I just decided to jump the gun now to upgrade before school started. I finally start my animation course and with that I can finally get big discounts on software which I'll be messing with all semester long.

My gtx 580 will be working with my gtx 275 which means I had to lose my 650w power supply for a 850w (Hungry suckers and this is the first time that I will use 2 cards). I have 12gbs ram, i7 and my motherboard should be plenty good (this upgrade should hold my pc up for 5-6 years before my next pc). My last rig lasted almost 8 years with 1 upgrade so I hope that will be the same with this one (its still kicking but its been cleaned and really I might use it once in awhile for 16bit games).

I also added another 1TB drive and a cooling kit (don't have the paper in front of me, little disorganized right now).

I would wait until very close til the game comes out and then decide.

I got a Corsair 620W 80+ and I'm on my 2nd GPU for it now. Even a powerful gamingrig with one card do not use that much power. 620W is enough unless you go SLI/CroffFire. Be sure to check the PCI-E cables for the extra powerneed.

i7-2600K is the best for reasonable money today.

But don't worry. Every hardwaresite worth their salt (that wants people to read them) will post Battlefield 3 hardware guides just like they did for StarCraft II.

Actually, I disagree. The i5-2500k is almost exactly the same as the i7-2600k but for $100 less. For gaming purposes, there will literally no difference between the two (or a difference so minimal that you wouldn't notice, not for $100 anyways). I heard the i7-2600k is only useful for video encoding or tasks that require a lot of CPU usage for a long period of time, and even then you're only shaving off a few seconds (depending on the task).

Bara

The 2600k has 100mhz on the 2500k, there is indeed no help as far as current gaming is concerned, since none of the designers seem to bother with utilizing even a quad, but it's a slightly faster rig aside from hyperthreading.

I went with the 2500k myself, if it proves insufficient to the task in another year or so, I'll turn it into a backup server.

I for one will not be upgrading for Battlefield 3, mostly because a new Windows isn't cheap, that's the only thing that would actually need upgrading, but that would imply retooling my software, and that'll take ages. I still wish they would pull a Crytek and make DX10 features magically work under Windows XP.

My guess is that I'll play it near the end of next year, when I plan to switch to a new editing rig. I'm going hexa core(probably a zambezi or the komodo if they release it by then), with 16GB of RAM, but I'm not that keen on changing my video card. The 5850 packs a lot of punch, and seeing how poorly some games currently use it's raw power, I'm really not that interesting in getting a new one, probably until the Radeon series switches back to triple digits (as in, it goes over 9000). Unless of course they make DirectX 12 mandatory for all games.

And yes, the i7 is mostly aimed at software that actually is designed to use all the cores at maximum load. Games can't really do that yet, video rendering and editing on the other hand will gobble up anything it can get it's hooks on. 

Hyper 212 Plus is awesome, but isn't there a 612 thats newer now?

Besides Civilization 5, BF3 will be the only game that supports and makes use of multithreaded rendering on Nvidia cards, so having a card in the 5xx range could pay off (the Civ5 performance rose noticeably when it was implemented).

I don't need to upgrade, since I have Nvidia560Ti.

Unfortunately, I don't like Battlefield franchise.

System requirements posted on their beta site:

http://www.battlefield.com/battlefield3/1/beta 

WHAT ARE THE MINIMUM AND RECOMMENDED SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR PLAYING ON PC?

Minimum System Requirements
OS: WINDOWS VISTA (SERVICE PACK 2) 32-BIT
PROCESSOR: 2 GHZ DUAL CORE (CORE 2 DUO 2.4 GHZ OR ALTHON X2 2.7 GHZ)
MEMORY: 2 GB
HARD DRIVE: 20 GB
GRAPHICS CARD (AMD): DIRECTX 10.1 COMPATIBLE WITH 512 MB RAM (ATI RADEON 3000, 4000, 5000 OR 6000 SERIES, WITH ATI RADEON 3870 OR HIGHER PERFORMANCE)
GRAPHICS CARD (NVIDIA): DIRECTX 10.0 COMPATIBLE WITH 512 MB RAM (NVIDIA GEFORCE 8, 9, 200, 300, 400 OR 500 SERIES WITH NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 GT OR HIGHER PERFORMANCE)
SOUND CARD: DIRECTX COMPATIBLE
KEYBOARD AND MOUSE
DVD ROM DRIVE

Recommended System Requirements
OS: WINDOWS 7 64-BIT
PROCESSOR: QUAD-CORE CPU
MEMORY: 4 GB
HARD DRIVE: 20 GB
GRAPHICS CARD: DIRECTX 11 COMPATIBLE WITH 1024 MB RAM (NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 560 OR ATI RADEON 6950)
SOUND CARD: DIRECTX COMPATIBLE
KEYBOARD AND MOUSE
DVD ROM DRIVE

Oooh, I wonder if those are beta requirements or final game requirements... This also implies that the beta will have full graphics. 

According to those requirements, a GTX 580 should run the game perfectly... 

Bara

Did I offend someone because now my motherboard died...(probably because of that dead fan) ef. Well thank god for 2 year warranty.

Seems like lots of games lately are 20gbs or more... One of my buddies tried TOR said it was around 40gbs... damn.

Well I at least I have more time to to draw for now.

And of course, I don't have a GTX 580, all I got is ancient stuff like a GeForce 4200 Ti and a GeForce 6200, much less sufficient RAM, about the only thing that is acceptable is the processor. I guess I really need to build a new computer of my own if I ever want a play a new video game ever again.

I'm really surprised. My old Nvidia 8800GTS is at the minimum spec. I was almost for sure I'd need a new video card to even run BF3.

Still going to want a new card, but this means I can slum medium/low settings for a little while longer!

So I purchased most of the parts I need for my new build. Only thing missing is the CPU (which I'll be picking up from Microcenter when I get the remaining parts) and the video card (which I'm waiting on BF3 benchmarks before buying it... or at least an indication of what it takes to run on Ultra). I can't wait to start building this thing

Bara

When the world ends, the 8800GTS will STILL BE THERE. They made that to last.

I'm running the 8800GS and I'm still super stoked about how it performs! Too bad my 3.4ghz Pentium D is finally on it's way out as far as processing speed ...

c'mon 64-bit coding!!! I want a reason to upgrade!!!