My old 7yrs old buddy died recently and I am thinking about building a replacement. Thinking about the following specs:

1. CPU: i5 4670
2. Ram: 8gm
3. GPU: gtx 700s

I'll playing the following games mostly in the future, in the order of favorability:
1. DCS p-51(and future WWII stuff)
2. Arma 3
3. Rome II total war
4. BMS
5. IL-2 series

I am a little undecided on the following items:
1. I know most people go for intel cpus, but would AMD cpus work for DCS games? Any drawbacks?
2. I know many people go for 16gb ram. Is 16gb necessary or 8gb is sufficient
3. I saw the current gtx 750 gpu is cheaper than gtx 660. Why is that? For gtx 700 series gpu, which one is the best for flight sims like DCS. Would AMD/ATI cards work well with these games?

Any tips would be great. Thanks in advance.

8GB should be sufficient but I was thinking of playing with 16GB simply because I could afford it. I wonder why you are not considering a 4670K and OC the damn thing? Overclocking today is easier than it was before, and just by buying a good 3rd-party cooler, you can eke out more performance out of your chip.

I'm still on an old i5 750 OC'ed to 4.0GHz but even at stock clocks, I played ARMA 3 with no problems. GPU is HD 7970.

IMO, go ahead with Intel, and that's coming from someone with AMD. I don't get the framerates others with similar equipment do, cpu being the main difference. Even with reports of the FX8350 being a hidden gem for gaming, I still don't (going from a 4170 to 8350). I did get an improvement, but nothing like the reports I saw where it traded blows with some high end Intels. Not saying it isn't good, just that it isn't quite as good, which, to me, says shorter lifespan in the long run. If it's the difference in hitting your budget or blowing it, then I'd say go with the FX8350 rather than cutting back on the graphics card. Played some DCS the other night for the first time with this set up and it was super smooth. I didn't have anything up to check fps though.

8GB is fine for memory. I've got 16GB and rarely get above 30-40% utilized. However, in a couple of years when there may be calls for that extra memory it may be difficult or expensive to find more of what I have to upgrade, so I went ahead for the sake of future-proofing. At just an extra $50, it wasn't a major decision anyway.

Seems the 750 is actually a step down from the 660 performance wise, although I would have thought it the same card a year different.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-7.html

I'm very pleased with my GTX770, FWIW.

in DCS SHIFT (or is it CTRL?) + Print Screen brings up FPS, Press it again brings up Debug/Frame Info.

Another GTX770 owner here, had it for 6 months now, great card.

I'm still running an i7-2600k at stock clocks and it's doing fine. I'll upgrade it at some point, maybe when the DDR4 CPU/mobos come out and I'll just do all 3 then.

Trouble with doing an interim upgrade is my DDR3 RAM might not like the mobo I get for the CPU I pick. It's a lot easier to make a CPU choice first, pick the best mobo price/feature combo to go with it, then buy the RAM based on that.



The Jedi Master

Thanks, that's good to know. Much better when you can get that in-game.

Good advice here.. I have the same CPU (8350).. and it is decent and it OCs very well.. I would suggest going with 16G on the RAM though. I got 32G because at the time I could and it was a great deal .. but I have not fully used it yet.. but 16G is the sweet spot for RAM. I have a 7870 GPU which does the job but I am considering an upgrade .. My rig is 18 months old.

How did you arrive at this statement, Bearcat? Have you seen your system use more than 8GB? If so, was it gaming (what game??) or some other task?