New computer for Civ IV

[Pbhead]

Ok thanks for all of your guys help, I still have a few questions. First, where in the world can I get liquid nitrogen cooling?? (sounds great,but I can just see a pipe breaking onto the motherboard and having a small explosion on my hands{Which is really impossable because nitrogen is (generally) inert, unless you turn it into laughing gas a.k.a nitro...})

and second the ram thing, more is better I think I can manage 2 gig but there are different types of ram in brands(I understand speed and types preaty well)

Also which is better Nvida or ATI? (fairies vs big... scary... thing...)

Thx for all your help!

 

[AsnoT]

and second the ram thing, more is better I think I can manage 2 gig but there are different types of ram in brands(I understand speed and types preaty well)

i've been using kingston valueram modules for a few years now, no complaints.
don't fall into the trap of modded rams with coolers and whatnot on them - only needed for extreme overclocking attempts.

the same goes for liquid nitrogen cooling, btw (you're rightly suspicious of its properties) - that's for modders and other 14 year olds

i guess a lot of the hardware preferences people have, have little or no basis in hard data, they just LIKE the company or its products. ATI or nvidia is such a question - i like ATI cards, but i have no special reason for that.

 

[NinjaGnat]

I to am getting a new computer for civ4, well at least not entirely new, just an upgrade. I'm getting it mid-December, and after reading all the forums about problems playing the game, I'm quite glad I haven't had to go through all that frustration.
I was thinking about getting the best processor out, i.e. Athlon 64 FX57, but that comes at quite a cost! Reading through 'Toms Hardware' site and the likes, I came to the conclusion that the Athlon 64 dual Cores are much cheaper and at only 200mghz difference it was hard to justify the extra expense.
Here's what I'm getting anyway:

Foxconn FNF4SK8 with integrated audio
Athlon 64 Dual Core 4200
1GB (2 x 512mb) DDR400 Ram
80GB Sata HDD
DVD Dual layer drive
GeForce 6600 PCI-E 256mb
Windows XP Home fully patched

As I'm on a fairly tight budget, I hope this will do for now, and this system is easily upgradable. I've kept the price down also by keeping all my old periphials.
Anyway I hope this will do for Cic4. And good luck to you in what ever you choose to get. We civ addicts need the best!

It looks great, I would only recommend one thing. Downgrade your processor to a dual core 3800+, and upgrade your video card to a 6800GS with the saved money. These days graphics cards are significantly more important than processors to playing most games. Even in civ, the 200 Mhz difference will matter a lot less than the difference between the 6600 and the 6800GS.

 

[Psyringe]

As someone who is planning to buy a new PC next year (provided I'll have the money), I'd like to throw in a slightly different opinion.

First, I recommend not to tailor a PC specifically to Civ4's needs yet. The reason for this is that the game is rather young yet, and its needs may change in the near future. New features may increase its hardware hunger, but it's also possible that code optimizations lower it. (I admit that for me, it's easier to wait, since I want to have a PC that also runs Oblivion well, My guess is that this will bring me on the verge of bancruptcy. ) Anyway, it may be prudent to wait at least for the next two patches.

Second, don't neglect stability. I have built my own PCs for years now, always using cheap hardware, and the result is at least one system that randomly crashes and I can't find the reason. Next time I buy a PC, I will:

- go to a computer shop that has a good service, i.e. when my PC doesn't work any more, I want it fixed ASAP. I've spent way too many hours tring to fix things myself, and way too many days arguing with service people who really want me to give my mainboard away for 3 months so that its producer can check it. ("Ummm, yes, your computer will be unusable for the next few months. But if this bothers you, why don't you buy a new motherboard instead? We have a good one here. Of course, you'll also need a new processor, and your old memory sticks won't fit ...." - Aaargh! )

- tell them that I want a computer with maximum compatibility and stability. If this means I'll have to sacrifice some performance, fine. 5% extra performance don't help when a game keeps crashing because of hardware problems. I will actually tell them that I'll run a stress test on each component and want it to pass that with no errors.

I've built PCs since 1991 (bought my first one for Civ1 ). If I learned one thing, then it is this: You don't really notice the difference between 20 fps or 25 fps, but you'll certainly notice six hours going down the drain while trying to fix hardware issues.

 

[vbraun]

SLI was landing at about the same time as I stopped following hardware, but I thought it didn't require any special support, that the 2 vid cards basically acted like a single vid card as far as the software was concerned. Am I mistaken?

Software can be written for SLI to take full advantage of it (get close to 2x performance), otherwise you get up to like 1.5x. At least thats how I think it works.

 

[Pbhead]

thanks for the tip, pysringe The computer I am on crashes randomly sometimes so I will try to get one that doesn't crash under any load. CivIV has crashed for a lot of people, and I dont want my os to magnify that.

 

[calyth]

Puhlease... while onboard video is just crappy budget stuff (as it's meant to be), onboard sound hasn't caused significant CPU load in years. Modern CPU's can pump some sound effects out of a pair of speakers with their little pinky fingers.

How many years? I dug This up through Toms search. I couldn't find the one that Tom's conducted, but it makes the case that the cheap onboard audio chips does dent performance. And surprise, a quick google net me a 2005 post on Anandtech. And to add insult to injury, the first link had spectacular results for the nForce2 onboard audio. I've the chipset, and it's got so much white noise it is not worth the sand that the chip is partly made of.

