....

what framerate do u waant?

close to 60!

Have you any sort of idea about PCs at all? I think that would probably be a bit more helpful as you seem to be going into this completely blind.

Ram and SSD have marginal affects on gaming. For a cpu you would need a 2500 at most. GPU is where you need to think high, maybe 2 680s? A single 680 at the moment is hitting mid 30s with everything maxed. And this is at 1920*1200.

RAM tops out on most games at 2 gigs so you don't need a load of it unless you're doing work that actually uses intense amounts of it like video editing or photoshop. Same again with the SSD. It'll just help with load times so things will probably load in much quicker but don't spend lots of money on something that won't make a huge impact. You could probably get away with a 680 and turn a few settings down. From watching the QL with Vinny and Brad, it seems ambient occlusion shadows is an absolute frame rate killer. The game only just came out so I suspect drivers aren't exactly where they could be so Nvidia could increase performance over time.

2560x1600 is almost double the pixel count of a 1080p screen but you've said you don't care about AA so that lowers some of the burden (especially if this game uses MSAA or even SSAA for the top quality AA - there are some mighty fine PC screenshots coming out) as the card doesn't need to make 2/4/8/16 samples for a single pixel value at polygon edges (or areas of transparent texture draw). Looking at what people are getting then 60fps shouldn't be that hard with a decent card but it's a question of how much relief dropping from extreme AA to no AA provides verses doubling the pixel count. As a DX11 game then there should be very little (if any) difference in CPU load between most visual settings so no need for anything exotic for the CPU. Even with the HD textures then I wouldn't expect you to see any benefit from more than 8GB of RAM.

If you want to know for sure then just keep browsing around for someone doing a complete run-down of the game and benchmarks for a range of hardware but I'm not expecting this to be a new high-water mark for taxing PCs. Liquid cooling is a fun excess, not something you need for performance for playing games viably.

Edit: Oh, I guess we should answer the original question (at a guess): $230 i5; $120 Z77 SLI mobo; $45 2x4GB 1600MHz RAM; $80 PSU; $800-1000 (??? No idea to hit 60fps solid) for two 670/680 or a 690?; any HDD (game running will dump the data set into the RAM). But that GPU stuff is a guess, maybe it'll only need $500 on a single 680 and the drivers that drop next month (or maybe AA really takes a lot out of a system and 1600p isn't that deadly) or maybe AMD's higher memory bandwidth will be the critical factor and so their $400-500 cards could manage (they not only have that memory bandwidth advantage but also focus more on 3-screen performance tweaking that deals with very high pixel counts).

Norm Chan is using that monitor, I think he said he was using a 680 and was getting decent frame rates on everything he played. it was on the last podcast that lloyd case was on that they talked about it; 4 or 5 weeks ago.

I don't think there's any such thing as 1600p, or at least nobody's mentioning the marketing word to my knowledge.

Anyway, I doubt the difference between 8GB of RAM and 16GB RAM would do much. It's mostly the GPU and CPU that matters. I'll let others who know better be more specific, but it seems like maxing this game out will take quite a machine.

@believer258 said:

I don't think there's any such thing as 1600p, or at least nobody's mentioning the marketing word to my knowledge.

There are 4k monitors out there, it's just nowhere near a product for the average consumer.

@Vonocourt said:

@believer258 said:

I don't think there's any such thing as 1600p, or at least nobody's mentioning the marketing word to my knowledge.

There are 4k monitors out there, it's just nowhere near a product for the average consumer.

Maybe it's because my tastes aren't refined enough or something like that, but that sounds quite excessive. I knew some PC monitors could go that high, but there's a limit to the difference that the human eye can actually tell.

Anyway, I thought it was just called 2560x1600 resolution, not "1600p".

@boocreepyfootdoctor said:

Maybe not with 3D enabled, maybe not with anti-aliasing cause it wouldn't be needed on a 2560x1600 monitor... but certainly with ambient occlusion shadows, max draw distance, higher than 60hz refresh rate, the HD texture pack, basically everything else maxed out.

Would you absolutely need one of those $1,000 dual GPU cards? Would you absolutely need the top of the line Extreme Edition intel CPU, like the six or eight core ones?

I guess an SSD and 16GB or RAM are a guarantee, but will one need "pro-edition" higher speed versions from Corsair, ones with some MLG kid's name on 'em?

And will liquid cooling be necessary?

Right now, the game is very optimized for AMD hardware.

Once nVidia makes some hardware specific tweaks, I'd look at getting an nVidia 660. At $299, it's within arm's reach of 670 performance.

I'm running a 2500k @ 4.6 ghz. You won't need any crazy kind of CPU. Any ivybridge/sandybridge Core i5 should give you plenty of oomph.

SSD is nice. Crucial M4 128 gig drives can be had for under $100 nowadays. Samsung or Crucial SSDs or nothing at all. There are some Intel ones that use the Sandforce controller. Avoid anything Sandforce driven like a free chicken sandwich from the restaurant that hasn't had power in three days. It might be all right for a lil bit, but after a bit of time, you'll regret it.

Being a console port, there's no 64 bit executable. It won't touch most of your 16 gigs of ram. But, the stuff's so cheap, why not?

Liquid cooling's good for two things. Silly overclocks that you want relatively silent and burning up tons of money. If you need to ask if its necessary, then you don't need it!

....

@boocreepyfootdoctor said:

Thanks duder. I have a big school paycheck coming in Sept. and want to use college as an excuse to get a decent gaming PC, perhaps next gen ready (meaning Star Wars 1313, Watchdogs, etc.) While games like Crysis push PC graphics to their artistic limits, open world games like Sleeping Dogs, I believe, are a better benchmark of performance. Like GTA4 was for my 2008/09 PC. Although that game always ran terrible no matter how good a PC due to a sloppy port. But with all the talk of S.D. being a well cared for port, I'm thinking of using it as something to budget around.

You're kind of right, but in this case (and in my experience), Sleeping Dogs is not really more taxing than Crysis or TW2. For the minor gains in smoothness using uber-sampling (or whatever Sleeping Dogs calls it), yes, you'll need a powerful machine, but I wouldn't say it's worth it. I'm running everything on normal (nothing disabled), at 1920x1200, with the high res texture pack, and it's running at a constant 60 with my 3 and half year old machine (i7 920, gtx280 x 2 in sli, 6gb ram). It looks great.

Just buy sensibly, but don't try to future proof it too much. If you've got the cash, build a decent machine that runs current games maxed out (with or without high AA levels, this is really your choice - again, I don't think it's worth it to try and max out the AA on everything). When those "next-gen" games come around, consider adding a second card then.

You need a top end GPU to hold a solid 60 in this game at 1600p. My SLI 680's just scrape in at 60 with every turned up to 11 with the exception of the really strange AA setup in this title at 3600x1920. Considering that's about another 60% resolution on top of a 1600p screen you could probably do it with a GTX 670 or a HD 7970.