Here's my two cents based on my experience in beta 4

I'm running a laptop with an AMD turion ML 40, 2.2 GHZ (single core), 2GB ram and Nvidia 7900GS 512 MB, Win 7

I have the resolution set at the second to highest and have anti aliasing turned off. My machine does not like the antialiasing at all. I look at it this way, I've never been able to see the game with antialiasing turned on so I don't know what I'm missing.

It takes forever to start a new game. Initially building the world takes anywhere from 5-25 minutes, maxes out the cpu, and sometimes crashes. However once the world is built I have no problems running the game. Loading a saved games takes seconds. I've finished a game on both novice and beginner levels although the end seems kind of abrubt. In both cases I got somewhere between 600-700 turns and just suddenly got a popup that I'd won. I forget the exact wording but it seemed to me there were still other kingdoms left to conquer, spells to learn, etc. I'm writing that off to it being the beta version.

I'm by no means a hard core gamer and don't have the money to spend on a new machine right now so I'm making due with what I have. The settings I've listed above worked in beta 4 so I'm guessing they'll do for the release version.

The CPU on my machine is definitely the laggard in regards to the requirements but still seems to get the job done once the world is built. I think the rig you have should do fine. Just an aside,......my cpu is not just the laggard its really flaky,......I posted a different thread here about my issues with CPU performance. I have run the windows experience index a number of times and my cpu is consistently the lowest score on my machine coming in anywhere from 3.0 to 4.2. I tried a number of things (updating drivers, updating bios, uninstalling software, cpu-z to check clockspeed, I even cleaned out the fans and exhausts just for grins) and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to the score. While I was working on the issue the index started at 3.6 dropped to 3.0 and last night was went back to 4.2 (the original score the day I bought it 3 years ago). I had made changes between the 3.6 and 3.0 scores but did nothing else between 3.0 and last night when I ran the index and got a 4.2. Something in the back of my head tells me the cpu is going to just burn out soon. Anyone know where I can find a Turion ML 40 or 44 ? Havent found anything on Amazon or Ebay (well nothing thats reasonably priced anyway)

Now to actually be on topic for once since I'm in a relatively good mood. I think there might even be a lot of performance difference between our Gold version we get a day early and the day 0 version we update to on Tuesday.  I just wonder now if the saves will be compatible. Would suck in a way to get really far in a gold game and have to start over when you update to day 0. Won't be end of the world by any means, but most games when you update the engine it invalidates the saves.

Thanks again, everybody. Your replies have been extremely helpful and thorough and I can't wait to get the game myself. It seems that, at most, I may have some overheating issues. That said, I've never had that to a great extent in turn based games and Elemental seems more CPU hungry than GFX hungry, the latter being more responsible for FPS drops due to overheating.

Not at release. It will come later.

pretty sure i read somewhere that the devs wanted the art style so it looked good, it stood out (2 checks so far) and it was playable on a "crappy netbook"

I was wondering, how flexible is the CPU requirement for Elemental? Mine is a bit old, 1.8 Ghz Athlon64 3000+.

The rest of the PC meets the requirements, 1GB of RAM and an X1950 Pro video card which is actually very powerful for an AGP card.

As long as it can run I'm fine with it.

Brad said this in a recent interview:

"[T]his game actually has the same hardware requirements as GalCiv II because we avoided doing any bump-mapping. All games have bump-mapping these days but it’s really expensive from a hardware, CPU, and video card standpoint. But because of the game's art style we didn't have to do bump mapping so our game will actually run on a netbook. . . I actually bought a three year old Thinkpad as my demo machine to drive home the point about the game's hardware requirements. It's getting 40 - 50 frames a second."

No kidding.  Check out Civ 5's requirements.  They're insane for a turn-based game.

But that's precisely the kind of thing netbooks are intended for making your criticism perplexing.  It's a bit like criticizing a minivan because it doesn't run like a high-performance sports car.