Please do write this up. Can't have enough info. I'm piecing together a pure gaming system soon, and need to do it on a budget. I've already purchased an i7-920 (with DO stepping) and plan to do a mild overclock to about 3.6ghz. I also plan to buy the ASRock X58 Extreme mobo (about $170.00 USD). I'm trying to hold out until the newer Nvidia GT300 series comes out but the ATi 58xx series looks pretty good too. I'm open to suggestions.
Flyby out

Yep.

But all the other stuff - TIR, TeamSpeak, FRAPS, Pr0n downloading tool, etc. can use it.

The 32 bit OS was every bit (byte?) constrained to how much RAM it could use as RoF is.

The max total RAM address space for a 32bit OS is 4 gigabyte. If your graphic card has 1G of RAM, your maximum memory is going to at most be 3GB, because the 32bit OS has to use 1GB of that address space to address your video memory. It’ll actually be lower than the 3GB because there are other hardware resources that need address space, too. So, saying there is no reason to go with a 64bit OS is BS to be honest. The real fact is that there is no reason to go with a 32bit OS on a new build PC.

Simple fact, if you have a new 64bit CPU and are getting a new OS then it is much wiser to go with a 64bit OS to get the full benefit from it. I see many people who purchase a new 32bit version of Vista or Windows 7 and stick 4GB of RAM and a 1GB high end graphics card. Before they have enven built their new PC they have crippled it by practically throwing away 1.4GB tp 1.5GB of usable RAM.

Using some simple mathematics with RoF on a 32bit OS with a 1GB Graphics card and 4G RAM.

4GB RAM
- 1GB RAM for GPU (effectively eliminating 1GB of system RAM)
- 1.7GB for RoF
- approx 0.3 - 0.5GB for other hardware addressing
That leaves a total of 0.8 - 1.0GB RAM for your OS and other apps that are running in the background. I can assure you that if RoF was running on such a system your free RAM would be measured in the low Megabytes, and that the paging file would be used a lot.

With regards to overclocking an i7-920 to 4ghz over 3.6ghz., I haven't seen where there's any benefit insofar as gained frames per second. I guess I'll have to find some links to show that. Otherwise if I saw where 4ghz provided a nice bump in fps I'd do it, especially with the newer DO stepping. Nice to know it's there, though.
Flyby out

If you're not getting any benefits from overclocking the CPU on framerate, it means you've likely reached your video card's potential for that particular scene. No sense in offering more processing power.

One of the only times when you will notice a difference with overclocking the CPU is when many things are happening at the same time nearby, but are not actively being rendered on-screen. In Rise of Flight, particularly, you will notice a difference on tank missions or missions with loads of AI planes. They slow the whole process down, even when you're not directly looking at them and your framerate indirectly suffers from it.

Simply put: if you're getting terrible framerates simply looking up at the blue sky in an especially busy mission, the CPU is the bottleneck, not the video card and overclocking might help, to some degree.

This is why IL-2's Black Death track is such a great benchmark. The images it draws have long since been outdated and should be maxed out on framerate by now using modern video cards. Yet the process behind the images, the plane AI and certain particle effects that are still being rendered on the CPU instead of using pixel shaders, cause the infamous slowdowns.

This is not to say that a day will come that the Black Death track will be perfectly smooth, as not only processing power increases, but processing methods improve as well. That's exactly what the i7 does with threading, but it requires compatible software.