wlape3 Posted May 26, 2011 Share Posted May 26, 2011 Based on my experience, I would say there is a better chance of seeing an improvement on execution speed with a faster processor than moving over to an SSD. An SSD will certainly speed up your disk access but this does not appear to be a bottleneck for the game engine. A few weeks ago I transferred my C drive contents to a 160 GB SSD running off of a PCI-Ex4 bus connection. This greatly speeded up my boot times and application start ups but did not seem to effect SCWW1 very much at all. Over the weekend I'm going to upgrade my processor from a 2.3 GHz Phenom I X4 Black Ed. to a 3.5 GHz Phenom II x4 Black Ed. I'm also upgrading my CPU cooling from a stock AMD unit to a Zalman 135 MM fan unit. Hopefully, this will allow me to overclock it a bit as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hubert Cater Posted May 27, 2011 Share Posted May 27, 2011 I suspect that you will indeed get the most boost from the CPU or from an improvement in RAM as most of the game is held in memory but start up would be improved with a faster HD as you've found. It will be interesting to hear what you discover with your next set of upgrades. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wlape3 Posted May 27, 2011 Author Share Posted May 27, 2011 I had suspected most of the game existed in memory during play. Before I bought the SSD, I had noticed a lot of disk activity during turns but these must be small reads and writes. Most of my data drives are SATA2 or SATA3. My motherboard is an older ASUS which still uses DDR2 but accepts AM3 socket processors. Not much memory tweaking available but I can certainly make sure what I have is running at the max. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted May 27, 2011 Share Posted May 27, 2011 A SSD does nothing once the data is in memory - if it stays there. If you feel you are spending too much time waiting on disk the proper first answer is more RAM. More RAM will help with more usage scenarios than faster disk. Windows Vista and Windows 7 also prefetch disk blocks based on previous usage patterns, that makes a SSD less valuable as it speeds up disk wait time on conventional HDs a lot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wlape3 Posted May 27, 2011 Author Share Posted May 27, 2011 A SSD does nothing once the data is in memory - if it stays there. If you feel you are spending too much time waiting on disk the proper first answer is more RAM. More RAM will help with more usage scenarios than faster disk. Windows Vista and Windows 7 also prefetch disk blocks based on previous usage patterns, that makes a SSD less valuable as it speeds up disk wait time on conventional HDs a lot. I'm maxed out at 8 GB of RAM so there is no more to add. Also, I am using Win7 64 bit which does access all that memory. Any other tweaks I could try? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted May 27, 2011 Share Posted May 27, 2011 I'm maxed out at 8 GB of RAM so there is no more to add. Also, I am using Win7 64 bit which does access all that memory. Any other tweaks I could try? You might be able to more directly tell Win7 what to prefetch. I am surprised that you feel that you are spending too much time waiting for disk with 8 GB. Do you maybe have an old disk? An older 7200rpm is a lot slower than a newer 7200rpm, in particular if you have lots of RAM. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wlape3 Posted May 27, 2011 Author Share Posted May 27, 2011 Currently I'm running SCWWI off of an SSD so disk access time is not the issue. Most of my other disks, particularly those with frequently accessed files are SATAII or SATAIII. No RAID configuations except for the SSD. I don't know if the prefetch is enabled on the SSD or even if it would help any as the access times are already very fast. Just wondering if tweaking my memory would help any. It's all good quality chips with heat sinks. PC6400, DD2 running in dual channel mode. 4 sticks of 2 GB each, 2 matched pairs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted May 27, 2011 Share Posted May 27, 2011 No, RAM speed generally doesn't make a noticeable difference in computer speed as long as it is halfway generation-appropriate. What problem are you trying to solve? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wlape3 Posted May 27, 2011 Author Share Posted May 27, 2011 In SCWWI my computer has slowed to the point it is affecting my enjoyment of the game. I'm hoping I can increase the speed of execution to bring the response level back to where it was with SCGC. I've already used all of the devices Hubert programmed in to increase execution. The turns do go faster but the interface is still very pokey. The game now runs slightly better on my laptop (which has an i5 running at 2.4 GHz using WinXP 32 bit with 3.5 GB of ram) than my desktop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Panama Red Posted May 28, 2011 Share Posted May 28, 2011 When was the last time you defragged your HD or cleaned out your Temp folder ??? Defragging can definately speed up games since the HD's does not have to "hunt" all over the HD to load the game or new parts of the game as you play. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wlape3 Posted May 28, 2011 Author Share Posted May 28, 2011 When was the last time you defragged your HD or cleaned out your Temp folder ??? Defragging can definately speed up games since the HD's does not have to "hunt" all over the HD to load the game or new parts of the game as you play. A few days ago. When you have an SSD you have to be fastidious about these things to maintain performance. Hard drive access time is not the bottleneck. Even with my regular hard drive which is a SATA2 with 32MB of cache the access times were pretty decent under Win7. Just installed a faster processor which should have boosted things by at least 50% but actually scores lower on the Windows Experience Test because it won't clock higher than 800 MHz. This is a known issue with my mobo so I'm hopping someone else has cracked it already. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted May 30, 2011 Share Posted May 30, 2011 You have a processor < 800 MHz? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wlape3 Posted May 30, 2011 Author Share Posted May 30, 2011 You have a processor < 800 MHz? No, but it was almost as bad. The processor should have been running at 3.5 GHz out of the box but a glitch somewhere in the BIOS or maybe Win7 power management kept the multiplier at 4. Fortunately there was a wealth of information on this problem with my mobo on various forums and I was able to fix the problem. Now I'm running at 4.0 GHz on all cores and hope to be able to tweak the memory a bit too.:cool: The trick was to use the nVidia tools to tweak my processor. Since I have an nVidia graphics card and an nforce chipset this was a great solution for me! So far SCWWI is running like a champ. AI turns are much faster an the GUI is much more responsive. Couldn't have a better outcome. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baron Posted June 1, 2011 Share Posted June 1, 2011 When you say interface is pokey do you when while you are playing or during the replay? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wlape3 Posted June 1, 2011 Author Share Posted June 1, 2011 When I was playing. Clicking on a unit to show ranges, etc, took 2 to 3 times as long as before. The AI seemed fine although it was taking longer to run even using the quick logic and other tweaks to speed things up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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