DaviddesJ,
You say that no matter what the program does, it shouldn't be able to overheat my computer. Consider that while not running Civ 4, the GPU temperature was a steady 60° Celsius, but that climbed to 112°, even with all the Civ 4 graphics options set to the least stressful. Clearly, the program affects the temperature of the video card. Considering that my system had all four fans installed, and that the nVidia GeForce 6800 GT is known for overheating, my conclusion is that this is a problem with the video card rather than the installation. It is as if Gigabyte Technologies is also trying to sell their cooling hardware.
Before using the external hurricane fan, I had actually
underclocked the GPU speed and video memory speed. Its default speeds were 350 MHz and 1000 MHz respectively, within a range of 315 to 700 MHz and 900 to 2000 MHz. I set the speeds to the lowest, and still reached 110°.
The ASUS P4S800D-X motherboard has a 400 MHz memory bus, which is much faster than the 50ns DIMM memory cards (i.e., 400 MHz > 20 MHz).
I do know of some commercial software applications that have had problems on systems with more than 2 GB of RAM. As I understand it, slightly different programming must be used to accommodate such address spaces.
My system was assembled by
http://www.hitron.com. A major software company's Quality Engineering had all their PCs assembled by them, for several years until they went more "corporate". HiTron has been assembling my personal systems for fifteen years, and this is the first problem I have encountered (in contrast with my nightmare experience with a well-known nationwide PC vendor).
In retrospect, I am not positive that these failures were with the 1.52 patch. They may have occurred only with the original release.
Still, I think it would be good for Firaxis to test on a PC with 4 GB RAM (even if the system only sees 3.25 GB).