Good info everyone. Thanks a lot. A few more ?s First, yes, it's true that SLi does not double the amount of available ram, but I sure wish it did!
As for the SSD; other than quicker boot time, is there any benefit to a combat sim like CLOD? So far as I've been able to read (on tech sites) there hasn't been shown to be any benefit, but they don't test using CLOD.
Seems that Ramdisk isn't much help either. Does that mean the sim needs even more optimizing to reduce stutters? What bottleneck causes the stutters? Are stutters also linked to the trees and the cities, and so can be called a "rendering issue"?
Adonys, it's impressive that you can run everything maxed out with a 1gb vram video card. I'll have to read up on that GPU.
Fall_Pink? I will try to configure towards as many features turned on as possible, so it's good to know that a quad will get utilized more efficiently. As for Vram, I think a 2gb gpu will give me a bit of breathing room in the short term.
thanks all! Great feedback, and sharing.
Flyby out