requesting reccomendation on hardware for sc4

[jutrock]

hello all.
i recently wiped my entire plugins folder clean and started fresh downloading only things i use and keeping the folder oranized.  this was an attempt to decrease lag and freezing in the game.  while the size of my folder decreased from about 4 gigs to just under 2, the game still doesnt run as smooth as i'd like.  my systen is pretty high end except that im using onboard video.  i have everything needed for a system i can dedicate only to the game with the exception of a processor, graphics card, and ram.

i see so many mayor diaries with seemingly thousands of plugins.  i often wonder how smooth their gameplay is.  id love some reccomendations on the best hardware config to run a large region with a few gigs of custom content smoothly.  or, if you have a system that can do it, can you tell me what you have in the case and how your game runs?  this help would be much appreciated as i love the game too much to not be able to enjoy it.

thanks!

[xxdita]

The game's system requirements are:
Operating system: Windows 98, Me, 2000, and XP
CPU Speed: Pentium 2/3 500 MHZ or any AMD Athlon
RAM (memory): 128 MB
CD/DVD Rom Speed: 8x
Video Card: 16 MB card (nvidia TNT2/ATI Expert)
Sound Card: Any DirectX Compatible card (sound blaster)
Hard Drive Space: 1+ GB.

So if you're putting together a computer strictly for playing SC4, all you really need is the basics. Any system capable of running Windows XP is fine. Of course you should max out the memory, and have plenty of hard drive space for the game and your plugins. The latest video cards will probably cause more trouble than they're worth, so on-board video is fine. The faster your hard drive is, the better your performance will be, so buy a small (50GB oughtta do it, or 2TB, whatever), fast (7200rpm) hard drive as your C drive.
The game isn't able to take advantage of multi-core processors, so focus on single core speed.

But whatever system you go with, make sure you keep your Plugins folder as organized as humanly possible, and... this is probably the most important thing.... use SC4DatPacker.

[FrankU]

I had more or less the same question and asked it in the thread:

http://sc4devotion.com/forums/index.php?topic=8505.0

You could take a look there. Andreas helped me a lot.

[jutrock]

thanks for the help.  all i want is to be able to zoom and scroll a large, full city without worrying about stuttering and lagging, so will more video ram help with that? or is that just processing power?

[BigSlark]

I'm not quite sure helps with that issue, I have a Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 running at 3.25Mhz with 6 GB of RAM and I still have to wait for rendering...

Cheers,
Kevin

[FrankU]

I do use my new AMD Phenom XII 550 (dual core 3.1 GHz), 8GB of RAM and Nvidia GeForce 9800 and I still have to wait for rendering the whole image.
I must admit that I worked on 1024x768 pix's, but now I also have a new screen with 1680x1050 pix's and that is a lot more. If I resize to 1024x768 it is real fast.
So probably I will use the small window for work and the large for taking pictures.