Quest for the Ultimate Civilization IV PC Build

[Hastings101]

Why do I want to make the ultimate computer for Civilization IV?

So I got the idea in my head to try my hand at building a PC for fun as I keep seeing these builder videos on YouTube. I have built a PC in the past but it was working with knowledgeable friends, never on my own, so it sounds like a fun challenge. But in reality I don't need one: all of my gaming lately is on a console or my MacBook Pro. However, I did think of one fun use case that I would love to make a PC for.

I obsessively play a game called Civilization IV (4) and have for the last two decades. I play this in Parallels on my M1 Max MBP and it runs pretty well, but it crashes a lot (not sure if this is just the game being old or because of the ARM emulation). I also love to mod it and play on gigantic maps with double the amount of AI players (from 18 to 36) so that could be the problem. Additionally, the game does get very slow over time. Civilization IV is a turn-based game and these gigantic maps can end up taking 1+ minutes to finish, sometimes several minutes long when I've played on the same map for weeks. I am curious if this can be improved, thus I have a goal to focus on to appease my urge to build a PC.

What are my next steps?
1. I am going to do some deep research into Civilization IV and see what sort of hardware would be best. It is an old game and I am certain it does not use multiple cores for example, so buying a 16 core powerhouse may not make sense in this very specific scenario. I will use this to determine what the best configuration for this PC would be.

2. I am going to compare all of the possible hardware with the various benchmarking sites available and see how it performs on this game, games from the era, or modern games that are built similarly (maybe indie games that aren't multicore focused?). I may end up buying very old parts because they perform better in this weird scenario, who knows.

3. I am going to thoroughly test the performance with benchmarks on my MacBook Pro. I will also do the same using Civilization IV using different map sizes and record the data to compare to the PC hardware.

4. Buy it, put it together, see how it runs, make modifications if needed by switching out components and testing to see if it improves performance.

tl;dr - crazy man obsessed with old game going to make pc specifically for game and geek out about it posting updates on this forum

 

[Huntn]

It, the game has low sysytem specs, but if you’re going to take the time to build a computer, why not make one that can play something recent or even new? I used this in 2013 to build my first computer. It’s still applicable and I like that they show you now to test the motherboard before you install it and wire it up in the case.

My standby computer which I purchased on Amazon for less than $500 has a 3 yr warranty and it’s being prepared to be shipped back at their cost For repair. Even though it has a recent i7 processor and 16gb RAM, and a sub-par graphic card, I would not really recommend this for purchase. But maybe it would run Civ IV. It advertises itself as running Fortnight. You can use it as a comparison. Link


Part 1:

Part 2:

Newegg TV: How To Build a Computer – Part 2 – The Build

Welcome to Part 2 of Newegg TV's How To Build a Computer tutorial: The Build! In this episode we've gone for e

www.techandgeek.com

Part 3:

 

[Hastings101]

It, the game has low sysytem specs, but if you’re going to take the time to build a computer, why not make one that can play something recent or even new? I used this in 2013 to build my first computer. It’s still applicable and I like that they show you now to test the motherboard before you install it and wire it up in the case.

My standby computer which I purchased on Amazon for less than $500 has a 3 yr warranty and it’s being prepared to be shipped back at their cost For repair. Even though it has a recent i7 processor and 16gb RAM, and a sub-par graphic card, I would not really recommend this for purchase. But maybe it would run Civ IV. It advertises itself as running Fortnight. You can use it as a comparison. Link


Part 1:

Part 2:

Newegg TV: How To Build a Computer – Part 2 – The Build

Welcome to Part 2 of Newegg TV's How To Build a Computer tutorial: The Build! In this episode we've gone for e

www.techandgeek.com

Part 3:

Thanks for sharing! Will helpful when putting things together. Yeah I know anything can run Civ IV (I was doing it on like... pentium somethings back when it came out), but I want to see if I can push it to make any improvements to turn-speed specifically with raw power. Honestly I'm not really into most games lately and what I play is on console/steam deck usually so this is more for the fun of building a PC with a weird goal in mind.

 

[Huntn]

Thanks for sharing! Will helpful when putting things together. Yeah I know anything can run Civ IV (I was doing it on like... pentium somethings back when it came out), but I want to see if I can push it to make any improvements to turn-speed specifically with raw power. Honestly I'm not really into most games lately and what I play is on console/steam deck usually so this is more for the fun of building a PC with a weird goal in mind.

If you are going with old components you’ll likely be looking at used which can have uncertainties associated with them.

 

[Hastings101]

So I will obviously learn more over time as I get to work on this, but so far I have discovered:

Civilization IV is definitely single-threaded. There are some mods that make aspects of the game multi-threaded, but unfortunately, they drastically change the gameplay and seem to only work with the changed gameplay - there were posts talking about attempting to take only multi-threaded parts and apply them to the base game, but they never go anywhere or are said to be impossible.

Single-thread performance is important, but not everything. So according to posts by modders, who are very familiar with the internals of the Civ4 engine via Civ IV: Colonization, L3 cache and DRAM latency (not sure what this means exactly, RAM with low CL?) are two extremely important variables for Civ IV turn-speed. In addition, when researching single-thread performance in general, some on this forum (not related to Civ IV specifically) have stated that older games may benefit from high clock speeds instead of IPC. Not exactly sure if that is true or not, but is interesting and would definitely impact the CPU I pick. So while single-thread performance will be important, it might be more beneficial to have a high-clocked CPU that is technically not as fast as a different model in single-threaded tasks?

Some CPUs I am going to look into are:

7800x3D (because of the high L3 cache size)
i9-14900ks (because of the high single-thread performance according to PassMark, high clock speed but the efficiency cores are a concern with old software)

Will keep looking for CPUs, would like to find one with a very high clock rate too, though not sure if that actually matters or not versus IPC