Best performance possible for maxed out Civ 4 games?

[Sovereign]

Hi, all.

I'm planning on buying a new custom built computer, and I'd like to have a good idea of what would make Civ 4 run perfect on it.

I want smooth 60 FPS with a filled out landscape (lots of cities, units, town / cottages, roads, mines, force field on arcologies, etc.). Also I'd like playing 16 civ's on a Huge map with minimal "end of turn" wait times (as the computer moves the other 15 civ's) in the late game? One major issue I have is on my old system, it can take 10 minutes or more of waiting for the next turn after hitting "End of turn" button in, say, 1950 AD with 7 other civ's on a huge map. Also sometimes it can take like 15 - 20 minutes to load a saved game in that 1950 AD with 8 civs and filled out landscapes.

In short, what graphics cards, RAM, etc. would I need to maximize Civ 4 to its most extreme (see example above) and have it run fast, smooth, and perfect? Plus fast load times and short "end of turn" wait times?

Will the ATI Radeon 4870 X2 graphics card do the trick? How much RAM would I need? 2 GB? 4 GB? Are there other considerations?

Price is no object.

[Krill]

Er...does civ utilise all the cores on a multicore processor, and how does civ work on Skulltrail and a 64 bit operatiing system?

[Krill]

This is what I would buy if I had more money than sense. Please note, it doesn;t include disk drives, moniter or peripherals.

[snoopy369]

More money than sense, indeed.

I suspect you don't need nearly this much for effectively best-possible Civ4 experience. Any current 40nm quad-core processor should be more than enough (and many dual-cores, I only mention quad-core because that eliminates some of the cheaper ones), 2GB RAM if you aren't abusing your RAM with other things, a HD4870 would be fine i'm sure (and much better pricepoint than the 280 ), and a decent HDD (I'd actually grab a 9600RPM or better 72GB drive for the windows drive, and a 7200RPM 500GB+ for the storage drive; this often is your slowdown point on a fast machine like this - Virtual Memory access, ie HDD speed).

You'll never eliminate the end-of-turn waits, but it would be somewhat faster (depending on what system we're comparing it to ...). I certainly don't think you need a superpowered graphics card, just make sure it has a decent memory size (512MB) as that's one of the limiting factors. Also, make sure it's well cooled ...

[Krill]

Just use 4 drives in RAID 0 (or RAID 5 if you want that bit of redundancy).

[Krill]

TBH the E8400 is a great processor for the price, plenty fast enough for civ. Getting 4 GB of DDR 2 ram in two sticks isn't that expensive, though as Nehalem is being relesaed very shortly (4-5 weeks for the high end stuff, right?) and uses DDR 3 ram I'd wait for that if I were going to spend a ****load of money.

[Sovereign]

What about the Seagate 1.5 Terabyte hard drive? Would that have the disk speed to eliminate the bottleneck at operating Civ 4 and such? The specs can be found in this PDF... The hard drive is called Barracuda 7200.11.

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_barracuda_7200_11.pdf

It says it has 7200 RPM, and 300 MB per second transfer rates. Is that enough?

If not, what else do you recommend?

[Krill]

You need to get several identical hard disks and put them in RAID 0 or RAID 5. This speeds up the disk access time as each disk can access the platter where the infomation is stored at the same time. Having a single hard drive in almost any machine is one of the bottlenecks that slows the system down.

The drive that you suggested is a fine drive (though I don't know about the price compared to any others). I was joking about the above system btw (it's $7000 for fecks sake) though four hard drives in RAID 5, giving a total of 4.5 decimal terabytes of storage with redundancy will hold basically all of your music, movie and programs, OS, everything for the next 3 years, probably.

[Sovereign]

Another additional thing...

After doing a bit of sniffing around with the list Krill gave me, I came across a few sites that mentioned that the Nehalem DDR3 only offers a 1% - 3% boost over current DDR2's. I'm not sure whether is actually true or not.

Also, I'm trying to custom build this monster machine not just to run Civ 4 but allow for future games in the next 5 years or so. Like Civ 5, Civ 6, etc. when they come out.

Also, would two 1 TB hard drives work better than a single 1.5 TB hard drive for sake of speed and bottlenecks? Again, I want to make this a good investment that won't go obsolete for like 5 years or longer (desktops being able to be upgraded as opposed to laptops).

[Krill]

It's be cheaper to just build a system based around an E8400 now and a good Nehalem system in a year probably. It's not that expensive to build a good system every two years really. Gotta be a lot cheasper than the monstrosity above...

