[GS] Bought a new computer I hope will be great for Gathering Storm

[Disgustipated]

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3823673/9900k-pin-cpu-connector.html

Yeah I'm just not seeing that I need that. I do have one extra cable from my P.S., problem is after I put the CPU cooling rig on, it's difficult to fit my hand in there again. And I really don't want to take that thing off again. I don't plan on overclocking. The guy in the link above did overclock at 4.9 and had no issues.

edit: got the game running. Had to update video card/gpu drivers because the colors were funky, I meant to do that earlier. The game is fairly fast. My large size map I loaded in the information era (a save game from a few days ago) loaded before Sean got through with the information era blurb. The game isn't sluggish like before, and exits to desktop much faster than before. In between turn times that late in the game were good. CPU temps stayed in the mid to upper 30's mostly. I got my old saves transferred already. Looks like it's ready for next week. I want to play more, but will have to wait until tomorrow. Though I still have financial stuff to take care of tomorrow since I'm having trouble logging on to one of my financial sites due to an old phone number, and need to do taxes this week before the 14th.

 

[Laurana Kanan]

it's been almost five years since I built my current rig... nice feelings!

It's been four for me, but I've been adding or replacing a couple parts every year. Looking at updating my GPU this year. Was considering the RTX 2060, but I'm curious now about the performance of the new GTX 1660 Ti coming out next week. Might not be much of an upgrade looking at the leaked specs, but it does have upgraded GDDR6 memory, the new Turing architecture and doesn't include the useless (for me anyway) ray tracing.

Given that it is a 9900K, even if you don't overclock, that beast is hungry.

Seems like wasted money if you don't o/c. That's the whole point of the K series.

No need for optical drives 99.9% of the time. Bootable USB sticks are more flexible when installing Windows.

Indeed, pretty much every program can be d/l online now - even many older ones. I must admit though, that I have an optical drive on mine. I have a couple legacy programs on installation disks, and I will occasionally burn a music CD to play in my SUV or for friends/family.

 

[racha]

Seems like wasted money if you don't o/c. That's the whole point of the K series.

OTOH, the 9900K costs a fortune and overclocking shortens its lifespan.

 

[Disgustipated]

Is that true about the lifespan? I was thinking maybe I should oc. I'll hold off for now. I do care about longevity, I got almost 10 years out of my other rig, and it still works as a backup. And I'll have to hook it up again today so I can log in to my financial site and change my phone number.

I will have to see about external optical drives. I still do watch dvd's from time to time. Remember those? My computer monitor is bigger than my tv (which was my brother's until he died, I see no reason to buy a tv). I still haven't ripped all my cd's either. But honestly that may never happen. Some cd's from the 90's I have no desire to listen to anymore, or if I'm really hankering to hear a song I just bring it up on YouTube (I don't have spotify). I still listen to my cd's on road trips as well. My cars aren't that new. My Corolla has a 6 CD changer and my Tacoma has 1, but does have an aux jack to hook up my tablet.

Edit: and the biggest reason to have an optical drive is I still have games that I play on cd-rom and dvd-rom.

 

[racha]

Is that true about the lifespan?

Heat is the enemy of anything electronic and the greater the heat the more you shorten a device's life. What no-one can tell us is how long Intel intend a given CPU model to last while overclocked, and even if we knew that, each individual item is different. If I'd known the people who built my new rig were going to overclock it I would have told them not to (it's possible I won the CPU lottery and got a better quality unit that naturally hits 5GHz).

 

[Laurana Kanan]

overclocking shortens its lifespan.

If done correctly where you don't go crazy with overvolting and have an adequate cooling system to keep temps down, an o/c CPU should last well beyond the time it's obsolete. I've had my 4690k o/c @ 4.5GHz going on 4 years without issue and I know my nephew's had his 2700K o/c to about the same for almost 7 years before upgrading last year.

In general most CPUs are going to last 10+ years, but are likely to be obsolete within 5. O/C done correctly will still likely shorten the lifespan minimally, but it's likely to be such a small amount that the chip will be replaced by then anyway. iirc the 9th gen Intel chips run hot at stock, so investing in a liquid cooler wouldn't be a bad idea.

 

[thecrazyscot]

Edit: and the biggest reason to have an optical drive is I still have games that I play on cd-rom and dvd-rom.

I would recommend making isos of your CDs and DVDs...that saves wear and tear on the discs as well as provides a backup in case they're ever lost!

 

[ChocolateShake]

I picked up a physical copy of Rise of Legends a ways back and have been wanting to give that a try but it's not available digitally anywhere.

