Right now I am leaning towards a dual 1156 socket motherboard. Starting out with i7 950's and moving up to hexcore or xeon if need be. Not dead set on the solution yet, still waiting for feedback here and over at overclocking.net

You mean 1366. :) I would suggest waiting for the 1155 socket to sort its problems or some news about the new Bulldozer which are rumored to be announced this month and released in Q2.

Even i5 2500k beats that i7 950, not to mention its price.

The Il2 dedicated server software ran in a dos box.No audio,video or inputs.it did not take a lot of horsepower to make a good server.What was needed was a good,stable upload speed of about 4KB per client.

I feel that a lot of problems people had with joining servers with more than 64 people was not the fault of the server but f the client machine.Not necessarily the internet.You have to remember that the client machine has to not only keep track of all 64 players (and objects,triggers etc) but render them as well(at least the planes in view and the textures below).So the client machine had to be pretty stout to run with a lot of planes.

But at the moment this is all speculation until we get the new(and hopefully improved) dedicated server software.

As a side not a couple of sites have changed the preorder date to 3/3/11 (or 3/3/11 for the Europeans).So the server software may be even closer to release.

so can I take it that it will need 16 kbytes upload per client from the server with CoD and therefore roughly 2mb total if you had 128 clients ?

anyone know if there will be a linux dedicated server? i'm not going to run windows in my server environment for something that doesnt generate me any money.

probably not are you renting server space ?

no i have my own private cloud. its just simpler as my environment is entirely linux. plus there is that whole windows license thing.