Cool, I should soon be playing Huge maps!

[Willem]

Originally posted by Tattila the Hun


I have Asrock Dual SATA2...

http://www.asrock.com/product/939Dual-SATA2.htm

Works splendidly with my R9600 AGP, and has a slot for PCI-E, aswell as place for next-gen CPU expansion, M1 or something. Cheapest in Finland is about 59€. For Athlon XP, or anything with socket 939. I gots 3200+

Well damn, just after I have this one going. Oh well, it only cost me $100, not really that big of a deal, especially if I can trade it in for a PCIe version later. I just bought the 9550 last summer in order to play Pirates! so I'm not really in a big hurry to replace it already. I'd like to wait until the fall at least.

My first priority right now is a new sound card. It seems this motherboard doesn't even recognize my 5-6 year old Soundblaster Live! card, and I want something that's good enough for recording music. I plan on producing a CD of my music sometime in the future and I want something that's going to give me top quality.

[Willem]

Hmm, I really like the way these pages just pop up after they're loaded. Big difference.

[Zoid]

I didn´t notice much improvement in loading speed for the site when I upgraded. But in the game...HUGE difference...

[Alex]

Maybe we need a patch to improve Apolyton's performance...

[Zoid]

Not that the site was slow before or so...

[potoroo]

Re: Cool, I should soon be playing Huge maps!

Originally posted by Willem
Just waiting for my income tax cheque to get processed after which I'll be getting myself a new motherboard and an AMD 3500+ processor. I'll be smokin'.

Woohoo! I am so with you. Only last weekend I upgraded my system from my five year old PIII 733Mhz (yes, I know it was under Civ4's minimum CPU spec but I persevered anyway!), 512Mb, GeForce 4600 Ti - and it's like a whole new world.

My new system:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
Arctic Cooler Freezer 64 Pro CPU cooler
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard
XFX 7800GT XXX 256Mb
Corsair TWINX1024-3200CL2
200Gb Seagate SATA HD
Antec P160W case
Antec NeoHE 500 PSU

It hoots! And I've finally played my first Huge map! And I can watch the in-game movies!

The 4200+'s single core performance is a bee's dick less than the 3500 Venice and it ran fine so for Civ you'll be right. I ran my Huge map game at 1280x1024 with graphics everything on max and my only comment would be that with 1GB RAM during the end-game there's ocassionally a brief pause of a few seconds if something like the military advisor screen was loaded from the hard disk. With 3Gb memory simply won't be an issue for you.

Originally posted by Willem
It rather sucks though, the motherboard I have now I only got last year, but there's no longer any processors available for them. Computer gear gets obsolete so quickly.

Ouchies! What motherboard/socket was it?

Originally posted by Willem
Hopefully my Radeon 9550 will be up to the task. A system is only as good as it's weakest link after all. If I leave the graphic settings on low it should be alright. Won't it? I'll have to wait until later this year to upgrade that. And a new sound card is on my list as well, the one I have now is at least 5 years old now. Time for a new one.

The one thing I didn't get was a new sound card (my Sound Blaster Live! Basic went with the PIII). The onboard sound is good enough for Civ but if you need something better that doesn't cost a fortune why not get an Audigy Value for the time being?

Originally posted by Willem
Yeah, I already had 1 gig and I just picked up another so 2 gig should be more than enough. I have 4 RAM slots so later on this year I'll pick up another gig. I was told that XP can only handle up to 3 so I'll then be maxed out.

XP will see 4G but by default it's divided as 2Gb for the system and 2Gb for the user space. If you boot XP Pro (I'm not sure about Home) with the /3GB switch it allocates 1Gb to the system and 3Gb to the user space.

Memory holes caused by video cards, etc, may cause Windows to report something like 3.75Gb RAM rather than 4Gb. A misunderstanding of this behaviour may have mislead whoever told you XP couldn't see more than 3Gb.

[Qwertqwert]

I'd think that memory is the biggest factor in map size...

[Willem]

Re: Re: Cool, I should soon be playing Huge maps!

Originally posted by potoroo

My new system:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
Arctic Cooler Freezer 64 Pro CPU cooler
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium motherboard
XFX 7800GT XXX 256Mb
Corsair TWINX1024-3200CL2
200Gb Seagate SATA HD
Antec P160W case
Antec NeoHE 500 PSU

Looks like you really went all out. Sounds good.

With 3Gb memory simply won't be an issue for you.

Well I only have 1.5 at the moment but that should do. It seems the dual channel architecture on my MB doesn't like having 3 cards so I had to get rid of 512.

