For those of us looking to upgrade for SOW

[Les]

Originally Posted by lbuchele

...
I'm looking to build a system with Sandy Bridge 2600...

You raise a good point here. If anyone is actually looking to make up a new system from scratch right now, the new Intel chips are just around the corner and could be worth waiting for, especially as they'll be using a new socket ie. requiring a new motherboard as well.

[addman]

Originally Posted by KG26_Alpha

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

I have to agree with what your'e saying here, during the spring/summer this year I worked at a well-known PC retailer here in Finland. I don't know how many rigs I assembled but I can tell you this, the rigs that where giving me most the grief when I was testing/stressing the hardware (we had to do that before delivery of course) were the ones with expensive high-end hardware. The Asus Formula IV mobo for example failed on many tests, maybe every third PC I assembled with this mobo had some kind of a problem. So I had to check each part of the rigs individually and most of the time it was the mobo or the GPU (mostly nvidia high-end GPU) that was failing. The most reliable rigs were the low-mid range PC:s, I could almost assemble them blindfolded and they would go through all the tests without a hitch.

Many times we also had to contact customers -wich had ordered parts for us to assemble- that some of the parts that they had choosen were incompatible or that the PSU was too weak for the GPU they had choosen etc. Some people just have no clue about hardware, midi atx mobo in micro atx, AM3 cpu in AM2 socket, 6GB RAM with 32-bit win7 and on and on it goes LOL!

[Mysticpuma]

My 'old' Q6600, 8GB Ram and Radeon 4890 are ticking along nicely. I did consider upgrading to the i7, but then heard that early-mid 2011 a new chipset will come along.

I think I can cope with my system as it stands at the moment. Even with enhanced versions of IL2 it runs smooth enough to be satisfying.

When BoB comes out, it'll be the same as when IL2 came out and everything struggled. Eventually though these things iron themselves out, so I'm not following the 'must build a new rig...NOW!' route for now.

I will of-course when I feel the need though.

Cheers, MP

[TeeJay82]

This is my current system spec.. tbh i prefer the raptors cause i got 1.2tb for the prize of 1 512ssd

transfers are 200mb burst copy and 100 stable over longer copies

cabinet: Silverstone raven 02
Motherboard:Asus Crosshair Folmula IV
PSU: Cooler master Silent gold 1000w
CPU: Amd 1090t clocked to 6 x 3.8ghz /w Coolit vantage alc cpu cooler
Memory: Kingston Hyper x 2333mhz 1.65v 8gb (4x2gb) running at 2000mhz
Hdd: 2x WD raptor 10000rpm 600gb in raid 0
GPU: Gainward 580 Golden sample
Dvd: sony optiarc &%¤%& something

[swiss]

Originally Posted by addman

AM3 cpu in AM2 socket

For AM2+ I see no problem, other than you can't use DDR3.
At least If you have an aftermarket mobo, most manufacturers offer BIOS upgrades for this combo.

[Blackdog_kt]

I agree with Les about memory and windows versions if you go for an i7.

As for graphic cards, i tend to buy what gives the best relation of power to euros. That's never the top of the line card, but usually a card that's one series older. For example when Ati release their 69xx series, i might wait a few more months and buy a 5970 for under 200 Euros.

The thing to remember about these new DX11 cards is that they have important differences in performance depending on what you are going to run.

When they were first released, nVidia was the best for games using a lot of tesselation but Ati had more raw power that made it better for anything non-tesselated (or lighly tesselated). This happened because nVidia cards had more shader processors that were specifically tailored for tesselation, but overall the Ati cards had more shader processors of the generic kind (although some benchmarks report the Ati 5970 still being better than the nVidia 480 despite heavy tesselation in certain games and vice versa in others). Ati also needed less power and generally ran at lower temperatures, which tends to result in overall greater longevity and less risk of failed hardware components.

Nowadays nVidia have released their 5xx series, improving a lot of things in regards to power consumption and heat dissipation. I don't know if their architecture is significantly different though.

The big upheaval and slight confusion lies in Ati's 6xxx series, because it's actually two different product lines. They are doing a tesselation specific series of cards that will be slower than the 5xxx series in overall performance but better in tesselation (essentially copying what nVidia did with the 4xx series, better in tesselation but slower than the 5xxx series in other areas), but they are also going to release the 69xx models which are actually based on a completely different GPU. I guess the 69xx series will be the overall fastest and most expensive for some time.

So, now that we have a rough idea about what each brand's models can do, how do we make up our mind? Easy. Since there's so much performance differences based on wether the card has to run tesselation or not, we need to know if SoW will make enough use of that specific DX11 feature. If it doesn't, we don't need to buy an Ati 6xxx series card or an nVidia 4xx/5xx card.

Well, according to Oleg Maddox himself in a previous thread discussing these same questions, he stated they would need to rework lot of models to make them compatible with the tesselation feature. If i recall correctly his answer was somethinng like "not yet, but we might in the future". So, there's really not much reason to buy an Ati 6xxx series or any of the nVidia cards if all you want to run is SoW. If on the other hand you also enjoy first person shooters then it makes sense to invest in a card with good tesselation performance, as they are the genre which has the most titles using that feature out on the market as we speak.

I have an i7 920 with 3GB of RAM (three sticks of 1GB each) and an Ati 4890 (actually it's the first time i build a PC with an Ati card and i'm very pleased), running off of a 700W PSU and an Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard.
If i was building a new PC for SoW right now i would go for the exact same CPU, mobo and PSU, get 6GB of RAM (3 sticks of 2GB) and an Ati 5970. Or, i would wait a bit for sandy bridge to come out and get a bigger i7 thanks to the resulting price drops (maybe a six core one).

That's exactly my planned upgrade steps for SoW as well, changing out a few of my components over the next year to match the second list.

In my experience, games that make the most use of blazing fast graphics cards are action and maybe arcade racing games. The GPU is very important there, due to the close proximity of the characters to the player's viewpoint. If you want Batman's cape to wrinkle realistically as it flows in the wind, or the enemy's veins to be visible as he's clutching his gun, then you need a high end tesselation specific card.

However, for flight sims you need a different kind of performance. The extensive and complex modules of AI, FM, DM and in SoW systems modelling as well (mr Maddox said there's up to 500 different parameters being tracked for each single aircraft) will require first and foremost a fast CPU.

Also, to load these maps in an adequate amount of time you want a fast enough disk and a good amount of RAM, something that first person shooters don't need to do as they can break up the game map in small, easy to load pieces between different areas but which is impossible for a flight sim after a point. Our maps are still broken down but they consist of entire theaters of war and maybe a quarter of a continent at a time, not just a few square kms of a little forest and a couple of buildings.

That doesn't mean you can run a modern sim with an outdated graphics card, but the truth is that the fundamental differences in what a sim does compared to other games reflects in the kind of performance you need. As for the graphics part, as long as it doesn't stutter and it's not ugly it does the job and frankly, seeing mostly DX9 shots of SoW during the months of development updates it's obvious that the game is pretty enough and miles ahead of anything else even at its low settings. In this train of thought, as long as all you care about is SoW and not much else, going one step down in the graphics card department makes perfect sense, especially if you can pump that spare money into getting faster RAM, a better CPU or even a small solid state drive to put your operating system and a couple of your most used applications and games on.

[lbuchele]

Very good and useful post Blackdog kt.

[kendo65]

Yeah, thanks Blackdog. Very informative and useful.

[Ctrl E]

any idea what sandy bridge is supposed to cost?

[swiss]

Originally Posted by Ctrl E

any idea what sandy bridge is supposed to cost?

http://www.overclock3d.net/articles/...ces_revealed/2