Civilization 4

[lucasp]

I had to throw my old hard drive into my pc cause my newer one died. It's a 40gig 4500. My PC plays eq2 and hlf2 on it just fine. Think going back to a 7200 will help out on Civilization 4. I don't have the game yet but have been looking to pick it up.

XP 2600+, 1gig mem, 9600xt 128.

[Mr. Chambers]

I'm sorry I'm just not sure what the question is? Your rig is having problems playing Civ4 and you think it's from the slow speed on the hard drive? Is it being accessed alot? You have a gig of memory I wouldn't think the swap file would be used much if at all unless Civ is a huge memory hog...

[mdameron]

His question is does he need a 7200RPM hard drive to play Civ 4, which he doesn't have yet.

I would say buy it and see for yourself. I wouldn't think so, but ya never know till ya try it out. It might do just fine.

[John G]

I wouldn't expect a 7200 rpm drive versus what I would suppose you have is a 5400 rpm drive (possibly larger cache size, too) to make much of a difference except for load times. With 1 gig of RAM, you shouldn't be hitting your swap file much while playing. And, if you were...they answer would probably be more RAM since any hard drive is way too slow. Even the effect on load times wouldn't be anything drastic, either.

Now...if you need/want more than 40 gig and will be buying a new HD anyway.... Yeah, look for something 7200 or 10,000 rpm, 8 or 16 mb cache, and with native command queuing (NCQ) for multitasking.

[hibner]

caution: threadjack ahead

Is NCQ proprietary to Seagate?

[John G]

Nope, other companies use it or could use it. The drives that have had my attention lately have been some of the Maxtor Diamondmax 7200 rpm drives with 16MB cache AND NCQ. Very reasonable price, too. Just recently put one in a system with no problems.