Ouchies! What motherboard/socket was it?

I don't really know, but I had an AMD 1700 in it. They don't make that socket type anymore.

The onboard sound is good enough for Civ but if you need something better that doesn't cost a fortune why not get an Audigy Value for the time being?

Well after spending $650, I'm all tapped out now. And Creative has a new line of cards available so I'll be investing in one of those, not the Audigy. For the time being the onboard sound will do. I just want a better card for recording music and I'm not in a position yet to be able to start on it. It will probably be another year before I'm ready to work on it.

If you boot XP Pro (I'm not sure about Home) with the /3GB switch it allocates 1Gb to the system and 3Gb to the user space.

I have XP Home. Apparently that's one of the differences between the two, Home only accepts 3 gig. I'm planning on getting a 2 gig dual-channel setup happening once I have more cash for another 1 gig card like I currently have. That should be enough for awhile. Since I now have a 64 bit processor, I might invest in Vista when it comes out, then I can probably use the other two RAM slots on my board as well.

[potoroo]

Re: Re: Re: Cool, I should soon be playing Huge maps!

Originally posted by Willem
Looks like you really went all out. Sounds good.

I did the best I could within the Five Year Plan (oops, sorry! The Communism thread is over there =====>).

Originally posted by Willem
Well after spending $650, I'm all tapped out now. And Creative has a new line of cards available so I'll be investing in one of those, not the Audigy. For the time being the onboard sound will do. I just want a better card for recording music and I'm not in a position yet to be able to start on it. It will probably be another year before I'm ready to work on it.

Obviously you know your own budget best. I was just suggesting that perhaps a $35 Audigy SE would keep you going for a year given the X-Fi line starts at $122.

Originally posted by Willem
I have XP Home. Apparently that's one of the differences between the two, Home only accepts 3 gig. I'm planning on getting a 2 gig dual-channel setup happening once I have more cash for another 1 gig card like I currently have. That should be enough for awhile. Since I now have a 64 bit processor, I might invest in Vista when it comes out, then I can probably use the other two RAM slots on my board as well.

"Operating systems based on Microsoft® Windows NT® technologies have always provided applications with a flat 32-bit virtual address space that describes 4 gigabytes (GB) of virtual memory. The address space is usually split so that 2 GB of address space is directly accessible to the application and the other 2 GB is only accessible to the Windows executive software."

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system...AE/PAEmem.mspx)

However, I've confirmed that it doesn't have the /3GB boot switch to alter the default 2Gb system/2GB user space allocation. That's the difference between the two.

Why does the system only show 3.5 GB of memory when I have 4.0 GB of memory installed?

Under the current PC memory addressing, there is a memory area just below 4.0 GB which is reserved permanently. The reserved area is for system BIOS to put APIC, ACPI Table, PCI Devices', Resources and AGP aperture information. When your system DRAM is 3.5 GB or lower, the system will show that the same amount of memory has been implemented. However, if the system DRAM is above 3.5 GB of memory, the actual amount of memory that the system shows will be less due to the reserved area. Regardless of memory size, the reserved memory addressing is always present, but only when the DRAM rises above the 3.5 GB amount will that area become visible.

http://tyan.com/support/html/f_s2668.html

As I said before, a misunderstanding of this behaviour may have mislead whoever told you XP couldn't see more than 3Gb.

As for Vista - I am so not going there for at least a year after it comes out. It's a resource hog that makes XP Pro look anorexic and I've no desire to throw all my hard earned performance gains into the bin.

[Willem]

Originally posted by potoroo
"Operating systems based on Microsoft® Windows NT® technologies have always provided applications with a flat 32-bit virtual address space that describes 4 gigabytes (GB) of virtual memory. The address space is usually split so that 2 GB of address space is directly accessible to the application and the other 2 GB is only accessible to the Windows executive software."

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system...AE/PAEmem.mspx)

Hmm, given wrong information by the guy at the computer store. What else is new?

As for Vista - I am so not going there for at least a year after it comes out. It's a resource hog that makes XP Pro look anorexic and I've no desire to throw all my hard earned performance gains into the bin.

If software makers start moving to 64 bit, you might not have any choice. I'll wait and see though before I make the purchase, I'm only thinking about it since I now have a 64 bit processor. There might be some advantages in using it for that technology. Overall though I'm happy with XP, it's been very stable for me. It's certainly better than 98, I despised that OS.

[Provost Harrison]

P4 3GHz / 800FSB, 1GB, GFX5900. It's actually a few years old now but it still seems to be managing quite alright...