Hi folks. I been thinking about same upgrade issues myself for last few weeks an the new AMD Bulldozer thats about the be unleashed got me thinking.
Silly question, how does IL2 CoD scale with more cores?
Is il2 CoD GPU bound or CPU bound?
Hope you appreciate where im coming from with next bit....
Here is our dilemna
i5 2500k is a butt kicking CPU no doubts about it.
i7 2600k is possibly overkill.
AMD Bulldozer fx 8150 or similar FX cpu based Oct core PC. Question is an this is mostly aimed at IL2 CoD will the extra cores help or is it a complete waste?
I think bottom line is most modern CPU's are capable of great things now, but I for one dont want to find myself in need of another upgrade in 2 years time. I want the new build to last at least 4-5 years an still be able to cut the mustard.
Grom
Good question about the cores; I don't have any information on that, sorry.
The i7, imo, would definitely be overkill if your rig is primarily for gaming (I don't know of any games that can use virtual cores).
I still think the i5 2500k is a good buy now. The release of Bulldozer may force a price drop on 2500ks (or it may not... I was surprised at how long it took for prices to drop by any significant margin on the e8400).
Since you want to make this build last and, as you note, the price will always drop you have to determine for yourself how long you are prepared to wait; that said, I decided to build my new rig on the P8P67 mobo when I learned that the upcoming Ivy Bridge was going to be an upgrade option (also 1155-pin socket).
I also can only upgrade every 3-4 yrs or so, I figure in 2 years I'll swap out the i5 2500k for an Ivy Bridge CPU. The nice thing about that is that it should yield a performance increase with a simple 20-minute swapping of the CPUs. Same goes for the GPU, I'll either get a new vid card, or buy another 6970 to X-fire.
If need be, I can add another 8 gigs DDR3 in future, though at the moment 8 gigs seems to be the sweet spot with no improvement past that point.
All these changes will keep my rig at a "second tier" level, are financially manageable as I can upgrade when need/sales arise, and can be done with minimal disruption since the MoBo won't be changed
I went with an Asus P8P67 Pro rev 3.0, and I'm happy with it (there were a few teething issues to sort out, but nothing too dramatic) as it seemed like a good platform for future upgrades and I don't need any of the features of the Z68 chipset boards.
Good luck,
C_G