I hope it gets an update like Rise of Nations on Steam. I really enjoyed both games quite a lot, I was part of a team that played Rise of Nations in a league, and that was tons of fun. Both of them were great for both single and multiplayer.

When Rise of Legends was released, after some time there was a pretty big competition sponsored by Intel. One of the factions that was considered maybe the weakest at the time, the Alin, had a special bonus where they'd temporarily get extra units each time they built a new military building. The number and I believe tech level of the units depended on the level of military tech they had researched.

After the competition started, suddenly the Alin became the leading faction. Some players had figured out how to really make the most of the extra units, and I believe the player who won the competition used them for victory. Funny how there can be hidden strategies in some games, I really enjoy finding stuff like that.

On the subject of computers, congrats to everyone who's built a new rig/upgraded it for GS! I was having trouble with Overwatch over the past few weeks and used this site https://www.userbenchmark.com after seeing it recommended by someone on the forums there. It turned out that I hadn't enabled a setting in my bios called XMP, I think the site recommended that as well. My memory wasn't running at its maximum speed capacity and was bottlenecking my cpu as a result.

Looking forward to checking out the site recommendations in the thread as I'm considering putting a new build together. I agree with @Victoria it's always good to make sure nothing extra is running in the background, I regularly go through the startup section in the task manager.

 

[Aristos]

It's been four for me, but I've been adding or replacing a couple parts every year. Looking at updating my GPU this year. Was considering the RTX 2060, but I'm curious now about the performance of the new GTX 1060 Ti coming out next week. Might not be much of an upgrade looking at the leaked specs, but it does have upgraded GDDR6 memory, the new Turing architecture and doesn't include the useless (for me anyway) ray tracing.

You mean the 1660, right? That's the one coming out next week, and everyone has their eyes on it... RT is useless, and will be for a long time until someone starts coding it into the games, if that happens...

If done correctly where you don't go crazy with overvolting and have an adequate cooling system to keep temps down, an o/c CPU should last well beyond the time it's obsolete. I've had my 4690k o/c @ 4.5GHz going on 4 years without issue and I know my nephew's had his 2700K o/c to about the same for almost 7 years before upgrading last year.

In general most CPUs are going to last 10+ years, but are likely to be obsolete within 5. O/C done correctly will still likely shorten the lifespan minimally, but it's likely to be such a small amount that the chip will be replaced by then anyway. iirc the 9th gen Intel chips run hot at stock, so investing in a liquid cooler wouldn't be a bad idea.

Well, let's say the moment you OC you start piling up chances that you will lose the silicon lottery... OC does not mean your hardware will fail, but it sure means you are stacking odds now... and @Disgustipated only has an air cooler, a good one, but still air. I agree though that buying a "K" without the intent of OCing is a waste of money (that's why I didn't go for the 4790K, I knew I wouldn't OC that one).

 

[Laurana Kanan]

You mean the 1660, right?

Lol, yep! I don't know how many times in the past month I've mis-typed that.

Well, let's say the moment you OC you start piling up chances that you will lose the silicon lottery... OC does not mean your hardware will fail, but it sure means you are stacking odds now...

As I wrote earlier, if done correctly, and you don't go too extreme, you're really not increasing the odds of a failure by a significant/noticeable amount. Especially when looking at a chip's "relevant" lifespan, but even compared to it's possible "overall" lifespan.

I could get my 4690K up to 4.8GHz on all cores and it would still be stable, but backed it down to 4.5GHz because it was generating too much heat for my comfort and in that case would've increased it's chances for failure since it was pushing it's limits at that point. In any event, Devil's Canyon like other K-series chips were specifically designed and marketed to be o/c, but if you don't know what you're doing it's best not to mess with it and stick with locked chips.

only has an air cooler, a good one, but still air.

Air coolers are fine for o/c if they are good aftermarket ones. I still have my Hyper 212 Evo workhorse installed and it does an exceptional job. But, yeah the newer K-chips definitely benefit more from water cooling solutions.

Imo, if I had to upgrade right now and didn't want to o/c I probably would go with an 8 gen chip like the 8700, save a couple hundred and use that for other components like a better GPU. If time wasn't an issue, though, I'd wait to see if/when higher-end locked 9th gen chips would be released.

 

[Aristos]

I still have my Hyper 212 Evo workhorse installed and it does an exceptional job.

It's almost as if we assembled our rigs together. I love my Evo. It's amazing, still kickin'...

 

[Janskey]

If you're buying new and going for a 9th gen intel chip then you'd need to get a Z390 mobo in order to be compatible out-of-box. Z370's will work after flashing the BIOS, but iirc you still need an 8th gen chip installed first to do that.

