ArmA 3 System Requirements

[chortles 263]

Hint: forget the soundcard, use onboard audio. Here's a sample build of my own for much, MUCH cheaper:

•Windows 8 Pro 64 bit

•Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 77W Quad-Core CPU with Intel HD Graphics 4000 on-die GPU and Hyper-Threading (for if you might possibly record or stream your Arma 3 sessions)

•ASUS GTX660 TI-DC2O-2GD5 GTX 660 Ti 2GB 192-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 Ready

•Corsair Dominator Platinum 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz Desktop Memory

•Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe 240 GB SSD

•Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler (heat sink/fan)

•ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe Mini-ITX motherboard

•BitFenix Prodigy Mini-ITX case (though its body is more of a mini tower due to its height and interior room)

•SILVERSTONE Strider Plus ST50F-P 500W ATX 12V v2.3 & EPS 12V 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Full Modular Active PFC Power Supply

[tonygrunt 10]

Hint: forget the soundcard, use onboard audio.

If you are going to use headphones, most onboard audio(realtek) doesn't have good surround if any.

And you should probably add another hdd, arma2 gets pretty big when adding mods.

[NeMeSiS 11]

OK how about this

•Windows 8 Pro 64 bit

•Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor

•Asus HD7850-DC2-2GD5-V2 Radeon HD 7850 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 Ready CrossFireX

•Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB (4x 8 GB) 240-pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2400 Desktop Memory

•Western Digital WD VelociRaptor WD1000DHTZ 10000 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5 Internal HDD

•CORSAIR Hydro Series H80 (CWCH80) High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler

•ASUS Black 12X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 12X DVD-RAM 8X BD-ROM 8MB Cache SATA Blu-ray Burner BW-12B1ST/BLK/G/AS

•ASUS Xonar DSX 7.1 Channels 24-bit 192KHz PCI Express x1 Interface Audio Card

•Corsair Vengeance K60 Black/Metal USB Wired Gaming Performance, FPS Mechanical Keyboard & Corsair Vengeance M60 Black 8 Buttons 1 x Wheel USB Wired Laser 5700 dpi Performance, FPS Gaming Mouse

All in all, a little under $3,000.00. I have all ways build my own gamers. Never have build a proper gamer under $2500.00. I can't see one builded for under $1500.00. US

Maybe you should check a different site or something, with just 2 minutes of googling on the word 'PC' i found a prebuild system with these specs:

Intel Core i7 3770

8 GB DDR3 werkgeheugen

1TB HDD + 16 GB Cache-SSD

AMD Radeon HD 7870 (2 GB)

Windows 8

DisplayPort & HDMI-poort

DVI-aansluiting

Gigabit ethernet

1 x HDD swap-cage

8x USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.0

5.1-channel audio

For €999 (About $1330) (including taxes)

Unfortunately this was on a Dutch site, but i cannot imagine that it would be more expensive in the US, especially after taxes and all.

If you build it yourself it should be cheaper, and you can switch the CPU for the k version and use a larger SSD.

Edited January 19, 2013 by NeMeSiS

[alexboy 11]

hoping they some how lower the requirements to make it perform better on lower pc's too, like make the video performance actually work, and not make the game lag when lowering the video data.

[Ezcoo 47]

Make sure that your components are in balance, it's waste of money to spend extra money to eg. extremely high speed memory if another part is bottlenecking the performance.

My specs:

ASRock Z77 Extreme4 Intel Z77 (for overclocking the CPU)

i5-3570k (@3,4 GHz, not OCed yet)

GTX 670 OC edition

16 GB DDR3 1600 MHz CL9 memory

Samsung 830 256GB SSD

In singleplayer missions and properly optimised MP missions, I can reach 100 FPS with about 2500 m viewdistance and all video settings at maximum (except video memory = default, HDR = normal and PP effects = Low) with 1920x1080 Full HD resolution. In big towns the FPS drops about 40 %, which isn't bad actually. In heavy MP missions (Domination, Wasteland) FPS still stays almost always over 30 with increased viewdistance. ArmA can be really played well at 30 FPS in my opinion.

My suggestions:

Get

1. powerful, overclockable CPU with proper motherboard to make sure that the CPU can be overclocked (I can recommend the i5-3570k, it can be OCed up to 4,5-5 GHz)

2. proper aftermarket cooler for CPU

3. powerful GPU (IMO: GTX 670 or HD7970) with aftermarket cooler to make sure that it doesn't melt during your sessions

4. SSD! ArmA is extremely heavy on hard disks and if you get HDD it'll be the bottleneck of your system, I'm sure that you'll get massive FPS boost with SSD! You can get HDD also for pictures, videos, music etc.

