Building a Computer?

[SimCity4IE 202]

 I've finally decided to build my own computer, but I need to know what parts would be the best for the list I made?

ASUS M4A78T-E (Mobo)

Athlon II X4 965 BE (CPU)

Patriot Viper II PGV34G1600ELK (RAM)

Ultra X4 750-Watt Modular Power Supply  (PSU)

Dual SLI ATI Radeon HD 5970 Video Card (Graphics Card)

Antec 1200 (Case)

Western Digital WD15EADS 1.5Tb (HDD)

Is it possible to have 12GB RAM on this motherboard? How would SimCity 4 and Crysis work with this? What could be changed to make it run as smooth as possible?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

In the past, at least, Radion cards do not do well with SC4.  NVidia cards do much better.  When running turn off anti-aliasing and the other fancy features.  They confuse the daylights out of the legacy program with crashes resulting.  Best way to handle these features is to mark them "application selected".

[JLAAPRTM 12]

I would never build my own computer, I would just buy a new one.

[Z77 3]

 For the Mobo bit, heres a link to newegg about it. I dunno where your buying it but heres some info.LINK

By the looks of it, it can hold 16GB of RAM so thats plenty plus some

I also personally like Intel and Nvidia better, ive just had better luck with them. But thats a personal preference.

Also, if its more than a single core(which it probably is..not much is made single anymore) you may need to change settings in the computer so SC4 will work on single core only. Ive heard that multiple cores sometimes freak out and crash. i havent had much trouble on my dual core but if it does happen that may be one reason it doesnt work.

[Shadow Assassin 336]

In the past, at least, Radion cards do not do well with SC4. NVidia cards do much better. quote>

nVidia's drivers are absolute crap now though. Their latest driver versions actually caused graphics cards to fry themselves so they had to be withdrawn. The 192 drivers have their own set of problems to deal with in terms of SC4... the latest version that works with SC4 is 186... and if you have any newer games that require the latest drivers, you're pretty much screwed.

As for ATI's cards... it's been heard that they're doing well with their latest drivers for SC4.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

A word about the multi-core issue:  there is a setting in the process list that allows you to assign processors to a program.  You need to make sure that SC4 is assigned to only a single processor as it has no code to rendezvous multiple processes.  From what we have seen in the Technical Difficulties forum a few years earlier, this has ceased to be a problem with factory-builts.

And for preferences, I like AMD processors with NVidia cards.

[SimCity4IE 202]

Originally posted by: N_O_Body

A word about the multi-core issue:  there is a setting in the process list that allows you to assign processors to a program.  You need to make sure that SC4 is assigned to only a single processor as it has no code to rendezvous multiple processes.  From what we have seen in the Technical Difficulties forum a few years earlier, this has ceased to be a problem with factory-builts.

And for preferences, I like AMD processors with NVidia cards.

quote>

So would this mean that i would have lag in SimCity for only using 1 processor? I may use nVidia's new graphics cards when they come out in april if they fit into my budget, and if they are quite a step up compared the the GTX 295.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Unless the hardware is more sophisticated than I believe, SC4 needs a uniprocessor.  It isn't written in any kind of style that would allow the kind of path prediction logic that can break it up into independent pieces.  I have long suspected that it has a single dispatching loop that calls on each feature once every interation.  So a really fast processor will help, and a really, really fast graphics processor will work wonders, but multiple CPU's won't do a thing for it.  As code goes, this program is a dinosaur.  It was written in the era of expensive hardware and is therefore small, efficient and very delicate.  It does not appreciate hacking of any kind, and to make matters worse, EA has encrypted the code so that it is only actualized once it is in memory.

So called "modern" programmers have never been hard up for resources.  The first machine I ever programmed had 2K words of 12-bit memory.  In 1966 I got to work on a machine that had 256K of 36-bit memory (a whole megabyte) and the memory boxes (four of them) took up the better part of a large room.  That machine, by the way, ran Expo '67 at Montreal and the day to day work of the large company that loaned Expo the machine.  Getting these small machines to do anything, let alone nip-ups was a big accomplishment in those days.  So give thanks to Dr. Einstein's Photoelectric Effect, and stop worrying about making SC4 run like a modern graphics shoot-em-up.

[SC4BOY 20]

Here's a link to a similar thread .. It's pretty informative and I'm sure you would gain by reading it.. good luck.