Flounce

I am not a newb to cycling, but never knew much about Zwift until I saw a demo set up at Performance Bicycle, and I'm hooked. It's like playing a videogame. I spend 4-5 hours a week on an indoor trainer watching lame movies on Netflix/Amazon Prime, Zwift would be much more fun to pass the time.

1. Is Zwift the best platform for a "gaming virtual riding experience", or is there some other online program/system that is more fun ?

2. With Zwift, can I ride anytime I want and be able to "ride" online with other real people, or am I limited to particular times of the day where they have "rides/races" ? I usually do my indoor riding in the morning between 5am-7am PST.

3. From brief research online, it looks like the CycleOps Magnus, Tac Flux, and CycleOps Hammer are good trainers for Zwift. I kinda understand the direct drive vs. rear wheel aspect, but am otherwise ignorant of how much each of these add to the experience. Assuming that I can afford up to $1300 or so - but don't want to waste money - what do you recommend?

4. Say that I don't have a PC at this time for this purpose and need to buy one. I want it to be powerful enough to work smoothly, and the PC would only be for this use and nothing else (need not be a laptop necessarily etc). What is the cheapest PC that is powerful enough to handle Zwift with no limitations?

5. Thanks!

RShantz

1. Zwift is clearly the most used & in my opinion worlds better than the Cycleops system
2. Yes
3. I use Wahoo Kickr & am satisfied. Don't have experience with others. I imagine all are pretty good.
4. Ask a techie.

deapee

If budget was 1300 tacx NEO or kickr. Around 600 kickr snap or vortex smart.

I rode zwift for years with a dumb trainer, with power, and riding with a smart trainer is night and day.

As for PC, I'd say something with a dedicated graphics card and 2GB of dedicated gpu ram (not total system ram, but what's built into the gpu). I run it on a couple year old Alienware 14 and I find it perfect.

Athens80

4 - The graphics card is the biggest factor in getting graphical performance with Zwift. A card in the class of a Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 will get you 60 frames per second running at 1080p resolution and a medium level of detail (e.g., PC / Intel Core i5-2500 @ 3.30GHz / with Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti/PCIe/SSE2).

You can see more examples of systems in use and the graphics output they produce at https://zwiftalizer.com/benchmarks .

macca33

Wheel-off smart trainer - Kickr, Hammer, Direto, etc, etc and a PC with 2GB dedicated graphics card are the go.

Zwift is good!

mvnsnd

some rides are listed here: Teamup

Also workouts and more here: What's on Zwift