvidia is maybe a touch safer bet than AMD but it doesn’t really matter much if you get a recent model.
Alternatively, you could get a M1 Mac to run off of.
There have been loads of issues specific to Apple platforms over the past year (that didn’t affect PC), many of which have left users wondering whether they do any testing at all. There are some ongoing right now. I’m not aware of a combination of PC parts that just doesn’t work, aside from the known freezing issues on 10th/11th gen iGPUs. Entitled to your opinion of course, but I disagree with the notion that the game is inherently less stable on PC.
PS: M1 devices have a bug at present meaning rider shadows aren’t present when they should be. It’s been broken for nearly a year. 
I agree with Dave, I have almost 2000 hours on Zwift and had 2 crashes and one of them was a power outage and the other a Nvidia driver issue. I would say that is relatively stable.
There was an issue in November where tons of people on iOS couldn’t even log in for days because the game crashed immediately across multiple devices. The userbase itself found a workaround before Zwift fixed it, by changing the language back and forth. Just one recent example but how does that get past any sort of testing on a supposedly stable platform? Truth is they all have pros and cons, and all are susceptible to failure. It’s the frequent implications from the community that using a PC for Zwift is excessively complicated, expensive and ultimately unstable which I find hard to ignore. Of course some effort is required to knock up a dedicated Zwift PC, but the guidance is out there for anyone willing to try. 
I would recommend against Apple TV - in my experience Zwift app on Apple TV had many bugs with strange resistance levels (no resistance uphill, massive downhill). With that I put the Apple TV device away. The Apple TV box itself is reliable though and super simple.
iPad version of Zwift was better but it doesn’t look nice. Though at least it does seem to be super reliable. But then you cannot use ant+ connection.
Since I have a spare Mac that is pretty powerful (despite being old) I’m using that. It runs faultless with Zwift and I’ve never ever had a single problem on the Mac version of Zwift. Remember I use the very latest beta versions of MacOS (now 12,2) on that machine too. Even with that, it’s reliable, despite one of the Watopia Wayfinders saying I shouldn’t do that, that we should wait for Zwift to test things first (which is ironic).
All of the mentioned bugs in the Mac version of Zwift don’t seem to happen on my Intel based Mac (old X5690 processor and old RX580). That was a second hand computer that I got from an advertising agency which I upgraded cheaply. I ride in Zwift a lot so if something was going to break then I will find it.
Really, all of the platforms should be reliable but they all suffer from basic fundamental bugs that the Zwift QA process should be catching. If the resistance is wrong or the Kickr climb function isn’t working, that’s very obvious. Power dropouts, that’s obvious. Same with crashing at the top of Alpe.
@Dave_ZPCMR Hi Dave, same situation for me, also not on FB. Trying to spec a new zwift pc now. Thankful for any help! Thanks =) /A
No, you’re right, this is a good correction — when everything works on PC, it’s great. And by and large, it’s fine (just like every other platform). The problem is when everything doesn’t work, and that does happen in some cases, on some machines.
There’s the integrated GPU problem you mentioned, there was the chat crash bug, there was the autoscreenshot crash bug on certain NVidia drivers (as far as I can tell), and I’ve had at least two other week+ long series of repeated crashes for reasons that remain mysteries. Many have not had any of these issues, some have had some, and others have had more. If one of the homogenous platforms fails, it fails for everybody. And that does tend to make the fixes quicker. (I don’t remember if any of the aforementioned PC bugs have had any kind of an official bugfix that ended up solving the issue for me.)
So, as usual with a PC, the tradeoff is a risk of having to debug machine-specific issues with limited tools and limited help (even with volunteer efforts, which are much appreciated). It may or may not be the best setup depending on your needs — but looks like a decision was made here, so enough of that 
Thanks again everyone. Great and helpful information.