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.

Except this is not just a game, its a flightsim, probably the most complex and advanced one ever and requiring lots of cpu horsepower for AI, weather, flightmodel, complex damage model etc in addition to GPU power for looks.
Its conceivable that PC with more cores CPUs will give access to, for example, more complex AI routines or higher fidelity flight model.Oleg has said SOW has been designed for the long term, and in the long term PC performance is advancing by increasing the number of cores.

Doesn't matter whether you want to call it a game or a flight sim - they still use huge 3D graphics processing but I agree about utilising modern multi-core as this makes a lot of sense of course.

I don't know if SOW is going to be more CPU or GPU dependant or whether they are being clever and it will be able to adjust according to hardware but I will hope that a fast dual core with the best graphics card I can afford and bags of RAM will do the job for me.

SoW will probably remain in the tradition of flight simulators: CPU & RAM with the video card as a more minor requirement. The fact is simply that much of modern GPU engineering is focussed on first person shooters and not-that-useful for flight simulators. I'd also recommend waiting to upgrade until a few months after SoW:BoB is released.

EWW!

Whatever you do, don't go for Vista, if you're gonna upgrade, get Windows 7 instead, it's FAR better than Vista, and supports both DX10 and DX11.

It's OK I know how to tame Vista

And I have it on good authority that Vista will receive a platform upgrade to use DX11.

I'll have to upgrade before it comes out because I won't be able to fly it period with what I have..I don't think Single core 3gig with 2 gigs of ram and a 512 agp card

My system is in my signature. I'll be using it.

As an AMD/ATI aficionado, logically, my next upgrade should be a year from now. By then, AMD will have their 6 core "enthusiast" level CPU on the market -- I imagine BoBSOW will use 6 cores. The next MB chip set will be out. And, ATI will have their next major generation of GPU on the market (the HD5xxx series is the last of the current major generation).

On the other hand, logic is not always the determining factor

But still, why get Vista? It is for all intents and purposes massively inferior to Windows 7.

You will really appreciate the extra RAM and a 64 bit OS on that computer. I have a Core i7 machine too and had been long sceptical that moving from XP 32 bit and 3GB of RAM to Windows Vista / 7 and 6GB of RAM would make an appreciable difference. Well it has made a very noticeable difference - easily as much as in the older days when I would upgrade a CPU. I have seen pretty dramatic improvements in all games - a small increase in maximum frame rates (which I don't see because I run vsync anyway) but far more importantly a dramtic improvement in minimum frame rates.

I would go so far as to say that apart from those times in the past when I built completely new machines, I have never seen such an improvement as I have when going to 64 bit and 6GB RAM on my Core i7 machine.

I do have to add though (given the discussions regarding Vista / windows 7) is that I do not notice any difference in performance whatsoever between Vista 64 bit and Windows 7 64 bit. They both perform identically in games on my rig. As I say, the big jump in performance was going from XP 32 bit to Vista 64 bit and 3GB to 6GB.

Perhaps the only other upgrade I could suggest to you is to consider a good quality solid state drive. By the time SOW comes out, they might possibly be sensibly priced (or at least cheaper than they are now). I have a mere 30 GB one in my rig but that is actually just big enough since the rig only has to run one racing sim and one flight sim (I am running Vista 64 bit Lite, which is only about 9 GB installed). But it made a dramatic difference to performance and I could never go back to a mechanical hard drive.

Sensible feedback and much appreciated, but i think i'll pass on SSDs for now. The i7 is a slight departure from my usual upgrading routine, in that i had kept my previous athlonXP 2600 for about 5 years, so i had to change the whole lot. That's why i opted for the i7, as it was a new generation that will have better upgradeability in the future.

Normally, i upgrade components partially and never get top of the line ones. I usually get second best items, as they are usually the best value for money. I've got a 1.5TB disk since i got this i7 rig back in sping and it's already 1TB full. For the price of an SSD i could probably get 2 more of these drives, one for general storage and one for running a win7 install