[squidgyb]

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.