What gaming PC specs should I consider for a Sim Racing build?

I'm about to build my first PC, been gaming with a ROG G Series laptop, but it does not support triple monitor gaming. The intended purpose is Sim Racing (Rfactor2, iRacing, AC, ...), whether it is with triple 1080p monitors or a single super ultrawide monitor.

I'm looking at a Ryzen 5 3600 paired with a 2060 super and would like to know if those two would handle triple screen gaming at 60+ fps at high settings.

Hi Fernando,

You are certainly right to want to build your own machine for sim racing. To start things off, let's take a look at the requirements for iRacing and RFactor to get an idea of what is needed to run the game efficiently.

Starting with iRacing, we will skip the bare minimum specifications and move to mid and high-end. Mid-Range calls for an 8700K on the Intel side or Ryzen 3600/3700 for AMD, while GPU specs want at least a GTX 1060 6GB or RX 580 8GB with 16GB of system memory. On the high-end, iRacing asks for a 9900K or Ryzen 9 3900X and a Radeon VII or RTX 2080 Ti, with 32GB of system memory.

With that said, your three 1080p screens will be pushing nearly 7 million pixels, just shy of 4K at 8.2 million. A 2060 Super should handle it at high settings, but from my research, most are only looking at 80-90 FPS, you could bump that up to a 2070 Super and get closer to 120-140 FPS pretty easy.

On the CPU side of things, iRacing is heavily single-threaded, so your 3600X should work out quite well with its 3.8GHz base clock and 4.4GHz boost, but you will need to keep the CPU cool to achieve that boost.

As far as RFactor is concerned, are you running the original game or RF2? I'm guessing the RF2, so with that, as you know, requirements aren't very high with just a 3GHz Core i5 or Ryzen 5, 8GB of system memory, and a GTX 760 or Radeon 7870 needed for the GPU. I'm going to say your original choice of 2060 Super would be perfectly fine to run triples here.

That pretty much wraps this one up. I'm going to recommend the bump up to 2070 Super to be safe in iRacing while RFactor appears to be a non-issue. Your CPU choice should work out no problem as it has a high enough boost clock to clear most bottleneck issues with your GPU, though I would recommend a motherboard here that can overclock if needed, especially in the future if you ever need to push that boost clock up a notch. Good luck with your build!

Last updated: Nov 3, 2020 at 07:09 pm CST