Civ4 Slow framerate on MY pc?!

[PCnewb]

Ok, first I am a total newb to PC gaming. I liked civ rev on the 360 but wanted more. I downloaded civ4 from gamestops site on friday. I played it quite a bit over the weekend with no problems. I try to play last night and after a few minutes, it starts lagging, low framerate. I tried low graphics setting but It doesn't seem to help? Also I did get the 1.74 patch and the newest driver for my graphics card. I have windows XP.

My PC was built in 08 and it wasn't a "bare bones build" but I really don't know how good it is.

The question is: Is my Pc capable of playing civ4 once the game really gets going?

here's some specs I managed to find in dxdiag
Processor: AMD athlon 64 X2 dual core 5000+
Memory 2048MB
graphics card Nvidia GeForce 8600GT (512MB)?

Under my computer i found 2.6 GHz and 2GB RAM.

I'm not sure if my pc is any good or not. Insight please!

thanks!!

 

[tokala]

Should be more than good enough for Civ4

Have you any firewall/antivirus software running that might interfere?

 

[PCnewb]

Um, well I have norton 360 running all the time I guess. I'm always connected the internet while I play. I guess I will try to play offline with norton off. Does anti virus use up memory or cpu power?

P.S. I tried starting a new game last night and after about 2 mins. the game started to lag. It seems to go away after a few minutes and then comes back. wth?!

one more thing I did defragment the hdd but no help. I currently have like 130GB avail. as well.

 

[PCnewb]

Well, I tried playing offline with norton off, NO CHANGE! I don't get it. I used fraps to show my fps and when its good I get about 50 sitting still and 30 sweeping a decent sized map, when It's bad I get about 5fps. At the time that was on low settings.

 

[tokala]

I would still be guessing that there is some stuff running in the background that's not supposed to be there.

Is there some heavy harddrive activity during the laggy phases? Maybe the indexing service is running wild, and it appears to be a good idea to disable it anyway. See point #6 here.

You could try a virus scan from an external boot device.

Another idea would be that the CPU is being throttled due to overheating or a misbehaving power management. You can monitor the CPU frequency with RMclock, it should stay at 2.6GHz while playing Civ.

 

[PCnewb]

hey thanks for the info.

I don't hear any difference in HDD noise when it gets laggy.

Well I disabled the indexing service although it was already set to "manual" somehow. No difference.

I did not do a virus scan but norton isn't notifying me of anything.

Lastly I installed the Rmclock. here's where it gets interesting. My CPU load right now is about 90%! clock speed doesn't change while playing. temp is 30-32Celsius. Task manager is showing minimal CPU usage right now?

P.S. I cleaned the case out with compressed air eariler but nothing changed.

 

[tokala]

Did I understand you correctly that RMclock shows 90% at the same time as the windows TM shows almost zero CPU load, all while idling at the desktop?

 

[PCnewb]

Yes.
All figures at idle. the only thing I have up is this site.

rmclock is showing about 90% cpu load (varies from about 80-95%)
Task manager is showing 0-10% cpu usage
PF usage is 753MB now but i have seen it at over 1GB
currently showing 48 processes ranging from 28k-45,000k (kb?)

 

[tokala]

O.K.
Might be a good idea to try that virus scan from a clean boot drive. Stuff slips occasionally through a real-time scanner.

Apart from that, I'm out of ideas short of wiping the harddrive and starting over with a fresh windows installation

 

[PCnewb]

hmm. I did a scan with norton, showed 1 risk but it fixed it. I don't remember what it was.

I suppose I will try the virus scan you are suggesting.

I really don't see myself wiping the hdd and reinstalling XP.


thank you very much for your help tokala.