Will this setup play Civ4 fine?

[xpfusion]

I'm about to upgrade my computer so that I'll be able to play Civ4 on max settings (huge maps, all civs, high-end graphics, etc). This is what I ordered:

Pentium D 830
4 GB of PC4200 Kingston memory
Club3D Radeon X800XL 512MB

Is this a good setup for playing Civ4? If there are any issues, I'd like to know in advance so I can be prepared to solve them. Thanks.

And does the game support 1680x1050 resolution? That's the native resolution of my monitor and I'd like to keep it for playing Civ4.

[baboon]

Man that's a powerhouse, ofcourse it does. What's the point with the 4 gb RAM, that's pretty insane.

Don't know about the resolution..

[Solver]

No, sorry, Civ4 requires 8 GB RAM minimal .

Civ4 can support any resolution, you can set whatever you like in its config file. Some windows may not scale, but it will play under that resolution.

Huge maps with 18 civs is the way to go, and that's certainly playable on this amount of RAM. That's pretty much a next-level machine as you can figure.

[xpfusion]

Heheh.. Yes I know, 4GB is a lot but I heard Civ4 is really memory hungry. Besides DDR2 is really cheap these days so why not. Anyway, I'm a little uncertain about the Radeon card because people keep mentioning ATI issues. Should I be worried?

[Aileron]

I feel like Civ 4 is a memory hog, but I'm sure your "Deity" level system will be able to run it. Must be nice to have lots of $$.

[baboon]

Originally posted by xpfusion
Heheh.. Yes I know, 4GB is a lot but I heard Civ4 is really memory hungry. Besides DDR2 is really cheap these days so why not. Anyway, I'm a little uncertain about the Radeon card because people keep mentioning ATI issues. Should I be worried?

I think anything above 2GB is overkill.

[TheArsenal]

I added two more gigs last night to take it to a total of three. Not being a computer guy, my reasoning was simple: there were two slots left open that could take the memory sticks; and three gigs sounds better than one.

It is making a massive difference on the Huge Map I'm playing. Turn time is down radically, and it never hangs when I zoom in and out which it did on occasion (seems to zoom faster, but that may just be my perception). I didn’t check to see if that solved the lag time in opening the Military Advisor, since the Military Advisor doesn’t serve much use to me.

So far this game has cost me a Video Card and memory upgrade. Not complaining, but still.

[rev9of8]

Re: Will this setup play Civ4 fine?

Originally posted by xpfusion
I'm about to upgrade my computer so that I'll be able to play Civ4 on max settings (huge maps, all civs, high-end graphics, etc). This is what I ordered:

Pentium D 830
4 GB of PC4200 Kingston memory
Club3D Radeon X800XL 512MB

Is this a good setup for playing Civ4? If there are any issues, I'd like to know in advance so I can be prepared to solve them. Thanks.

And does the game support 1680x1050 resolution? That's the native resolution of my monitor and I'd like to keep it for playing Civ4.

Is there any particular reason you're going the Pentium-D route i.e. do you already have a motherboard that it'll slot into? Because, if not, cancel that order and switch it for an nForce 4 socket 939 mobo and an AMD X2 3800+.

The X2 3800+ is the price-point competitor for the Pentium D 830 (in fact, it should be slightly cheaper) and when Anandtech.com did their comparison between the two, the X2 3800+ so clearly trashed the D 830 it wasn't funny. Plus, the AMD part will run noticeably cooler due to its lower power consumption.

If you want to go down the ATi route and don't have a problem with doing a warranty voiding overclock then the Sapphire X800GTo2 is your card. The extra pipelines can be unlocked by flashing the video BIOS and the cards can be overclocked so severely that they effectively become X850XT PEs.

And yes, the game does support 1680x1050.

[Solver]

Heheh.. Yes I know, 4GB is a lot but I heard Civ4 is really memory hungry. Besides DDR2 is really cheap these days so why not. Anyway, I'm a little uncertain about the Radeon card because people keep mentioning ATI issues. Should I be worried?

Nope, no worries. Only a portion of the ATI cards is affected, and I am reasonably sure that a 512 MB card wouldn't be affected anyway. Civ4 is really memory hungry, yes, but going above 2 GB IS a big overkill. The game actually plays decently on 512 MB, and on 1 GB machines the biggest maps don't have any problems, so you won't need all of your 4 GB .

[Aileron]

Originally posted by Solver
The game actually plays decently on 512 MB, and on 1 GB machines the biggest maps don't have any problems

Really? I have P4 2.4 GHz, 1 GB ram, ATI 9800 Pro 128 MB, and it slows down A LOT on a Standard map in the end game. So much so that I'm only playing on Small maps now. I don't have many other programs running in the taskbar either....hmm, what's making mine so slow??

[Solver]

The weird thing is, some people are getting a pretty bad memory leak. I have 512 MB, and Standard maps didn't slow down for me even in the beta builds, which had poorer performance than the retail version. With retail, I can play Large maps and only get a slight decrease in performance in the late game.

[Qwertqwert]

Just so that people know, I believe he is probabally doing some video editing or 3d rendering or something more intense then games on his computer, but likes games too and wanted to play.

First off, the Intel processors are generally better at that stuff, and dual-core is also explained. RAM is used a lot with video editing, I believe it's so it can store a large chunk of a movie in the RAM itself so you can edit almost an hour of it without any large loads. And the 512MB card could be used for 3d rendering, most gaming PCs just use the 256MB cards since 512MB is rarely utilized (though the X1800 XT's come with 512MB standard and are clearly marked "gaming") but 3d rendering would use a lot of that (or atleast I believe so). He also has a big widescreen monitor, this should prove useful for playing movies that he may have just edited.