Haha...what can I say, they stole my name!

I'm always in upgrade mode..and don't ever count AMD out until the performance numbers show intel dominating!
I want the best price:performance ratio and competition is a win for consumers!

Skip Bulldozer. AMD has postponed it and will phase it out before the end of the year according to a leaked roadmap.

Sooo that leaves you with i5/i7 and nVidia...just like I told you in the first reply. :-D

Please don't listen to deluded biased fools like this. Read reviews and make your own mind up. Anyone who has a wierd biased fanboy love for one corporation over another is not to be taken seriously. All these corporations want is your money, no point ginving them more than you need to or more than they deserve. As far as CPUs go the Intel i5 2500K is the best bang for buck and overclocks exceptionaly well. Best bang for buck graphics card is the AMD HD6950, then the GTX570 or HD6970.

These are hardware components and the best one to purchase depends on many factors.

1. Your requirements
2. Price
3. Performance
4. Features.

Look at all of the above and base your decision on logic such as price per performance ratio, or featureset etc. Do not base it on the deluded advice from a raving Nvidiot or FanATIc.

Zoop I would get the 2500k a new motherboard and keep the rest of your old stuff and upgrade as needed.

your vid card and mine are pretty close and i also have 4 gigs of ram and i get pretty good fps on high settings (shadows off).
you would be amazed how a new MB/CPU upgrade can bump your FPS up :)

S!

phheeeleeezzeee, I fly with ATI (see sig) but reading the forum shows that nVidia has less problem...with this game...with this patch. 6950/70 users will be happy flyers too but if you'd have to make a choice then...!

Lookie here, Mr. ICDP.
OP flies IL-2 and might wanna keep doing that. 1-0 to nVidia.
Is there a general consensus as to which brand? 2-0 to nVidia.

But glad we agree on the Sandybridge though. :-D

To provide more overclocking headroom I presume?

Depends on your budget. You can play CloD fine with AMD so dont listen to the intel fanboys.

No, just price - gaming memory is double the price with a much smaller gain in performance. And you cannot OC an SandyBridge by raising the clock by much (it's on the cpu), which is why they have 'k' editions with unlocked multipliers.

Without a doubt, but for someone who wants a fast gaming machine that should last for a while, and is both faster and cheaper than the previous standard (LGA1366), SB is hard to resist. I prefer AMD for other reasons, one of them being the constant 'upgrade-ability',and am more than happy with performance.

Just picking up on what ICDP mentioned regarding the 570GTX, he is right!

I fly nicely at 3072x resolution SLI with 70+ fps no problems as long as my VRAM is not full.
e.g. REPKA server islands with all options grass, shadows, roads etc etc.

If I fly on a heavier map (REPKA server channel island), the moment my VRAM is filled up above 1240Mb, I have 30fps.
If I lower the eye candy (roads, shadows, grass=OFF) the my VRAM will go up to 1140Mb and I continue enjoying my 70fps.

So, no matter what kind of card you are going to choose, make sure you have 1,5Gb and more if you want to enjoy.

My next card(s) will have 3Gb VRAM for sure (I only need a rig to fly IL2 and CoD so this is the only requirement), I bet it will be available by next year.

~S~

PS: thanks for mentioning ICDP, it made go back and start testing....

This from that article:

"In all of our gameplay testing we haven't hit the VRAM wall with the GeForce GTX 580 with 1.5GB of RAM. In Metro 2033 we had the opportunity to show you what this looks like. We found that at 2560x1600 with Very High quality and 4X MSAA enabled and Depth of Field enabled, the VRAM requirements are at least a 2GB video card. This graph above proves that.

If you look at the GeForce GTX 580 line, it has a framerate between 6-9 FPS, varying only by 3 FPS the entire run-through. This is a clear cut VRAM bottleneck imposed by the insufficient 1.5GB of RAM on the video card for these settings. When you look at the performance of the AMD Radeon HD 6970, with 2GB of RAM, the performance is better and there is a wider range of framerate over time. The same goes for the 3GB MSI N580GTX Lightning XE which is faster still, with varying framerate."

So, TonyD thanks for that link. It has helped me decide on the 6970. I won't be running at that 25x16 rez, though. Probably 19x10 (or 12). Two gb of vram should hold me in good stead with CLOD in that case. Nothing like data! ;) Perhpas when CLOD implements that weather thing, and Crossfire gets optimized for CLOD, I could always add another card. BTW, I sold my i7-920. I'll buy an i5-2500k. It's not because of FPS. It's because of power usage. I never even used the 920 at any rate. It's off to a good home.
Flyby out