I did a whole bunch of testing with my rig, and came up with the #1 most important upgrade to get Star Citizen running smoothly. TL;DR;DW - Buy an SSD. My Configuration (Reference) Motherboard: ASRock Z170 Extreme 6 CPU: Intel i7 6700K @ 4.2GHz RAM: 32GB DDR4-2400 SSD: Samsung SM951 AHCI Hard DRive: 2TB Western Digital 5400RPM Graphics: Nvidia GTX 970 4GB Cooling: NZXT Kraken Water Cooling (CPU & GPU) Tested Configurations (Assume reference configuration except as noted) CPU: i5 (simulated by disabling HyperThreading in BIOS) Result: practically equal to i7 CPU: i3 (simulated by disabling 2 cores in BIOS) Result: Half the framerate of i5/i7 RAM: 16GB Result: Negligible difference RAM: 8GB Result: At times, 5fps slower Game run from mechanical HDD (page file also on HDD) Result: Some stuttering, especially when loading. Game run from mechanical HDD & 16GB RAM (page file also on HDD) Result: Marked stuttering when loading new areas, but still playable. Game run from mechanical HDD & 8GB RAM (page file also on HDD) Result St--u-t---t-------e---r------i-----n-------g. Technically, it runs, but is unplayable. Suprisingly, even with just 8GB of RAM, when the game is run from an SSD, it is pretty smooth and relatively stutter free. The best experience is with an SSD and 16+GB RAM. With a mechanical hard drive and 16 or even 32GB RAM, stuttering is evident. Conclusion: The biggest bottleneck for Star Citizen is likely going to be your hard drive. If you're not running it with an SSD, you're wrong.