Yes,it's fast,specially when Overclocked.I usually had 18 fps before the latest oficial patch with a combination of low/med and high settings.
Now,with SSAO disabled,I put everything to max available settings and I have 28/36 fps over london,at med altitude at very low altitude when looking to the buildings and doing hard turns ocasionaly downing to 22.
Over minor cities I can dogfight intercept missions at med altitude 45/65 fps, downing to 28/33 at the same low altitude conditions I described.
Dogfighting over the channel is at 70/119 fps.
Even so,I can't reccomend system upgrade to you,because your machine it's a strong one and probably the cores of our CPU are very far from being reallly stressed because of no optimized code.
Probably we will have further optimization down the road yet.

Actually the answer believe it or not, is NO.
The biggest difference in with the sandy bridge processors is the efficiency for amount of power used, in other words they use a lot less of it and get the same thing done. But as far as speed goes, 3.8ghz is 3.8ghz.
Now that efficiency may do the trick, as my processor might be doing more at the lower speed. Even though the game doesn't support multi threading, it still does help, as the operating system in the background does.
Another thing is my power supply, which has these capacitors at the ends of the cabling to prevent over/under current fluctuations may be providing my GPU a more clean power, but I can't really see that making that much difference. In the end I fear those might be more trouble than worth, if they go out its RTM with the entire PSU.

VIDEO:
Here is a 30 second clip made with fraps, which for some reason my fraps reported FPS didn't show up on youtube but its in the avi file.
Working on another video to upload from above london. It will be another couple of days...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrHDZ...layer_embedded

Yeah - in theory, i7 9xx vs Sandy Bridge 2xxx should be pretty much identical clock for clock. The bonus with the new SBs is that they overclock higher, so you get that extra 500MHz or so when you overclock.

I'm considering the same here - though I'll either upgrade the motheboard/cpu to a sandy Bridge, or "invest" in a watercooling setup to push the 920 I have to 4.4-4.5GHz (already on 4GHz on air).

Only today I decided to take a trip into London and pick up a 3Gb GTX 580, to swap out the standard GTX 580 I had and sell off the standard on on ebay - I thought there'd be a bit more of a pronounced effect on the stuttering over London (which isn't awful by any standard) but it's made little to no difference - VRAM usage on the old 580 was getting right up to 1500Mb, so I figured the extra VRAM would make a difference. VRAM usage with the 3Gb card has been up to 1.7Gb, but I've not had much chance to do any long flights yet to see if it'll use the full 3Gb.

Optimisations are the best hope for framerates and/or stuttering issues methinks, until we get some beefier CPUs in a year or two. Top of the range, right now, is a 4.6+GHz Sandy Bridge with a GTX 580, I think.

e: I should add - I have a ram drive setup on this PC for CloD as well - 24Gb RAM total, with various partitions for windows files/CloD/fancy cache. A few moments setup on startup (which happens relatively infrequently) and the difference in loading times and general operation is pretty amazing.

The 2600k intel 3.4ghz can be overclocked to 5.2ghz on air cooling alone with the asus 1155 extreme motherboard.

That's if you're bloody lucky with the chip, and don't mind putting 1.5v through it 24/7.

The comparison of ~500MHz overclocking overhead on the 2600 still holds true - 5.2GHz on air is an extreme case - 4.4-4.5 is possible on air with a 920; provided you feed it enough voltage and turn HT off and have an NH-14 or Silver Arrow.

Still - I'm tempted by an upgrade to a 2600k. It was only a few months ago that I jumped to i7 in the first place, though.

i spent some time testing using the black death track. latest beta, all game settings maxxed except no ssao or v sync. note: i dont get tearing with v sync off, so i see no reason to use it.

1st i ran it at my cpu stock setting of 3.7 ghz, then i ran it with a OC at 4.5 ghz.

my results were no change in my minimum fps, both runs were 18 fps and my average using the OC was only 2 fps higher than no OC, 68 vs 66 fps.

this pretty much confirms that COD doesnt use all the available cpu power to its greatest extent and that throwing more ghz at it won't get you anywhere, at least not at this point in time.

my system

I5 2500k
asus p8p67 deluxe
gtx 570 super OC
8 gigs 1600 ram

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lajZi-JAFXA

They easily overclock to 5.2 with air cooling alone, and in this set up there isn't even any extra cooling fans. I've read further into the matter while building my computer and from what I can tell it's really stable, especially compared to previous setups due to the new EFI BIOS. The asus motherboards with EFI go one step further and if set on "auto" mode they will back off if it senses problems, WHILE windows is running live.

nice oc vid!!

ok so how do we watch/use this blackdeath vid for testing our specs?

go to extras in game. select tracks, then double click the black death track to run it.

note: you may have to 1st move it from the soft club folder/records in documents, to the games records folder. at least thats what i had to do.

Well colour me impressed. :eek:

Still, ~£280 for the motherboard, £220 for the cpu... How do I explain this one to the missus? :grin:

e: notwithstanding the point patrat made though - unless we get more significant optimisations in the code, it's probable that ~1.2Ghz on top of what I have now wouldn't make any difference in any case :(