Quote:
Originally Posted by T}{OR
I would suggest waiting for the beginning of the 2011 when Intel's Sandy Bridge micro architecture CPU-s should become available to public. The new GPU flagships are behind the corner and should also be available by then.
What does this all mean? - You can save considerably on your current components if you buy them in two months time as the prices will drop. Or you could get the latest gear available for the more or less the same price.
Personally, and more importantly - I'd wait for the game specs to be come out. This way you won't miss with your purchase.  |
Good point if you want cost effectiveness.
As for the individual components and judging from the performance we've seen in the videos from the Igromir expo (running SoW on full detail at PCs
below the minimum specs, with stutters no less but still running stable and smooth over water), i doubt your proposed rig will have any problems whatsoever.
If anything, i'd go for a more middle-range quad core i7 instead of the 6 core model as it seems a bit overkill to me personally. Not that i know anything about how much SoW will benefit from extra cores, just guessing here.
I'd also choose an Ati graphics card just because the current nVidia offerings use up a lot of power, generate a lot of heat and as a consequence need high speed, noisy fans to keep temperatures where they need to be, all for a very small performance increase in most applications that don't go overboard on tesselation. Meaning, Ati will give the same or better performance over a wider range of different applications for less money.
I've always had nVidia cards up till getting my i7 rig last year, at which point i switched to Ati, so it's not like i have a grudge against them. It just doesn't make sense to me at this point in time to buy and install a very expensive mini-heater in my PC case with all the trouble that comes with it, for a marginal 5% or so boost in frame rates and maybe 20-25% in specific full-tesselation titles like a few first person shooters that i don't play.
As for RAM, 3GB is the minimum requirement for SoW, that's pretty much the only part of the specs we do know officially. I'd say get 6GB, 3 sticks of 2GB actually to take advantage of the tripple channel feature in i7 boards. More than 6-8Gb seems again like overkill and wasted money (before you can ever take full advantage of it, you might be on your next upgrade that uses a different kind of stick altogether, like DDR5 for example)
Since RAM is relatively cheap compared to other stuff, you could get one of the dual GPU 5xxx series Ati cards with the left-over cash, a simulator specific peripheral you might need, an extra hard disk, or a solid state disk to put your operating system on, and so on. You might even be able to sell your old monitor and get a new IPS one for the added color quality. The options are endless and you can tailor your PC to be a very well rounded machine for reasonable amounts of money, as long as you shop one step below the top of the line components.