[snoopy369]

Multiple disks is better than one, because you can RAID them together to get multiple writes; however, I think that typically having a single (or dual, raid 1) fast write drive for your OS is good enough (you won't see a dramatic improvement by RAIDing multiple drives together); and either way you're better off with multiple smaller/faster drives than larger/slower drives for the OS portion.

7200 RPM: normal
9600 RPM (or more): faster

3 GB/S is normal SATA2 speed (not 300MB/s, which is probably a misread/mistype), that should be normal (but of course it isn't the real transfer speed, as you don't read data off that).

[Sovereign]

Thanks. I'm trying to think long term here. A computer that can last me 10 years or something, instead of buying a new computer every 2 - 3 years. The laptop I bought (and is my current computer), I got it 6 years ago and it barely can run Civ 4 using Omega drivers on an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 card.

If I have a computer with such extreme capabilities, it could keep me going game-wise and work-wise (I'm a Graphic Designer) for a decade before I have to buy a new one. One problem with laptops is that I can't upgrade them easily, and can't upgrade video cards. If I could, then Civ 4 would be a breeze on it and the laptop could continue for 2, 3, 4 more years.

After doing a bit of research, I found the following to be worth looking at:

1. Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive with 1.5 Terabyte capacity.

I'll probably need 10 years or more to max out that much memory. Plus I'll be able to have like 50 memory intensive games like Civ 4, Trainz Railroad Simulator 2006, Call of Duty 4, Crysis, Doom 3, etc. without running out of memory.

2. ATI Radeon 4870 X2

From what I've read, it outperforms Nvidia's GX280 and can be quad crossfired with two X2 cards instead of dual crossfired.

3. Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770

This quad core beast outperforms all the other processors in either stock or overclocked methods. Its quad core should allow for use of more wide variety of multi-core applications and games that may pop up in the next 1, 2, 5, or 10 years.

------------------------------

I'm still unsure on whether to wait for the Nephalm system or not. I can upgrade my tentative 4 GB DDR2 RAM boards to the Nephalm RAM boards later on when they become cheaper, right?

I'm still researching coolers and other hardware items. I may be able to get these things at a discount since I work for IBM and I also know a computer build-it guy in my town who runs his own computer shop. So thats why price may not be such a huge issue for me.

[Krill]

The two 4870 X2 cards should be fine There was an article linked to in the OT comparing three 280s in SLI and two 4870 X2s in a fully kitted out skulltrail PC, and I think it was basically a tossup; ATI won on price and in a few games, the 280s won on supreme power and in at least half of the games.

[snoopy369]

The 4870 is definitely the choice for 'good' video card right now (similarly to the 4850 for 'cheaper').

Please understand that you cannot build a computer capable of playing good games ten years from now, right now, assuming technology develops at anything like the pace it is now. After all, a top-of-the-line rig in 1998 (P3 600 or so) couldn't even run XP acceptably, not to mention Vista...

More than likely, your timeframes - even if you use the most expensive parts available - are about 3 to 5 years at the maximum, of playing acceptable games, and that's probably assuming a video card upgrade at a minimum. Making your current system as upgradeable as possible of course should be the primary motivation here, but i'm sure they'll change the CPU socket a half dozen times in the next ten years, not to mention the RAM architecture, the HDD interface, and the video card slot configuration/type.

On HDD:
1. Your best performance comes from multiple HDDs, particularly an OS HDD to handle virtual memory and the OS tasks, and an applications HDD for your applications; then add on top of that RAID to split your applications across two drives. I do NOT recommend a single 1.5 TB hard drive under any circumstances; first, in the current day you will not use this much capacity unless you are downloading the entire internet (your music/video tastes are up to yourself of course), any given game takes up a few gigabytes, and it's good practice to uninstall games you haven't played in months anyhow. With the same money (or around), buy two 72GB 9600RPM HDDs (much faster than the above 1.5TB drive) and two 500GB 7200RPM Barracudas, or thereabouts. You can always add more later - and it will be much cheaper later, and probably much faster.

You can of course upgrade to a newer board (assuming your CPU is supported by the new boards, I don't claim to know Nephalim well enough to know what will be compatible with what), but each time you insert your CPU into a board is a small chance of failure.

If I were you, I'd go repost this question in the Technology forum in Off Topic, where Aeson will likely see it; he's something of an expert on CPUs and building machines in general.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Sovereign
A computer that can last me 10 years or something, instead of buying a new computer every 2 - 3 years.

You're dooming yourself to failure then. Moore's law still holds true so basically all computer components become obsolete after 2 years tops anyway. The only saving grace in getting a system that's over the top is that software developers design for a more average system and don't demand the best. At most though that machine you're hoping to make last for ten years will probably only be relevant for maybe only five.