Oh right, you do need the update, though on some mobos you can flash without any CPU (most modern ASUS boards, at least).

Got my new computer up and running. I'm on it now. 32GB of ram I9 9900K. Sweet.

Although I did not realize new computer chassis don't have slots for optical drives. Oh well, my little goof. What do you guys do for optical drives?

You got yourself a really nice setup.

I'm so cheap I just took the innards of a broken external HDD and use them with my old optical drive.

Spoiler :

Heat is the enemy of anything electronic and the greater the heat the more you shorten a device's life. What no-one can tell us is how long Intel intend a given CPU model to last while overclocked, and even if we knew that, each individual item is different. If I'd known the people who built my new rig were going to overclock it I would have told them not to (it's possible I won the CPU lottery and got a better quality unit that naturally hits 5GHz).

While it is true that increasing voltage (which is usually required) increases electromigration, it doesn't have any meaningful effect if not taken to extremes. E.g. my old E6300 (the original, released in 2006) runs still just fine, despite being overclocked from 1.86GHz to 2.8GHz ever since (those CPUs were crazy, some people actually got +100% OCs on air cooling). Of course, you should never trust just one example, but a CPU dying because of overclocking is very rare. I guess the manufacturers wouldn't allow it and use it in their marketing otherwise.

 

[Disgustipated]

I am actually considering moderate overclocking now. My cooling setup seems pretty good, even if it is just air. I can always install the 2nd fan. I just have to look into how to actually do it. I wouldn't do anything extreme, just a little boost.

 

[cvb]

Marbozir mentioned in his ''Is Civilization 6 Gathering Storm Any Good?'' video, which he published today:
"I'm playing the game on a GTX 980 and on an i7-4790K, which is obviously not exactly a bleeding edge machine, it's not, but I have to turn it down on quite a few graphical settings to make the game run in a reliable 50, 60 FPS and for a while it was dipping down black below 30 or even below 20."

I mean, if he isn't hopping through a game as lately, the performance of his combination is easily to watch ...

 

[Aristos]

Marbozir mentioned in his ''Is Civilization 6 Gathering Storm Any Good?'' video, which he published today:
"I'm playing the game on a GTX 980 and on an i7-4790K, which is obviously not exactly a bleeding edge machine, it's not, but I have to turn it down on quite a few graphical settings to make the game run in a reliable 50, 60 FPS and for a while it was dipping down black below 30 or even below 20."

I mean, if he isn't hopping through a game as lately, the performance of his combination is easily to watch ...

I was bored yesterday, so I decided to redo my graph settings experiment in advance of GS. I run an i7 4790, 16 Gigs DDR3 1600, GTX 760 2 Gigs. I started with everything maxed, and got an average of 22 ms (~45 FPS) with a 99 percentile of 39 ms (~26 FPS). I barely noticed any bad stutter running the saved game I had at hand at turn 330, all standard.

Then I started playing with some settings, starting with MSAA (the great FPS killer). Overall goal was to continue to downgrade settings until one of two happened: I noticed the change in quality in-game, or I achieved excellent performance, whichever comes first. So I did, step by step, trying the benchmark and also the savegame.

What came first was excellent performance, at a point where I was not really noticing my "downgrades" from the max settings; at least, I don't see the difference at all in my 24 inch 60 Hz 1080p LCD screen... at that point, I had achieved an average of 14 ms (~71 FPS) and a 99 percentile of 22 ms (~45 FPS). Moving around in the savegame, there was no NOTICEABLE decrease in visual quality anywhere in the map or the leaders animation from the max settings scenario, nor any stutter whatsoever. I settled on those settings, which were already the ones I had before and proven excellent.

All that with "just" that lil' ol' workhorse of the 4790 and its inseparable companion the 760... ... second guessing now my impulse to go RX 580...

EDIT: funny observation... the GTX 760 has a memory bandwidth of 192 Gbps, compared to the 256 Gbps of the RX 580. The amount of VRAM makes a difference (the 580 being 8 Gigs), but in terms of bandwidth there isn't much to gain... the GPU itself obviously is more powerful, more cores and more frequency, but still... I'm amazed by how good that 760 was for it's time (and still is), no wonder why Nvidia quickly killed it, it was their cannibal )

EDIT 2: that same configuration allows me to run Rome 2 TW at Ultra or higher settings, without any stutter, or performance/quality problems. Imagine that...

