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.
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