Im no expert and Im currently in the process of building a new PC with playing high-end simulators (with mods and add-ons) as the objective. On DCS forum, someone posted an outstandingly profound analysis of different hardware components. You can check it here: http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=157374 It concluded that I7 improved performance. Yeah, I know: different softwares, and DCS 2.0 does benefit from multi core systems, but it also benefits from high freq CPUs and uses the CPU much more than the GPU. I would go for the i7, unlocked and effectively cooled, and I would try to get as much frecuency as possible. For extreme builds there are extreme i7s with higher L3 caches, etc. but I have no idea if the increase in cache memory has a big impact on performance.
