For those of us looking to upgrade for SOW
 

Maybe this is old news for people here but Nvidia is planning to launch a new VGA card shortly after ATI 6990 , named GTX 590, a dual GPU solution like the 6990 is.
It's good to see competition and probably is a good idea to wait a little because Il2 had in the past better performance in Nvidia based solutions.
(I'm no fan of any brand in particular)

S!

I still prefer single card solution over SLI or XFire, less problems as can be seen on both brand's forums. And as SoW uses DirectX the performance will IMO be good on both brands. I rather wait for the next gen AMD/NV offerings, these are just refreshes so to say, the 580GTX being what 480GTX should have been etc. But nevertheless good for us gamers :)

SoW will run DirectX only. The issues ATI had before in IL-2 was because of the OpenGL API you had to use to run Perfect Landscape. Nowadays IL-2 runs great even on ATI cards because ATI has finally fixed the driver bugs.

The next generation may be a greater improvement, but the 69xx series from AMD does not appear to be a refresh, it is new architecture.

As a manufacturer you have to come up with products to keep sales turning over , be it re-badged video cards or multi GPU's, SLI or Crossfire its all designed to do one thing.....................part you with your hard earned cash.

I have built and sold all the above PC's and the customers have been very happy with their new "Rigs".

Until they read some GPU fan site claiming the next and best greatest thing, I then repeat above process customer goes away happy.......again.

Problem is they are individually not seeing the "big picture" the cheaper systems I make that run with exactly the same performance as they are number hunters and want very specific parts they have been told are the latest and greatest.

Its simply not true.

Hardware hits a peak then its going to be quite a while until the nest major difference hardware hits the market, meantime there's releases of minor hardware with claims of "this is the new must have" simply to keep creating sales.

You have to look hard these days to cut through the sales and fanboi site stuff to find the hardware at the right specification and price.

Believe it or not some of my customers have bought hardware because it just looked cool :shock:

What sort of CPU & RAM do you reckon I'd need, to keep that GTX 590 supplied with enough bytes to make full use of its abilities?

For me, dual GPU solutions are too potentially problematic to bother with. Either dual GPU cards or SLI/Crossfire setups. Yes, they'll give you the highest frame-rates at any given time, but not necessarily the best overall experience.

In terms of waiting for the next big thing, I read an article just the other day describing the difficulties and time-frames that can be expected for that, particularly for nVidia. I won't link to it because I can't be bothered finding it and it was just well-informed speculation. But essentially, what it added up to was, it'll probably be a year or more before there are cards out there significantly faster than the current GTX580. Yes there'll be new models coming out before then, tweaking the current technology to make it just that bit faster enough to sell as a new product, but the really new tech won't be out for a while yet. Which suggests, if you don't want to go with a dual GPU setup, and if you want to make your nVidia purchase last (and if you have a use for it!), now would seem to be the time to buy. If they mess up the first release of the next gen tech like they did with the GTX480's and it's then better to wait for the refresh after that, a GTX580 could last you quite a while.

I don't follow the AMD tech so closely, because I use the CUDA features exclusive to nVidia cards, so I can't really speculate on what they might be betting up to, but I haven't heard about anything beyond the up-coming top-end 69** cards, the release of which I think got delayed a little bit recently.

Somewhere within the Core i7 range is probably a safe bet. Quad core, hyperthreadded, fast DDR3 ram with 6GB, oh and a SSD hard drive. That'll probably be a good bet for something that is in balance with a video card like that.

I don't know what the absolute minimum would be. But if I were building a new system right now I'd say, at least a Core i7 920, overclocked. Beyond that, whatever you want to spend your money on.

Having decided that though, your RAM choice is narrowed down, as using such a chip, which uses the LGA1366 socket, will require an X58 motherboard, which in turn will enable you to use triple-channel DDR3 RAM, which is best used in multiples of three sticks.

So, 6GB (3x2GB sticks) would have you covered for any game that I know of, whereas 3GB (3x1GB) could leave you lacking. Using 6GB would require also using a 64-bit version of Windows too though, so you'd have to factor that in.

You could use 4GB(2x2GB) and a 32-bit version of Windows, but the RAM wouldn't be running in triple-channel mode, and depending on whatever else you've got running (like Windows itself), 4GB might not be enough to keep something like, say, SOW:BOB moving along nicely.

Edit - Just wanted to add that when it comes to real-world gaming, there's next to no perceivable difference in frame-rates when running dual-channel or triple-channel RAM, or even between running double-channel and single-channnel RAM. And although I haven't experienced it first hand, there's no perceivable difference, in game, between equally clocked, LGA1366 or LGA1156 socket CPU's.

I have the SSD bought already, 6 GB RAM and other periferals.
I'm looking to build a system with Sandy Bridge 2600 and one of the afore mentioned cards because I'm suspecting that SOW will need a lot of power to run properly.
But maybe a GTX 580 can do the job right.