Not being able to play Arma a few weeks due my Italy holiday, I had a lot of time to over think my system upgrade.

I know there are a lot of other places to drop upgrade questions, but I wanna hear the opinions of you guys.

I'm ready to push the order button for my new (I hope ArmaII/OA and DCS A10 prove) system.

My old system for 5 years now: Amd64 multi proc 4400/4GB with a ati4870 video card.
My planned new system order: Intel core i7 930/6Gb,ASRock X58 Extreme3,2x GTX460 Sli.

Will I be happy? (what can I expect)

ok shoot...

I'd drop one of the 460's and put as much RAM as you can into it. With 12+ you can run the entire game in RAM. You can't make ArmA2/OA any faster than that. RAM to RAM.

Yeah I'd drop the SLI as Arma2 is more CPU dependent then GPU (unless you run a huge monitor at high res and/or 200% fillrate). Either more RAM like Punisher suggested or a fast HDD/SSD. RAM-drive is your best option tho

How does one force a game to run in a Ram drive only on Win7? Many apps won't run if they don't detect a pagefile.

If you have 6+ GB RAM in Win7x64 you don't need a pagefile. Turn it off. Pagefiles are old school when your system was struggling with 640K.

I have never in my entire 15+ years as a System Admin/Network Engineer seen a program that requires a pagefile. Programs don't require a pagefile, just the OOOOLLLDDD OS's that did not have enough RAM to feed the programs.

There are a couple of threads in the BIS forum on how to get all or some of ArmA2 to run in RAM. I have 8GB RAM and load the main .pbo's in my RAMDISK.

The ultimate ArmA2/OA setup is to install the entire program into a RAMDISK virtual HD that you call up anytime you want to play. Takes about 2 minutes to get up and going when you want to play.

I have only ever seen one progroam complain about no pagefile in Windows 7, and that was my old Photoshop Elements 2. It refuses to start unless I manually set a pagefile to the size it specifies, even with 2GB ram. Back when it was new, I ran it with only 512MB of ram!

Doesnt Arma2 prefer the ATI cards? Shouldnt you be looking at ATI 58xx or 59xx cards?

Thx guys.

I placed my order.

It looks like the games I play most, ArmaII/flightsims benefit little or not from a Sli setup and games like battlefield bc give good fps without. I drop the second videocard for now, might get one later when new games ask for it. Ram disk seems indeed the way to go but I keep my order at 6 GB as a start. Might upgrade later to 12Gb if I feel for it. I do wanna buy a SSD but wait till the end of the year when Intel comes with the new 25nm SSD technologie. Prices should drop by then(160GB for price of the 80GB now) http://www.macbidouille.com/news/2010/08/13/la-roadmap-des-ssd-intel-1

My order looks like this:

i7 930 2.8Ghz (will OC to 3.8)
6Gb i7 optimized mem package.
Gigabyte GTX460 1G. OC it should performance faster dan the 5850.

Word of advice on the 460. The 2xx.xx series drivers are hit/miss for people.

Read and keep watch in the Nvidia drivers forum on guru3d.com. It is the best place to get the scoop on what is or isn't working.

http://forums.guru3d.com/forumdisplay.php?f=21

ok,

Got my new system up and running.. First things first, burn-in and performance testing: "Running arma2/OA"

Woow what a differents it makes!! I'm veeery happy ! !