I tried the demo with my Opteron 165 system (2.75ghz dual core), 2gig Mushkin, and 7900 GTX overclocked videocard. I snickered to myself about how I was going to turn everything all the way up just to see how badly it would run. All the way up for me is 1280x1024 w/ whatever the maximum ingame settings are. It ran smoothly, but I never really pushed the game. I might put off picking up this gem till I invest in a new videocard. That 8800 GTS 640mb looks inviting. I think that on a screen of my size (19in LCD), thats probably one of the best upgrades one can do to try and get this game to run well. While I agree with Rokkuman09 that for under 2 grand you can't get this game 'perfect', you can get a pretty good experience with some 'reasonable' hardware. To anybody wanting to upgrade for this game, I suggest the following: C2D e6600 (or AMD equivalent) nVidia 8800 GTS 640mb (an overclocked version wouldn't hurt) 2gig DDR2 800 w/ decient timings (example: 4-4-4-12 @ 1T) You should be able to build that for under 2 grand, but I honestly don't think the game will be perfect. You'll probably still get slowdown when there are hundreds of units on screen.