About the speed issue: With a Phenom 9500 (4x2.2 GHz) the game was pretty much unplayable slow, even 1x speed didn't work properly.

With an Intel Core i7 975 (4x3.3 GHz) the game is doing much better although I still wish for more performance (probably a simple OC would do it) as on larger maps, later into the game, I sometimes need to switch back to 1x speed.

A cheap solution probably would be an Intel 920 processor with massive OC (they seem to be good at that).

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OC = Overclocking

About the board/CPU: You might want to read up about the processors performance, especially for single core games. The reason that I did recommend that 920 is that I've seen pretty many reports of people who did speed it up to 3.6-4 GHz for gaming and that all the tests I've read before buying that 975 were pretty much saying that the 9xx series outperformes AMD processors very easily. I've also had some talks with gamers and they all recommended intels 9xx processors.

The speed difference between the 975 at 4*3.33 compared to the Phenom 9500 at 4*2.22 really is enormeous. Thus, if the processor you selected, is not giving much more power than the slight MHz difference to the Phenom suggests, I would expect that you still get a laggy game experience.

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Well I went ahead and went with my processor/motherboard. I don't have that much money with me anyway, just thought I would try out this trick I heard here about dual cores. I don't expect this game to run perfectly, but it should take care of most of the lag.