5. 8 GB or 16 GB 1600/1866 MHz CL9 memory – 1600 MHz should have the best price/performance ratio atm

6. proper soundcard for your system, depends on e.g. your playback system, 5.1, 7.1, headphones...?

7. proper playback system if you haven't one already, I recommend good headphones with sound card designed for headphones (like Xonar DGX, cheap and powerful)

Then overclock at least your CPU, maybe also GPU. You could also buy the OC service from professionals if you don't want to do it yourself. ArmA is heavy on CPU, so I believe that you'd get nice performance boost by OCing your CPU.

That's just my two cents, but at least I'm happy with my build, and I haven't even OCed anything yet... And those components didn't cost even a fifth of that $6,5k PC...! :p

[chortles 263]

An SSD is the most important upgrade for (current) Arma 2: OA/CO. You might be able to get by on the i5-3570K without problems, but you can also drop down from the 670 or 7970 to a 660 Ti or 7950 if it's from a good manufacturer.

Also, the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus (aka 212+) or EVO are extremely popular as aftermarket CPU coolers, whether or not you OC.

EDIT: Until 11:59 pm Pacific (I believe GMT-8?) Sunday night of January 20th -- that means 2:59 am Eastern (GMT-5) Monday morning of January 21st -- Newegg is offering a XFX Radeon HD 7850 1GB for $160 before $20 mail-in rebate, while NCIX is offering a 2 GB model for $192.08 before $20 mail-in rebate, and both models are single-fan; the dual-fan models are $195 before $20 mail-in rebate for a 1 GB at Newegg and $225 before $20 mail-in rebate for a 2 GB at Newegg; right now a overclocked (975 MHz instead of 860 MHz) dual-fan 2 GB model for $230 at Newegg also comes with a pair of 2 GB DDR3 1.65V RAM sticks (4 GB total).

Edited January 20, 2013 by Chortles

[RustyRecoil 1]

I believe i may need an upgrade:)

[HorbeySpector 164]

Gonna have to buy a new pc for this game.. i3 atm.. Hope it's worth it!

[Metal69 1]

hello and sorry for my english.

i want know if my graphics card gigabyte gtx 660 ti oc 2gb may run the Arma 3 in full hd and hight graphics.

regards ;);)

[papanowel 120]

hello and sorry for my english.

i want know if my graphics card gigabyte gtx 660 ti oc 2gb may run the Arma 3 in full hd and hight graphics.

regards ;);)

The game is not release yet and I doubt that you will be able to play it on max settings (10 or 20 km view distance and everything in high).

It's also depending on what your cpu, ram are.

[giorgygr 61]

Currently i have:

WinXP-32

CPU Q6600

RAM 4g

GPU 5970

SSD (for ArmA)

If i change OS to Win7-64 and upgrade RAM to 16gb

will give me enough horsepower..or my Q6600 will be serious bottleneck? :/

[PuFu 4599]

games don't use more than 3gb of ram anyways, so that 16 will have no impact on game performance (a3 will most likely be LAA, but will not have 64 binaries). so yes tha q6600 will be a serious bottlenexk

[chortles 263]

hello and sorry for my english.

i want know if my graphics card gigabyte gtx 660 ti oc 2gb may run the Arma 3 in full hd and hight graphics.

regards ;);)

An OC'd 660 Ti 2GB I believe will support Arma 3 "full hd and high graphics" just fine, but as Papanowel suggested performance will almost certain have as much and probably more to do with your CPU and RAM.

[Metal69 1]

An OC'd 660 Ti 2GB I believe will support Arma 3 "full hd and high graphics" just fine, but as Papanowel suggested performance will almost certain have as much and probably more to do with your CPU and RAM.

hi

thanks. i believe that this video card will be adequate but i answer for leave doubts since im doing a pc. The cpu will be i7 3770k 3.5 ghz and the ram will be 8gb 1600mzh so that i believe that it will be adequate.

regards and sorry for my english.

[EvenLease 11]

Hows my System specs look? Think they will hold up?

Hoping for good optimization. Specs below.

[chortles 263]

EvenLease, if you don't already have a SSD that's well over 40 GB in capacity (enough to hold both a Windows OS and Arma 3) that omission is where the bottleneck would be.

Metal69, do you have an aftermarket CPU cooler for that i7-3770K so that you can overclock it? Also, what's the motherboard chipset, Z77 (highest-end consumer Ivy Bridge chipset) or something else?

[EvenLease 11]

what if I only ran ArmA 3 on the SSD? instead of both the OS and ArmA 3....

Because currently, my OS starts up in under a minute.. able to game within two minutes of pressing the power button.

So, if ArmA 3 was on a SSD would that help?

