So, a month went without any updates, sorry about that to both of my readers. What have I been up to? Well, I bought Civilization V but found out that my computers wouldn't run it. The game wouldn't even start on my 9-year-old desktop computer. It did start on my Asus EeePC 1101HA netbook, but it took no less than 15 minutes to get into the game with all the loading, and even then the game responded to mouse clicks with a one second lag. So, I was forced to buy a new desktop computer.
My new desktop computer is built on an Asus P7P55D-E LX motherboard into a Nexus Version 1 case. It has got 4 GB of DDR3 RAM, an Intel Core I7-870 processor and a silent Gigabyte R575SL-1GI Radeon HD 5750 graphics card. There's also an OCZ Agility 2 90 GB SSD data storage device. The computer is fast and rather quiet. :) A small mistake was that I bought the processor as the boxed version, i.e. with a heatsink and a fan. A separate, larger heatsink would've been in order as under full stress the CPU core temperature rises above 90 °C, when the idle temperature is around 40 °C! :O Intel customer service did assure me that modern processors can take high temperatures and that the CPU will shutdown itself to protect itself before any damage occurs, but I'm still a bit skeptical... Maybe I'll buy a better heatsink (something like this) later.
So anyway, the new machine runs Civilization V (and other games) very smoothly. :) In case you are interested in my experiences with the game, see my blog post at the Civilization wiki. There's also another game log I posted.
