Thanks. I would like to see these side by side just to compare the colors even with a regular LCD. That would be most helpful.

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

The IPS panels have more colours and I believe a much better viewing angle and the latter is very attractive. On the down side you pay nearly twice as much for an IPS panel. The other benefit of many IPS panels is that they have 16:10 ratio which means that they are a bit taller and give you less of the letter box type view you get from the 1920x1080. Having said that this is less pronounced in a 27" monitor because they are just so big. Dell do very good IPS panels but they are LCD backlit and I personally find them a bit warm for my liking. Going LED gives little benefit except lower power consumption and therefore less heat out put.

If you are in the UK take a look at the Hazro 27" IPS panels. Mine is absolutely gorgeous and it was fairly cheap. They save on bezel and control panel which is pretty crap but hey you don't play with either much. The panel itself is simply gorgeous.

At the moment I would say it is far more bound by the GPU. i5 is absolutely all you need and i7 a pointless CPU for COD and many other applications.

When thinking about a GPU I would put the amount of VRAM at the top of my priorities. I have 3 Gig on my 580GTX and I read somewhere over 2 Gig can be used.

Thanks. I will check out that option. I think I will look around before making a final choice. Appreciate the help.

But will it use more cores if they available or will it just use a max number pre set by devs?

Bumping this (is that allowed?) because i was learning a great deal from the discussion.

Let me stir the pot: The consensus seems to be that one should wait a month or so until release of AMD Bulldozer, at which time many folks think Intel will significantly drop prices on its cpu series (i7 and others)...so what do you all think about that?

Of course if one waits a month for that drop, one might as well wait for the pre-Christmas sale discounts....but then, why not wait until the post-Christmas Big discounts!!!! At that point, maybe wait until Thunderbolt is released, which will drive down something..ohh..Yeah...Sandy-Bridge! It always goes this way... at some point, you just have to jump off that bridge and hope for the best.

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

All I can say,

on my system, the cores are far from being saturated and not constantly as well, when runnind CoD. My GFX runs at full throttle though.

IMO CoD isn`t very well optimized for Multi-cores. On my system, I have good fps but micro-stutters. From what I`ve read on several boards, it seems you should get as much VRAM as possible, my GTX570 with 1280 MB runs over 90% most of the time when playing the sim.

Certainly RoF and CloD appear to use all the vram they can get; can't say about other games. Off-hand I can't say how much of the 2GB gets used when I run RoF, though I could check if it would help deciding which vidcard to get.