How I made my fx 5200 to work

[Icecream]

Starting conditions:

P4 3.00Ghz with HT tech
Nvidia FX5200
1 Ghz ram
Audigy
Old graphic drivers
Old bios
Old audio drivers

Civ 4 output:
- 1-2 fps
- No ctds or BSOD

This happened whatever civ4 settings i used.

Middle conditions:

As above only i uptaded all drivers and bios

Civ4 output:
- No lag at all and overall increased performance
- Very frequent and random CTDs and BSODs

Now I would add that I plaied a lot with nVHardPageSE tool and by changing a lot of graphic settings I experienced almost all the problems people reported in the forums.

Current conditions:

As above only i switched back to 66.77 graphic drivers.

Civ output:
- No CTDs or BSODs in 2 hours game (this was impossible before)
- Increased overall performance to a more than playable level with all settings to high and huge map during modern era.

So key things for me were:
- Bios update
- Using 66.77 graphic drivers

I would add also that those changes i made interfered even with the choppiness of bink videos that i believe it is a nvidia drivers issue.
For now i could only get the intro video to run properly.
The wonder videos are still a bit choppy but not at the level they were with the newest nvidia drivers.

[GAZ082]

I decreased the Shade to 1.1 and the other thingie also to 1.1 using nVhard and then make my virtual memory up to 2gb (i have 1gb of ram) and that dramatically increased the FPS.

[Icecream]

Yes I did that too during my playing with nVHardPageSE but with that config I still had serious CTDs and BSODs the thing that stopped CTDs was turning back to old 66.77 drivers, i did notice though enormous performance increase by switching to 1.1 shader version.
One thing that still annoy me is that I had found the config that could run all videos correctly but the major problems there was still the CTDs so now I cant remember what I had changed to make videos run.
Hope this can help.