 

[cvb]

When I wrote last Friday "[Huge monitors] TVs are nearly dirt cheap lately", the backround was, that I paid in 1993 more than 2500DM for a heavy(!) 24 inch EIZO monitor - which was huge back then ...

the GTX 760 has a memory bandwidth of 192 Gbps, compared to the 256 Gbps of the RX 580. The amount of VRAM makes a difference (the 580 being 8 Gigs), but in terms of bandwidth there isn't much to gain... the GPU itself obviously is more powerful, more cores and more frequency, but still...

Yes! The amount of VRAM makes much of the difference, especially as has been said on high graphics settings and larger maps with more Civs.

Btw, Gedemon writes @ his ''YnAMP - Yet (not) Another Maps Pack for Civ6'' this WARNING:

For all size above "Enormous", I'd suggest to lower the textures size in the video option and remove leaders animation as the game use almost all the 6GB of VRAM of my GPU.
Minimal configuration for the Ludicrous size:
- 8GB Ram
- a graphic card with more than 4GB of VRAM
Still the mod was not released blindly, the Ludicrous size has been tested on a 500 turns game in autoplay with 32 civs without crash on my computer (CPU : i7 4770K, RAM: 16GB, GPU : GTX 980 ti)

.

24 inch 60 Hz 1080p LCD screen

The absolute size of the pixels looked upon is the SAME for a 24'' 1920x1080 and a 48'' 3840x2160 screen.

If the 24'' screen shows X tiles side by side and Y tiles one upon the other, the 48'' screen can show 2*X tiles and 2*Y tiles (of the SAME absolute size and quality), ie. 4*area.
In order to show the "more tiles" of the same size, of course the scenario is viewed from a more zoomed out position with an adapted inclination of the camera. ->Eg. Farther Zoom mod.

DEMO: Farther Zoom mod for Civilization VI

.

 

[Disgustipated]

tried a huge map with 41 civs yesterday. AI turn times is still significant, but manageable. It is the huge Earth map for Ynamp. I'm playing as Indonesia. And yeah, I don't think I'll be finishing this game. Just wanted to try it. I've only explored up to the horn of Africa by the Red Sea before barbarians forced me back, and up towards the Kamchatka peninsula.

So far so good on my hardware. I sometimes like playing maps with all the civs in it, so that's one reason for the new build. I should say all the civs except duplicate leaders like Gorgo and Chandragupta. Although poor Saladin starts way down by real life Mecca, and he already got hammered by Egypt, and Egypt lost the original capital to Nubia from loyalty. I have loyal capitals mod, but that doesn't help when it's conquered. Arabia is down to 1 city. They really can't do well on a map like this.

 

[treadwin]

I've been playing civ6 on my old laptop (intel Core i3, 2.6 GHz, 16 Gb RAM, no dedicated graphics card). It works well if I play on small maps, low graphics settings and turn off diplo animations. I thought it was about time I upgrade my gaming machine to enjoy Gathering Storm in all its glory. Of course, I will use it for other games and stuff too.

Here are the relevant specs of the computer I purchased on Amazon (to be delivered on Saturday):

• Processor: AMD Ryzen 3 2200G Processor, Quad-Core, 3.50GHz.
• Video graphics: AMD Radeon RX 550 (4 GB GDDR5 dedicated).
• Memory: 8 GB DDR4-2666 SDRAM (I purchased an extra 16 Gb to increase the RAM even more).
• Hard drive: 1 TB 7200RPM SATA.

I know it is probably not top of the line but it should make playing Gathering Storm and other games much better. I am so excited and just had to share with my civ fanatics friends.

Thanks.

CPU is plenty fast enough. 4GB+ graphic card is good. As many people have said though, SSD is the one thing that speeds up games dramatically right now. Particularly if you can get your operating system on it as well.

 

[SupremacyKing2]

CPU is plenty fast enough. 4GB+ graphic card is good. As many people have said though, SSD is the one thing that speeds up games dramatically right now. Particularly if you can get your operating system on it as well.

Thanks. The new computer is doing great with civ6.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

Marbozir mentioned in his ''Is Civilization 6 Gathering Storm Any Good?'' video, which he published today:
"I'm playing the game on a GTX 980 and on an i7-4790K, which is obviously not exactly a bleeding edge machine, it's not, but I have to turn it down on quite a few graphical settings to make the game run in a reliable 50, 60 FPS and for a while it was dipping down black below 30 or even below 20."

I mean, if he isn't hopping through a game as lately, the performance of his combination is easily to watch ...

Honest question (and it might be sacrilegious to even ask)--does frame rate really matter in a game like civ? It's not as if there's a lot of action-packed movement going on. I mean film is 24 frames/sec.