What do you guys have planned?

I am hoping that I can get away with my 3GHz Core 2 and 2GB of RAM but my trusty 8800GT will probably have to go for whatever is the latest at the time.

One big question I have though is whether SOW is being coded to make the most of DX10? Looking at the screenies I would say it is but just how different will it look in DX9?

My games pc is still XP but if SOW is going to look so much better in DX10 then I will swap to Vista and increase the RAM as well.

I'll stick my fat neck out here and speculate that most sim addicts will be able to play it with their current hardware. The question is, will you be happy with the level of graphic quality and resolution any new sim determines to be your recommended settings. If you're a "screw this, I want max settings" guy, then wait till it's out a week and then spec a new machine. By then enough of a real world baseline will be established by forum discussion we will know what it really takes. Sticking my fat neck out again, I am guessing the next generation of PC flight sims will have more to do with the minimum acceptable framerate as opposed to the maximum framerate that is so endearing to most current players.

Specifically NineLives to your machine, watch for a 4 GB package of faster RAM on sale.

It should support DX11 too apparently.

I've been waiting for SOW to upgrade my system.


Wheels

I got an i7 920 based rig last spring with Ati4870 1GB and a 1.5TB disk. I decided to stick with XP so i got 3GB of DDR3 RAM to take advantage of triple channel capability, since XP won't "see" 4GB of RAM there was no use going for 6GB (3x2 for tripple channel).

Come SoW, i might upgrade 2-3 things. With SATA2 disks i think there's not even a need for a boot manager utility, i think you can select which disk to boot at startup. So, i'm thinking of keeping my XP installation for my older stuff and getting a second hard disk of the same capacity for Win7 64bit. With that OS i will be able to utilize more RAM, so i'll probably bump it up to 3 sticks of 2GB DDR3 RAM and that will probably be it. All in all, it will be an upgrade that probably won't cost me more than 150 Euros (price of OS excluded, but i can probably get this free thanks to an agreement between MS and the universities here). Then, depending on my rig's performance and pricing of newer stuff, i might go the extra mile and replace my 4870 with a DX11 capable videocard, or upgrade the 920 to a faster chip of the i7 family.

I have to update there's no question, but I thought I was going to need an Asus Rampage II extreme MB with 12 gigs of ram water cooled system but I can see I don't have to go that nuts

Same here. Its been a long wait for something to make it worthwhile.
My ancient Athlon XP2500 has had everything other than motherboard and CPU upgraded so I can play IL2 at a reasonable resolution. Its amazing how well the old girl copes with the odd driving sim etc, and since I don't really play FPS's anymore its fine for everything else. Personally I would rather hold off getting a new system until I'm sure what I can afford will cope with SOW easily at at least 1920x1200 with eye candy cranked up. I have a feeling this could be a while.
I wouldn't be surprised if it has at least 6 cores and 8GB ram.

Yep, I agree.
Hopefully I can resist the temptation to go to a multi-monitor setup.. 3x24"..mmmmm
http://www.amd.com/uk/products/technologies/eyefinity/Pages/eyefinity.aspx

Pretty much sure that 2 5870 will run it at good fps, the prob I think will be the CPU.....
I dont think that dual nor quad would suffice, but the next gen of CPU, with 6 and more core.
Plus, SSd should be a minimum for it, with 4 gb of hight speed ram.
My 2 cent

More of the load is being put on the GPU these days rather than the CPU.

I wouldn't be surprised if SOW follows this trend. If I can get away with just a nice shiny new card I will be happy with that.

But if I do go Vista which is increasingly likely (I can get it for free hence avoiding 7) I will also get more RAM.

Looking at the water textures they look very similar to the DX10 textures in FSX but I don't know about DX11. Did the coding start too early or is it a simple procedure to include DX11?

The port from DX10 to DX11 is trivial.
Of course using additional features like the tesselation is an additional job.