question about Civ IV and hardware upgrades.

[kromekoran]

hey all, I'm a Civ IV addict, it's pretty much the only game I play on my PC (360 for everything else), but my PC isn't really built for gaming. I have a 2.5ghz Celeron, 5500 FX, and 1.25 gigs of RAM (1 gig stick, and the 256 mb stick that came with the PC).

towards the latter half of Civ IV, it slows down quite a bit. I don't have the graphics cranked, or anything (obviously, given my video card). I was wondering if that's a CPU issue, or a RAM issue, or what? basically I'm looking to buy a new video card (7600GT) and adding another gig of RAM, hoping that'll speed up gameplay. will it?

 

[necrojustice]

Upgrading the Video should help it out enough. Going from 1.25 to 2.25 gigs of ram won't be that noticeable.

I have a reasonably fast system. (Athlon 64 3700+, 1gb ram, ATI Radeon x850XT) and adding another gig of ram didn't make a difference that I could tell.

Make sure that the power supply your computer uses can supply enough voltage to a better video card.
I also learned the need to check from bad experiences

 

[kromekoran]

cool, thanks for the advice. I'll go with the video card first then. and yeah, I recently bought a new 500w Thermaltake because my old PSU was failing and causing random reboots.