I think temperatures arent such an issue, but noise can be if the case is not well ventilated. I have thermaltake element S with several fans (also two big, one blowing directly onto the VGA, another upper output). In 3D mark vantage I didnt hear my card.

ALso another problem. I wouldnt buy ATI 5970 until SOW is out, because there can be a problem with multipleVGA such as rise fo flight or FSX have, and the ń you would get only half the graphics power, as 5970 is essentially two cards connected by crossfire on single PCB.

Anyway, there should be the new ATI's card by the end of summer..... better wait:rolleyes:

But I think Oleg said SoW will use multiple CPU cores and multiple GPU....

AFAIK the issues with ATI and OpenGL were pretty well sorted out with the 10.5 Catalysts. My friends with 5xxx cards have all reported that FB runs very smoothly now that the 9.10 atioglxx.dll fix is no longer needed.

Hopefully the SoW:BoB team will be making the business of computer specs as flexible as they were with IL2. That's not to say I expect BoB to function well on the Abit KT7A-Raid mobo with a 1.2ghz Tbird Athlon processor and 512mb pc133 RAM that I used ten years ago, but I think the spectrum of recent PCs should function well with the game, just so long as the owner recognises that his game will work better if his/her machine is optimised for fast response.

Personally I always preferred the sensation of experiencing how much better FB played and looked with every upgrade that I made; but my wallet was much happier to avoid the constant life at the bleeding-edge of computer technology. So my upgrades were always made when the prices dropped back towards sanity. I don't regret that ;)

B

I recently saw excelent reviews about the new Nvidia GTX 465 in SLI setup.
Lots of power with acceptable efficiency.
Maybe a good choice for SOW?

You could have built a hi end AMD Phenom II Quad or hex core for less and have better performance. And used the money you saved to put towards a better video card.

S!

I rigged to a new AMD Phenom II 1090T Black Edition accompanied with the 890FX chipset motherboard from ASRock. Smooth ride with the 480GTX and 8Gb DDR3. Will wait for the refreshes of both ATI and nVidia to see how they fare.

Don't go SLI with an i5 based setup though, 8x8 lanes is not enough for serious SLI. By the way i5's do not currently support triple channel DDR3 either.