I've heard that pigs fly and that I'm getting a new Porsche for Christmas, but neither of those are likely to be true. SATA only bumps the maximum throughput across the cable, but no drive on the market has the mechanicals to saturate a 133MB/s UDMA connection on it's own. Even a pair of striped drives might just break 133, and that's not the kind of data transfer that gaming requires. SATA drives are "better" only because that's the current cabling standard and anything that still runs on PATA is more likely to be either obsolete or budget-line and have corresponding internals.

You lucked out. I didn't say in this post (I did this in a different one) that I didn't bother with a UDMA133 drive because I know it won't saturate the bus. I got a UDMA100 Seagate that had at least 8MB cache and a very good seek time. I've "heard" the SATA stuff from the guy who did play WoW on Cedega on Linux and ran hdparm to test his SATA speed, and he said that it was at the close to 80MB/s. Well, he's wrong in this case.
Tom's 22HD round up 2 months ago Mine was a PATA Seagate 7200.7 200GB, so the performance would be a wee bit better than the 7200.7 120GB drive. My drive probably averages around 44MB/s according to Toms, the latest SATA drive averages at 63MB/s. That's a 43% increase on avg read transfer rate. The avg write transfer rate is pretty much the same. PATA drives that perform on the high end in that Tom's hardware test, not-so-surprisingly, have a SATA equivalent. So my generalization is wrong. Simply new drives provides a faster speed.

Did you "hear" this, or do you know it? Do you know what RAID5 is or how it works? If you do you'd know that RAID5 favors reads over writes (it reads faster than a single drive, but writes slower) and therefore would be fine for games. A complete waste of money and a ton of added heat and complexity, but fine performance-wise. Of course, the best option would be to ignore all the hardware machismo out there and just buy a single freaking drive and put your money into a better video card.

RAID 5 chooses a certain block size, cuts up your drives, and spread parity information across minimum 3 of them. If you have N drives, you get N-1*(size of the smallest drive) space, and can sustain one drive failure, maybe at the cost of reduced performance (for sure if you use soft RAID, cause CPU will do the arithmetic, hardware RAID would be a bit less prone depending on the card you got, server RAID cards most likely have the circuits in it to reduce the penalty of deducing the data from the parity info). You get the reduced performance because you need to do arithmetic on every block that you access to recover the data that you've lost. You do read faster - actually you only read faster if you read more data than the block size, otherwise you'll only read the block at the drive. If you read more data than the block size, RAID 5 would allow simultaneous read of the blocks required (blocks required = ceil(datasize/blocksize)). You do write slower, and you do waste a crap load of money, generate a lot of heat, and does little to solve the Huge map problem. I did said specifically that it will only help the load time because even my slower than top of the line HD doesn't thrash when I play a Huge map. And I wonder why I used the tone that "if you must avoid loading [time] like a plague (wrong word choice when I said loading speed)" when I gave the suggestion of striping or using RAID 5? Because I consider it to be largely irrelevent with making the game go faster, except at game loading time.

Psyringe: you're unlikely to find a computer shop that would take the time and care to build you a stable computer. Just hang around the hardware sites, find hardware that is stable, avoid generic RAM (I've got enough bad generic RAM to know to avoid it), and simply test the thing out until you're happy that it's stable. There are lots of software out that will stress the computer out and figure stability problems. My preference is Prime95, and memtest86+ for RAM. If it says that your floating point has a rounding error when you run their stress tess, there's something funny with your computer.

 

[John L]

I'm sorry, but what are you smoking? I'm sorry, but what are you smoking?

I don't smoke you "clever" little boy.

Or learn how to use partitions and a boot loader. Desktop hard drives really don't like being jostled around very much. But what do multiple OS's have to do with running Civ?

Apparantly, you did not take the time to completely read my post. Any system, when it has too many programs loaded on to it's OS will tend to slow it down. If your computer is loaded, try comparing it to a new install from a hard drive that has been reformatted. YOu will note that things run faster.

If you use two trays, one with a harddrive that is for business, and other things, and one for gamings, then the gaming hard drive will operate better, because it does not have all those other programs hogging the OS's resources.

Perhaps you shoulc try it sometime.

As far as RAM goes, get plenty of it (1GB minimum, 2GB would be super) and make sure it's decent quality stuff. It's really easiest to do this if you learn to build your own machine, which is quite easy and fun to boot. OEM's tend to use pretty marginal components at best. That also lets you install Windows without all the preloaded crap.

I already have one Gig of Kingston RAM. Is that enough for your expectations?

And I DID custom make my computer from scratch. I am a dedicated Clone fan, and have never owned a big name brand. So, I guess I am not really smoking anything after all, am I?

 

[WuphonsReach]

Late to the party but...

$100 spent on more RAM is worth 10x then if you had spent $100 on more CPU.

IOW... get 2GB, preferably in 2x1GB configuration (so you don't fill all of your slots). Do whatever it takes to get 2GB, even if it means going with a slower CPU.

Video card - go with whatever was top-of-the-line last year. The prices on those cards are generally reasonable (you won't be paying the early-adopter fee) and the performance isn't that far behind today's cards.