Anyone have 1st hand exp with SSD and CiV?

[anandus]

Do you have a reason?

Yes, I couldn't finish my post, because the wife was calling me to bed

The thing is that if you do run out of RAM, your system will become highly unstable.
Of course this depends on several factors, like the amount of memory, the amount of video memory (don't forget to deduct your vram from your available ram), the memory usage of programs, etc.

Of course, with 8Gb of RAM the chance is slim you'll run out of memory, but as there's no negative side-effect of running a pagefile, there's no real reason to turn it off to limit potential crashes.

As far as I can tell, its an old legacy function left over from memory restrictive days and it doesn't seem to help even though base memory still IS restricted. It only makes sense on low mem machines.[/]Yes and no.
Windows, also the newer versions are designed to work with a pagefile. It's (initially) a virtual memory for when you run out of memory, but the workings are a lot more complicated. Even Windows 7 makes good use of the pagefile.

And why wouldn't you want it on the SSD? Wouldn't that be the point? Read/write wear in aside, the point of an SSD is speed. Using the SSD for your primary OS drive with the page file makes the most sense.

Using your SSD for a pagefile is very bad for your SSD and really reduced the life of the SSD. If you have a pagefile put it on a different disk than your SSD.

You can run without pagefile and if it works for you than that's good , but it's not a sure-fire succes, on some setups it'll work, on others it won't. That's why, in general, I advise against it.

If disk space is an issue (say you only have a small SSD) then you could try out turning it off, but if disk space isn't an issue, then there's no argument for turning off the pagefile. There is no performance gain (on Windows 7 at least, due to Superfetch) and you only increase potential instability.

 

[steave435]

The thing is that if you do run out of RAM, your system will become highly unstable.
Of course this depends on several factors, like the amount of memory, the amount of video memory (don't forget to deduct your vram from your available ram), the memory usage of programs, etc.

VRAM very rarely has anything at all to do with your regular RAM, it's only an issue if you're using an integrated GPU in your CPU or MB. Dedicated graphics cards have the VRAM in the card.
Most people are running 64-bit OSs now so it's usually not a problem, but if you're still running a 32-bit system your system is limited to a maximum of 4GB memory and in Windows Vista and 7 there are artificial limits in the Home versions even in 64-bit versions. Home Basic limits you to 8GB and Home Premium to 16GB. Those limits include both your RAM and any swap you may have.

I do agree with the rest though, a small swap gives you that buffer that you may need. A 8GB system will rarely use all of it, but it can happen if there's a memory leak in something or if you like to run a lot of stuff at the same time. Personally, I've gone up to 12 out of my 16GB used a few times, and if that happens to you while you have no swap at all, your computer will freeze completely. It happened a few times to me before I got my new computer since my old one was running 32-bit XP, so when the RAM ran out there were no swap to back it up and it could easily take 10 minutes or so to close something to get under the limit again since the system was unresponsive.
A swap would warn you that it's about to run out since you'd notice stuff starting to take longer, but it would still work so you could start closing stuff down.

 

[PieceOfMind]

A year or so ago I tried putting civ5's installation over to an SSD (using a program called SteamTool). If there was any performance improvement it would have been too small for me to notice without getting out measuring tools. I moved it back to the regular drive after that.

 

[aziantuntija]

I played civ5 with this sytem for over half a year:

Abit IP35 PRO
Q9450
500 GB HDD
Win Vista
GTX 470

Then I changed to:

MSI P67A C45
i7 2600K
120GB SSD
Win 7
GTX 470

So the only common component in those systems is the GTX 470. Im by no means saying that this would be -solely- because of the SSD, but the game (also the save games) loads WAY faster than they did before! Most of the credit for the much faster load times (in pretty much anything like starting the win) I will give to the SSD.

EDIT: Please note that im not atlking about turn times, turn times did improve also conciderably but it was most likely due to the i7 upgrade (perhaps also 0.1% came from vista to 7 upgrade ).

 

[ense7en]

Using your SSD for a pagefile is very bad for your SSD and really reduced the life of the SSD. If you have a pagefile put it on a different disk than your SSD.

What!?
Maybe this was partially true for old crappy SSDs, but it is not for any current ones out there.

 

[Pizzaspy]

Yeah I got one and never heard "Welcome back my son..." again. Insta-load.