Recommended system specs for largest database in three/four countries

What would it take to run such a setup? I'm thinking going down to the bottom rung of English football and then having the top two divisions from Spain, Italy and Germany. Or alternatively using one of the edited databases to bring English football down to Tier 10. What sort of machine would I need to run that? Would an i5-2500K with 8GB of RAM do the job sufficiently?

Would be well enough to run it for sure. It mostly depends on how fast you want the game to be (which imo wouldn't really be much of a problem in this case either, but other people might disagree).

i'm using an 8gb, quad core. I find that I can run most of the leagues in Europe with the top 1 or 2 divisions from each. I did try to run england to level 10 but found that with all of the extra cups (must be nearly 100) that it ran very slowly.

I think one of the issues is that FM only supports x32 machines and as such will only ever recognise that I have a max. of 3.5 gb of ram.

If FM12 has x64 support then I can see myself running the top 1-2 divisions from every league in the whole database.

FM never uses the full capacity of my processor so it must be a ram issue.

@ dibbers: it is indeed, having the same issue here

T'riffic responses, cheers lads. Hopefully 2012 will bring in 64-bit support as it'd be a shame to waste 8GB of RAM on not processing FM data! Anyone with any experience of running in in windowed mode (as I'll be setting it up on a dual monitor setup). I'm expecting a performance hit but hoping the 3D match will still be usable.

3d runs fine in windowed mode as long as you have a decent graphics card. in my experience if it works in full screen it will work in windowed. just need a hd 2nd monitor otherwise you won't be able to read the writing. make sure the resolution in preferences is lower than the max of the monitor and you should be able to see everything without having to scroll attributes.

3d runs fine in windowed mode as long as you have a decent graphics card. in my experience if it works in full screen it will work in windowed. just need a hd 2nd monitor otherwise you won't be able to read the writing. make sure the resolution in preferences is lower than the max of the monitor and you should be able to see everything without having to scroll attributes.

Much appreciated, cheers. It's a 1GB Nvidia GTX 460 so should handle FM's relatively modest graphics absolutely fine. Looking forward to, at last, having the desktop real estate to enjoy FM at the same time as using my PC!