To be honest, I don't even look at video cards much anymore.  64-bit is the way to go on the OS and an SSD.

For a given CPU surface area, there's a certain amount of heat that can be generated safely. When you go from 4 cores to 6 (or 2 to 4, or 1 to 2), you have more cores but the same total heat to work with. That tends to mean each individual core is slower. That's the issue with 4 cores to 6. (Early on with dual cores, for most games a single core was actually faster.)

The Intel CPUs are very good at seeing when cores are idle and shutting them off, then overclocking the active cores. For any load where you don't actually have six active threads, Intel CPUs tend to do better for that reason. Every game I've ever played generally falls into this category, with 4 active threads or less at once.

The beta's are a  debug version that writes out all sort of stuff to the debug.err and generates dump/zip files, these slow things down, that said the game gets pretty sluggish around turn 300 or so.

Sure *HOPE* the final version runs faster.  Performance after I play a while is flat-up unacceptable on my current rig.   (xp sp3 3gb ram, core-2-duo processor, ati 5670 512mb).

Will probably to buy new sometime in the next six months -- wait to see how the official release runs, then pepper the forums with questions about the relative importance of fast cores, many cores, ram,  graphics options, disc options, etc, etc.