Some advice on choosing a new machine please?

[nickfindley 0]

I've been playing on a G4 Mac that's about eight years old now. Not ideal. I'm thinking about buying a Windows laptop that would pretty much only be used for SC4 and as a portable DVD player, but I haven't shopped for a PC in ten years. So what should I be looking for?

Does the game run well on Windows 7 or should I look for a gently used XP machine?

What kind of processor should I get -- Intel or AMD? I don't know what's what as far as that goes anymore. And is there a point of diminishing returns? A sweet spot in the middle where any additional processing power will just be overkill?

I've read anything over 4GB of RAM won't be used by the game. True?

Anything else I need to be looking out for? I'm just trying to run the game smoothly, and hopefully for around $400.

Thanks in advance for your advice!

[majestictorment 6]

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  Edited April 9, 2015 by majestictorment  

[asteconn 9]

SimCity 4 Deluxe runs fine on a low spec Dell Inspiron 1520 running XP - Cheapy celeron processor, 1gig of ram. Any modern laptop should be absolutely fine.

[Tysons4 68]

i have an asus netbook. smaller than a laptop, great for getting on the internet, watching movies and of course, simcity 4 deluxe. it set me back $200. it came with windows 7 a gig of ram (which i havnt upgraded) a 1.7 ghz intel atom (plenty fast enough for simcity) and a 250gb hd, with 512mb of integrated video memory (which allows all the settings to be set to high and still play well. the only drawback is there is no cd rom drive, but not to worry as steam has released simcity 4 deluxe. i went from a quad core 3ghz with 4 gigs of ram desktop to this (because my desktop died)

if you are looking for somehting portable, fast, cheap, easy, and with a long battery life (i can play for 10 hrs straight before it sleeps) realize that simcity 4 runs great on netbooks which should not be overlooked

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I've been playing on a G4 Mac that's about eight years old now. Not ideal. I'm thinking about buying a Windows laptop that would pretty much only be used for SC4 and as a portable DVD player, but I haven't shopped for a PC in ten years. So what should I be looking for?

Does the game run well on Windows 7 or should I look for a gently used XP machine?

What kind of processor should I get -- Intel or AMD? I don't know what's what as far as that goes anymore. And is there a point of diminishing returns? A sweet spot in the middle where any additional processing power will just be overkill?

I've read anything over 4GB of RAM won't be used by the game. True?

Anything else I need to be looking out for? I'm just trying to run the game smoothly, and hopefully for around $400.

Thanks in advance for your advice!

So, unless portability is a must, why bother with extra expense of a laptop?

For your $400 you can get a naked desktop with no software, and either load up your copy of XP or pick up a free operating system. There are lots of freeware versions of Linux out there, and SC4 runs just fine under UBUNTU with the wine windows compatibility layer.

wine is not an emulator. It is an on-the-fly compiler that compiles windows requests into native mode. I don't notice a lag in execution on my machine which is a GA-MA78LM-S2H made by Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.

This system cost me $400 Cdn plus tax. It is an ATI based mother board with an AMD Athlon II X2 (dual core) 64-bit CPU and an AMD fusion graphics chip set equipped for both VGA and HD graphics. It has plugs for both HD video and the new fancy HD sound systems. So far it has been quite satisfactory except that I had to replace the Internet chip with a board ($20) because the integrated chip-set suffered an infant mortality. It comes with a new keyboard and mouse, a 500GB SATA hard disk and a Blu-ray DVD/RW drive and plenty of USB-2 ports.. The graphics chip is integrated and takes 512MB off your main memory. A monitor is your responsibility.

I had lots of peripherals including VGA monitor, scanner, printer, external hard disks, web cam and a set of good SONY speakers. The Linux kernel recognized and configured all of them. I coughed up the extra money to get an extra 2GB of memory so that I now have 4GB, and this gives dual fetch, which speeds up memory access.

For an extra couple of hundred clams, most vendors will toss in Windows 7 and some kind of software bundle. Not my bag, thanks.

SC4 will run in whatever it takes to load the exe text, the data set, and all the tables for plugins and your city, when a city is active. I am unaware of any limit. I have a 10GB swap partition, and it shows some usage occasionally.

One advantage of this O/S is that it comes with a set of configurable desk tops (I have four). A simple keystroke allows you to switch to run something else even if you are running full screen in the game. This does not constitute a loss of focus for the game, so it doesn't know you've left. I sometimes run the system monitor in another desktop when I am testing something in the game.

The dual AMD processors run fine with the game with no considerations of affinity. I tested single processor affinity and it didn't make any difference. You also don't need to run at high priority. Running real-time on a Linux system is more than overkill.

Oh, and you can dual boot Win7 with Linux on separate partitions of your disk. No sweat, but install Linux first.

There may be some funny junk at the end of this post. I tried, but I couldn't get rid of the tables I got when I copied my system spec.

  Edited March 11, 2011 by A Nonny Moose  

[american15 5]

SC4 worked great for me on my old computer. It was an HP m7560n win an AMD 64. It was a fast computer, and I didn't have any problems with it (Except for only 18GB on the C drive) until the motherboard died. :'(