Hi FiL - even though the second machine is better, the first one that you list is still a quite powerful machine, it is by no means a weak machine.

The first one that you show there is more than enough to run MoI quite comfortably, and it should work well for rendering too, you would probably need to be doing some pretty heavy duty rendering projects like longer animation sequences to really notice the higher efficiency on the second machine.


> I have to focus on the processor (i5 - i7) or on the
> video card (AMD Radeon HD 6770M - AMD Radeon HD 6970M) ?

The baseline i5 and the Radeon 6770M are both perfectly fine for MoI.

Most rendering is CPU intensive, so choosing the higher CPU over the higher GPU is likely better for that area, but it depends on the specific renderer that is being used, there are some out there that do use GPU resources instead of CPU resources but that's pretty new.

But really instead of enhancing either the CPU or the GPU it's probably better to prioritize adding more RAM instead, if you want to pick only one enhancement from the base line machine probably doubling the RAM would be the best bet I think. But you would probably be ok with just the baseline there too actually.

The doubled RAM would not really do anything specifically for MoI, it would just tend to keep things fitting all in memory and make it smoother to run multiple programs at the same time. When you fill up all your available RAM the operating system then will swap sections of RAM out to the hard disk and back in again later on, but that swapping process is generally the #1 performance killing thing that you want to avoid. At the base 4GB that might be enough that you would be ok anyway, but new features of operating systems tend to be somewhat RAM consumptive as well so that's why it can be better to focus on expanding in that area as the first choice.

- Michael