say you wished to make a pc that could play dwarf fortress. What would you build it as?
Get a i5-2500k, a cheap mobo, few gigs of the lowest latency and fastest possible ddr3 you can afford. Getting a ddr3 speed rated ram thats higher than your mobo "supports" is perfectly fine as you will be overclocking anyways. And if not, you can usually run higher speed rated ram at lower speeds and even lower latencies.
Get a good air cooler and one of those workbench "computer frames" that just hold everything in the open so you dont have to worry about airflow. With a good air cooler, the cpu should be able to hit around 5ghz without issue. Set up the ram to the fastest possible speeds and tightest timings itll post at.
Run memtest86+ for at least 24 hours. if it runs with no issues, install a barebones, stripped windows xp install on some drive and just run DF and the tools you like. By stripped, I mean it. disable every service you wont use. disable anything from auto loading on bootup, etc.
oh, put in a cheap nvidia 9800gt or something. They are like $30 on ebay and plenty powerful enough.
You should end up with MONSTER FPS in DF no matter what size world you have or number of dwarves.
Depending on the BIOS in your mobo, you may actually be able to disable cores at the BIOS level. If you can, disable as many as you can (2 or 3) and then push the cpu clock even higher. Less heat will be generated, normally, and you might be able to go even higher on air without issue. If I'm not mistaken, it will also allow one core to handle more of the on-die cache without interference as well which should improve performance even more.
seriously, a 5-5.5ghz sandybridge i5 with some cas6 ddr3-2333 or such should net you some mind bending fps in DF no matter what.
This is what I plan on doing in a few months when I have some spare cash
I will pst my results when I do it. heh.