Upgrading your computer

[civ_king]

Poor man's gaming machine
Athlon II X4 630 Propus @2.8GHz ($99)
use a MSI 760GM-E51 motherboard+G.SKILL 4GB RAM Combo ($129)
PowerColor Radeon HD 5670 512MB ($89)
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound ($10)
Antec Three Hundred+Antec NEO ECO 520C 520W Continuous Power ($100)
Total: $428 (needs a Optical drive and HDD, but you can use your current ones)
(for $80 extra you could get Phenom II X4 965 BE Deneb 3.4GHz, much better CPU)

 

[MajorDisaster84]

For my part, I'm slapping a desktop together to supplement my two-year old, but still effective ASUS Laptop, and because I've not built a new computer in five years.

ASUS M4A79XTD EVO Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Processor
4GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM
ASUS EAH 5850 1 GB GDDR5 Graphics Card
Western Digital 320 GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
Plextor PX-880SA-26 24x DVD+R, 8x DVD-RW SATA (black) Optical Drive
Thermaltake TR-2 750W ATX Power Supply

For those with a little more coin, depending on where you shop, you can pull that together for around $1000, give or take $50.

 

[civ_king]

AMDs are super upgradeable because you can keep the CPU after a MoBo upgrade and easily get new CPUs

 

[TheChanger]

im definitely gonna need to update my computer. as it is it struggles with civ 4 on the lowest graphics settings... im tossing up whether i should preorder to satisfy my need to Civ, or just wait till ive updated my machine...

 

[kiwitt]

All my upgrades were initiated in part by Civ versions.

 

[Savoir10]

All my upgrades were initiated in part by Civ versions.

Hmmm. My new computers always seemed to coincide with a new Civ game. I wonder if their could be a conspiracy between Sid and Dell.

 

[agoodfella]

Tech dummie here, can someone confirm if my Toshiba laptop (Qosmio) will be able to handle Civ V:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 / 2 GHz
RAM: 4GB / DDR2 SDRAM - 667 MHz
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT TurboCache
HD: I guess I have external HD that can make room?

Thanks!

 

[civ_king]

im definitely gonna need to update my computer. as it is it struggles with civ 4 on the lowest graphics settings... im tossing up whether i should preorder to satisfy my need to Civ, or just wait till ive updated my machine...

what GPU are you using?

 

[Xzylvador]

Tech dummie here, can someone confirm if my Toshiba laptop (Qosmio) will be able to handle Civ V:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 / 2 GHz
RAM: 4GB / DDR2 SDRAM - 667 MHz
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT TurboCache
HD: I guess I have external HD that can make room?

It should definately run the game; don't know about maximum settings, but should run smoothly as long as you don't demand stuff like all animations on with 8xAA and 32xAF or whatever.
External HD: only use it to put music/movies/documents on so you have more room on the internal HD; do NOT install Civ or any other programs on an external HD.

 

[agoodfella]

It should definately run the game; don't know about maximum settings, but should run smoothly as long as you don't demand stuff like all animations on with 8xAA and 32xAF or whatever.
External HD: only use it to put music/movies/documents on so you have more room on the internal HD; do NOT install Civ or any other programs on an external HD.

Thanks for the reply! Not sure what 8xAA or 32xAF are...

 

[PieceOfMind]

In short, they are the "make my game slightly prettier by making my graphics card work a lot harder" settings.

AA = Anti Aliasing
AF = Anisotropic Filtering

 

[Bombguy99]

Civ use a lot of Processor between turns

A snapshot mid-turn of Civ 4: Rise of Mankind: A New Dawn (max map size, end of medieval era)

It was using 4 cores partially, probably enough usage to put some serious work on a 2 core machine.

The game itself was utilizing around 1.9GB of ram at the time, and I don't normally see it getting over 2GB regardless of how large or crazy the game gets. My system rarely uses more than around 4.5GB of ram with Civ going and various things in the background.

System is an i7 920 and 12gb of ram.

 

[civ_king]

A snapshot mid-turn of Civ 4: Rise of Mankind: A New Dawn (max map size, end of medieval era)

It was using 4 cores partially, probably enough usage to put some serious work on a 2 core machine.

The game itself was utilizing around 1.9GB of ram at the time, and I don't normally see it getting over 2GB regardless of how large or crazy the game gets. My system rarely uses more than around 4.5GB of ram with Civ going and various things in the background.