[chortles 263]

Arma 3 absolutely would benefit from a SSD if it works anything like Arma 2/OA, and the OS would have even faster boot up time if it were on the SSD as well... though I don't know if the OS being on a HDD would bottleneck an Arma 3 that was on a SSD. I didn't notice any performance problems from putting Arma 2: Combined Operations on a SSD with the user profile/addons (using SixUpdater) being on a HDD though!

By the way, as of this post Newegg offers an overclocked 2 GB 660 Ti video card from ASUS for US$290 before US$20 mail-in rebate (expires January 31st, as does Microsoft's Windows 8 Pro for $39.99 download offer). While I don't know if a regular 660 (non-Ti) would be enough for Arma 3, an overclocked 2 GB 660 from ASUS is US$220 before US$20 mail-in rebate... so $70 less than the Ti version.

[EvenLease 11]

How exactly do you put a Steam Game on an SSD? I believe ArmA 3 is going to be a steamworks title right?

[Randel 1]

sadly i might not be able to play this

---------- Post added at 23:50 ---------- Previous post was at 23:49 ----------

Or at least not very well

[St. Jimmy 272]

Hows my System specs look? Think they will hold up?

Hoping for good optimization. Specs below.

http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/arma-3-e3-hands-on-preview-8-questions-answered/

What hardware were they running it on and how smooth did it play? (@erockbart)

Very, very smoothly. A frame counter wasn’t visible, so don’t interpret this as scientific, but I felt I was running at 50-60+ frames throughout the demo. Bohemia was running a Core i7 at 3.2 GHz and a single GTX 580. Not low-end equipment, certainly, but I wouldn’t call that exotic, either. I encountered one or two microscopic hitches while helicoptering, but the game behaved extremely well overall. There was no noticeable dip in framerate when I right-click zoomed in most situations, and gunfire/explosions had zero effect on performance. The largest mission I had probably had 20-25 enemy infantry (and an enemy vehicle) scattered across a kilometer or two, plus my six or seven-man squad.

Add SSD (120GB is under 100€) and you are ready for super Arma 3 experience. And Steam have added recently support for games in multiple drivers.

[Metal69 1]

EvenLease, if you don't already have a SSD that's well over 40 GB in capacity (enough to hold both a Windows OS and Arma 3) that omission is where the bottleneck would be.

Metal69, do you have an aftermarket CPU cooler for that i7-3770K so that you can overclock it? Also, what's the motherboard chipset, Z77 (highest-end consumer Ivy Bridge chipset) or something else?

hi

i will use Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo because i heard that is very good for when i overclock it.The motherboard will be Gigabyte Ga-z77x-d3h or highest. however the i7 3770k dont consumer a lot. i havent SSD but i dont think that is very important.

thanks and regards and sorry for my english

[chortles 263]

hi

i will use Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo because i heard that is very good for when i overclock it.The motherboard will be Gigabyte Ga-z77x-d3h or highest. however the i7 3770k dont consumer a lot. i havent SSD but i dont think that is very important.

thanks and regards and sorry for my english

Hyper 212 EVO is a good choice only if your case is big enough to fit it and if your motherboard's RAM slots are arraned so that the Hyper 212 EVO does not block them!

If you haven't already bought the motherboard I would recommend another brand besides Gigabyte, maybe ASUS if that's in your budget or otherwise Zotac?

I would definitely recommend a SSD for better performance -- in fact, I would say that a strong CPU and a SSD are the most important thing for Arma 2 as far as frame rate!

[Covert_Death 11]

yea your rig is good, your probably like one step behind mine and i expect to be okay on launch day (optimization permitting)

the ONLY thing you NEED to not bottleneck your system (since you have the speed) is an SSD... without that you will never see the potential of your Hardware on arma. you could loose a good 20-30 FPS in dense areas without an SSD, maybe more and especially when turning in a direction. if your serious about arma you MUST have an SSD, especially with a top notch system like you have.

I have:

FX-8350 @ 5.0Ghz

GTX 670 2Gb OC

16 Gb DDR3 1800 RAM

128 Gb SSD

1Tb HDD

[Metal69 1]

Hyper 212 EVO is a good choice only if your case is big enough to fit it and if your motherboard's RAM slots are arraned so that the Hyper 212 EVO does not block them!

If you haven't already bought the motherboard I would recommend another brand besides Gigabyte, maybe ASUS if that's in your budget or otherwise Zotac?

I would definitely recommend a SSD for better performance -- in fact, I would say that a strong CPU and a SSD are the most important thing for Arma 2 as far as frame rate!

Hi my case will be Aerocool Strike-x One Advance Usb 3.0 so that i think that the 212 EVO will enter without problems. No still i havent bought the pc, what motherboard do you recommend?? The SSD will buy it in the near future when i have more money since they are more expensive.

thanks and regards (sorry for my english)