Can Civ 4 permanently damage your PC?

[blaireri]

I, like several others in the forum, have the glitch where after 30-45 minutes of play, the game crashes into some sort of black void and the PC has to be completely powered down in order to restore functionality.

Last night while playing I left my case open to listen as the game locked into black... The signal to the monitor cuts and then I hear one of my harddrive discs stop spinning. When I reboot my OS flashes the message "Windows has recovered from a serious error..." The only reason I even bothered running it again was to see if the Radeon patch fixed that specific crash (obviously it didn't). For the record I have a Win XP, AMD 2ghz, with Radeon 9800 and 1GB RAM. Not exactly low-end machine and I know many others are struggling with this exact same show-stopping glitch.

Now I'm concerned about running the game ever again even after a patch for this particular glitch is released (which could be a long time I'm guessing). Is it feasible this game could be so glitchy, it might actually do damage to harddrives or video cards? I've never encountered a piece of software that actually made a harddrive stop spinning and cut the signal to the monitor.

 

[daelon]

Windows XP(anyway) is made so applications in general cannot cause system crashes. At worst, Civ4 should crash if it's messing up.

If you're blue screening or your computer is rebooting, it's because of a driver that's not functioning right. Basically Civ4 asks the driver to do something and it screws up, and boom, you crash. Not really the game's fault although there's probably a workaround they could impliment, but i'd just update your drivers.

I haven't had it crash once yet, though it runs slow on Earth late in the game.

 

[Nothingman]

I had a friend bring his computer over to my place this weekend for some Civ 4 and his would crash very often. Usually just to the desktop but would also completely reboot once every 3-4 hours. We downloaded the newest drivers for everything. Crashing to the desktop will not hurt your computer but it certainly isn't good for your computer to reboot like that. Chances are it won't seriously damage your computer but I wouldn't say it is impossible either.

 

[Ravenlock]

I don't think this is the case with Civ (that it could actually do damage to your computer), but it's worth pointing out that yes, it is indeed possible. Pools of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor had bugs so serious that under the right conditions, it would actually delete data unrelated to the game from your hard drive.

 

[Tempete]

Hard reboots (improperly shutting down/rebooting your system) could cause data corruption on your hard drive. That was the case with FAT file systems, I don't remember if it still applies to NTFS in WinXP. I doubt there would be any significant damage to the hardware though (unless the crashes force you to turn your comp on and off very often).

 

[Turtleneck]

Although it's called a fatal error, that just means it was fatal to that particular session. The hard-drive stopping its spin was just your computer powering down to the insane memory eating game.

 

[zonk]

Windows XP(anyway) is made so applications in general cannot cause system crashes. At worst, Civ4 should crash if it's messing up.

If you're blue screening or your computer is rebooting, it's because of a driver that's not functioning right. Basically Civ4 asks the driver to do something and it screws up, and boom, you crash. Not really the game's fault although there's probably a workaround they could impliment, but i'd just update your drivers.

I haven't had it crash once yet, though it runs slow on Earth late in the game.

I don't think this is technically accurate -- after a day of trying, reading around various threads, etc, it seems pretty clear that Firaxis understated the minimum requirements, especially on the video card side.

I think it's a legitimate fear that trying to play this game with an undermanned card could lead to the frying of said card. Sure - the pc should in theory insulate its components from getting overtaxed to the point of failure, but I had burned out a video card several years back trying to run a game that DID have higher requirements than I had on my pc.... That was completely my fault.

I'm not trying to incite any fears or panic - but to suggest that there's no risk to your pc (or at least, certain components) isn't true either.

 

[Lord_Zath]

I encountered the same error when playing side-by-side with a friend in multiplayer. There'd be a loss of connectivity, followed by one of the computers freezing for a time. The two computers used are:

1. 1.4 ghz AMD Thunderbird
512 mb RAM
GeForce 4200
SB Audigy

2. P4 1 ghz
256 mb RAM
nVidia basic GeForce piece of crap card
Basic sound card

As you can guess, computer 2 was the one giving us problems. The funny thing is that what seemed to fix it for us was reinstalling the wireless network card on the computer. After that, things went fine...

Graphically, there's a few things you can try. Install the latest drivers, and then change settings to performance. To do this, go to your Display control panel. Click the settings tab, then the advanced button. Find where it shows Direct3D or simply says "performance/quality". Slide it all the way to performance. Make sure stuff like vertex shading, anti-aliasing, etc is on "application controlled/preference" and hit ok.

This, combined with lowering the graphics quality, has solved all issues of the game freezing up at all.

BTW, this seemed to have worked with a laptop of mine that used an ATI Radeon card as well. Obviously, I downloaded ATi drivers for that one.

 

[alamo]

That's interesting. I have no idea why a network driver update cleard it up, but interesting.

Yes, software can seriously damage your hardware. If your AGP slot suddenly switches to 1x voltage then it could jolt your 8x card.

On the other hand, that's not very likely. Not many publishers would last by selling PC-burning software.

Civ4's problem is that it wants to use the latest bells and whistles, and winds up being the trailblazer.

 

[crazypooljunkie]

Your biggest danger is most likely over heating if your computer isn't up to snuff, but I'd say yours is, also there is the possibility of data corruption, but I've never actually had a big problem with that. But if you're playing on a computer like mine you could easily burn it up (please burn, please burn, need an excuse for a new one). Anyway though, I'd probably have to agree with what others have posted. Chances of causing serious damage is small.