Computer specifications for FM help please

I'm thinking about building a new PC in preparation for FM13. The one I'm using now is looking very long in the tooth. Assuming FM13 uses the same resources as FM12.

What is the minimum set up that would allow me to run all leagues for up to thirty seasons and still process at a reasonable speed?

What is the minimum set up that would allow me to run sixteen leagues for up to thirty seasons at a reasonable speed?

If I only intend to use it for FM and web browsing and FM can only use 4 GB of memory should I save money by only getting 4 GB?

I'm currently using windows XP would Win 7 be better or does XP require less resources freeing up more for the programs to use?

If your main reason for the build is FM then I would suggest holding off until the spec's are released.

What I can say is go for a min 6GB triple channel or 8GB double channel RAM, I am 28 seasons into an all leagues save & FM is pushing 3GB RAM usage which means if you only have 4GB installed the game will crash at about the 20 season mark as you will not have enough spare RAM after the OS & other bits of software have taken up their allocation.

Processing speed is always a relative subject so my opinion of acceptable might not match yours but if I was to do less micromanagement & only watch key highlights I could probably run a season in around 20 hours, maybe less, on my overclocked i7-920.

The main bottleneck is definitely memory, be that either my save being stored on a HDD rather than an SSD or my RAM being PC-10600 rather than PC-12800 so if you need to don't be worried about saving a little bit on the CPU if it means you can buy faster memory & storage, you can always claw back the lost cpu performance with a modest overclock.

I still haven't bitten the bullet and got a new PC but I have been doing some reading and one thing I just found was.

"For all-round performance its big brother, the Core i7 2600K, is the top dog in Sandy Bridge land, but its eight threads of processing power are a little redundant when it comes to actual gaming. As advanced as modern titles are, there are still very few, The Witcher 2 and Football Manager 2011 aside, that actually take proper advantage of multithreaded processors."

If FM13 does take advantage of multiple threads would one of the AMD FX8 or FX6 give me the same sort of performance as the more expensive I5-3570k I'm looking at from intel?

What's your budget?

£300 £400 ish I thought id save some money by using my old case and hard drives but I will need a new PSU the demo crashed my comp and the old one seems to have been damaged by a hard restart. I'm running off an ancient one now that sounds like a rock in a blender.

Can anyone from SI confirm that FM gains performance from more cores?