Is my PC ready for simracing?

[Miguel Gonzalez]

Hey everyone im new to the simracing community, after getting hooked on f1 2010 for pc i started work on my own rig and custom wheel or i would be if bodnars boards will show up -.- but i digress, i bought my pc from newegg about a year ago now. origionally ive been using it for music movies warcraft and the occasional shooter. Now that im venturing into simracing im worried my rig isnt enough. here are my specs

Specs:
OS: windows 7 home premium
Motherboard: Asus M3A78-EM
CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 240 Processor
CPU clock: 2808.02 MHz
graphics: Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT
Memory: 4096 MB (4 slots 2 empty)
HD: 465 gigs 133 free +1TB external HD used for music/movie storage

im mainly playing rFactor and F1 2010 but i get worried because my load times in F1 are sometimes over a minute and thats with all the graphics on the ultra low settings.

some of you pc savy members can you reccomend anything that might help my performance? would more ram help at all? anything i can do to tweak and get the system running better?

 

[Christopher Aponte]

load times of the game is not down to graphics or memory, it is down to the hard drive
what is the harddrive brand and model?
also running defrag should help a lot on load times
in the end you can begin running it low ant then keep switching 1 graphics feature back on.....the biggest graphics hug in racing games can be shadows, but don't know with F1

overall your system seems fine

 

[Miguel Gonzalez]

well its a relief to hear im not in need of any dire upgrades. Hardware tab in my PC properties shows: WDC WD5000AAKS-00V1A0 ATA i "think" thats my built in HD ill try a defrag, i did a lot of file moving to the external to free up some pc space a defrag might just solve my problems. thanks for takin a look!

 

[Christopher Aponte]

Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB (have one of the AAKS model myself) is a good one...so it should run fine

you're welcome

 

[Jason Dewhurst]

You should be able to run most if not all sim games on rd at full with that system, modem/router config and ports also add to slow load times if not set right.