System is an i7 920 and 12gb of ram.

doesn't bother my Pentium 4 @3.2GHz mid turn

 

[Dark_Jedi06]

Finally we have the system requirements...now I just need the opinions of some tech savvy forum members.

I definitely exceed the minimum requirements, however I certainly want to run such an awesome game on full blast, based on my system specs do you guys have any recommendations?

Windows XP SP3
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU @ 2.40Ghz
2 GB RAM
nVidia 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS

I'm thinking I will have to add more RAM, something I've wanted to do anyway, but I have no experience with (what to purchase, installation, etc.) I would appreciate the thoughts of the techy bunch.

 

[Aramazd]

A snapshot mid-turn of Civ 4: Rise of Mankind: A New Dawn (max map size, end of medieval era)

It was using 4 cores partially, probably enough usage to put some serious work on a 2 core machine.

The game itself was utilizing around 1.9GB of ram at the time, and I don't normally see it getting over 2GB regardless of how large or crazy the game gets. My system rarely uses more than around 4.5GB of ram with Civ going and various things in the background.

System is an i7 920 and 12gb of ram.

AFAIK, Civ 4 is not largeaddressaware so it cannot use more than 2GB of RAM.

Finally we have the system requirements...now I just need the opinions of some tech savvy forum members.

I definitely exceed the minimum requirements, however I certainly want to run such an awesome game on full blast, based on my system specs do you guys have any recommendations?

Windows XP SP3
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU @ 2.40Ghz
2 GB RAM
nVidia 640 MB GeForce 8800 GTS

I'm thinking I will have to add more RAM, something I've wanted to do anyway, but I have no experience with (what to purchase, installation, etc.) I would appreciate the thoughts of the techy bunch.

You'll want to find out what kind of RAM your using, and you'll want to know what speed the RAM your using runs at. My guess is DDR2-800, but you can't be sure. You can download CPU-z to check if you don't know.

 

[Oerdin]

This game is a frigging resource hog. They need to send all of their programmers back to school so they can learn what optimization means. Also I have no faith that their stated minimum specs will actually be enough since the specs they suggested to reviewers were significantly higher then even their recommended specs and reviewers STILL had problems with stuttering and lag.

 

[Niptium]

Wow, this is surprising after all. I guess me investing in a total of 8 GB DDR3 RAM wasn't a luxury after all.

 

[paradigmx]

I'm thinking I will have to add more RAM, something I've wanted to do anyway, but I have no experience with (what to purchase, installation, etc.) I would appreciate the thoughts of the techy bunch.

find out your motherboard's maximum RAM clock speed and get that RAM, as was stared above you can find that using CPU-z, or if you know the make/model of your Mobo you can find out online.

Second, never mix RAM makes or clock speeds, it may work sometimes, but usually you'll just cause system stability issues as different RAM has different clock timings.

Lastly, RAM can be pretty cheap nowadays, go for the best clock speed you can get, but unless your looking at building a monster computer, don't worry about getting the high performance RAM, the value stuff is usually fast enough for most applications, I prefer the Kingston ValuRAM line, but others may disagree with me. You can find a number of videos on youtube on how to install RAM, but if your unsure, most computer stores can install the RAM for you at a fair rate(except Best Buy, they'll charge you through the roof and then try to sell you something else.)

 

[civ_king]

AFAIK, Civ 4 is not largeaddressaware so it cannot use more than 2GB of RAM.


You'll want to find out what kind of RAM your using, and you'll want to know what speed the RAM your using runs at. My guess is DDR2-800, but you can't be sure. You can download CPU-z to check if you don't know.

BTS is large address aware

This game is a frigging resource hog. They need to send all of their programmers back to school so they can learn what optimization means. Also I have no faith that their stated minimum specs will actually be enough since the specs they suggested to reviewers were significantly higher then even their recommended specs and reviewers STILL had problems with stuttering and lag.

Civ IV was sloppy coding and Civ IV for Mac was POS coding (couldn't use more than 2GB RAM even though it required a 64 Bit OS and Mac systems went up to 16GB RAM...

 

[cardgame]

As long as we're talking about RAM, is DDR3 really worth it? I have 6GB of DDR2 in my comp now and it runs things fine...