Most civplayers don't realize they pass up the best computer for Civ evey time they reach for a fancy quadcore costin 10 times the price. Pentium 4 sqeezed out one late model that shook the civving world and became civ4's bloated tech complaint forums greatest secret.
This model with the same enhanced 65nm Architecture as all new computers today, this same model with 64 bit support so to utilize 3gigs of ram when you play, is the ultimate civving rig.
You can blame the media misson of overblown concerns regarding
Megahertz myth for civ players having thought the rigs that followed the peak evo of the Pent4 where greater for civving.
Seems to me anyone with atleast 2mb of L2 should be at better advantage. That what the Pentium4 cedar mill has but it also uses anywhere from 4.0 7.4 ghz to zip through the 31 stage pipeline, and who cares how long the pipe is if the L2 supply never has you needing to make the trip? Its got the bases covered for a tiny slice of a quad cores price.
The 'clock speed is king' days have been left behind. True on almost all front cept civ4 was made before this was realized. We presume this applied to everything because sites like tom's thumbs used games like WW, Quake, and all other non turn based players to tell us so.
It makes sence from Intel view To reset the consumer upgrade clock starting again at the bottom with pent3 derived smaller pipestage 'M series' to get people upgrading every year again.
Clock speed was at a peak but thanks to todays 65nm and corrective software like ATI's CoreCell cooling applications, that peak can deliver the best turn speeds obtainable for a game designed 2 years before, when blueprints for civ4's engine utilizion where drawn up.
I am talking about the Cedarmill of course. Its an early conroe with 3.6ghz base speed that uses insane levels of electricy which requires a custom cooling system and software to draw back on heat, something that disn't escape a lot of critics but that also had nothing to do with performace comparisons with civ4 using hot or not CPU's.
It comes down to this, The top level Fast turns are a luxery not for the amount a new fancy computer costs but for the price of the fuel it takes to operate the older yet more adapt for turn clipping speeds pinnicle pentiums. This is whats not understood by vast majority because its such a small article exception to what otherwise is a written rule: Pent4 is ancient inferior design in almost all appilcation, almost all. Untill you own a cedarmill and see a coredue in action with the same game like I have, You will not knowt youve passed up on the long seeked out solution to fix interturn deley. What else won't a Pent 4 at this rare level do that you need to buy a 1200$ quadcore for? Surf the net? Write a letter? lol..Its a joke where only the insiders in pc home industry are laughing. PLease do some reseach
This "cedar' system coming in around 300 dollers thanks to drastic cuts to all 'pathetic single core' rigs after the coreduo was realised to be the greatest rig by majority, which it is for you electro bill. Its not for the best strategy franchise of all time though. So Take you pick but don't complain to the game when you made the wrong choice. Charge the industry with deception or Id blame yourself for going with the flow.
Compare the coredue with the Cedar playing civ4 and they both have 65nm CPU microarchitecture with 2mb of L2, they both have up to 3 gigs of ram, they both can have a good X800 XL 512MB Graphics Card, but the cedar churns AI processes at 3.6 ghz and the coredue 2.4.
This is without Overclocking. The highest speed ever obtained was on the cedarmill not a dualcore,. It was at 8.0.
In fact The single core is still used today in the OEM market provinding quite impressive processing to massive consortiums running specialized tasks that handle mega loads of calculations at blazing speed. Sounds like something needed for Civ4 mp interturns!". Yes Surprise! the mono is still the choice for most businesses applications in programmers eyes. They don't need that extra 2 or 3 engines that delivers nothing to the one concentrated task at hand like a refined 'to further stages' mono core which is represented at home by the Cedermill. Think about it
This rig is are only solution for the big mods that are still to come. Site google '3.6 ghz' or 'Cedarmill' '631', '641', '651', or '661' and 'slow'
With the thousands of complaints attributed to this one area. I promise you will never find one player who was using the Cedar Mill 'single core' Conroe
I like it so... but the MAF occurs in the best of the game 
But the game goes in crash also if i play a simple game with this mod (basic number of civs, random map) but i can play more time than the other way... bye
