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Wow! So far, so good. I just got my GPU today and I've been at Tomb Raider and Bioshock Infinite for hours at maximum settings. I am not a fan of FPS games, and the only one I ever played start to finish was Turok 64, but Bioshock is very entertaining. I thought I would enjoy Tomb Raider more, but I was wrong.

StarCraft II sees absolutely no improvement, which I expected. I am still waiting on the 5160's to deliver. Diablo III is noticeably smoother, but it still streams a lot of data, presumably from the HDD or from the Internet, which creates a lot of periodic lag.

Speaking of the 5160's, before I bought them I did confirm they would work. Also, I have found this rig, which is precisely what I have, including the same exact motherboard, sporting two 5160's. That makes me feel great about the small investment:

http://stuartconnections.com/products/C ... ion18.html

Thank you guys for your great advice! I can't wait to play FC3: Blood Dragon. That game I look forward to the most.

So, I guess to answer my own question, my CPU does not plateau my GPU (or does not appear to) except in Starcraft II (which I didn't have hopes for, anyway, but thanks to your guys' recommendations I am going to improve that big time).

The CPU's arrived yesterday and I've got them popped in now. StarCraft II is finally at playable, smooth performance! I am getting minimum 22FPS and that's during loaded battles, and definitely playable. I have all the eye candy turned on for both CPU and GPU, averaging 35-45FPS.

My computer responsiveness is also much snappier. Web pages load almost instantly.

Diablo III still has quite a bit of stuttering here and there, but I think that has to do with the fact that it's frequently streaming data from the HDD or from online or something.

Again, thank you guys for your advice! Feels like a brand new machine!

Star Brood wrote:

Again, thank you guys for your advice! Feels like a brand new machine!

Hehe, that's because it basically is a brand new machine. Completely different CPU architecture!

I'm kind of envious -- there really isn't any upgrade like that for my machine. Sure, I have the highest-IPC CPU core available (for x86-64) right now, but there's something about the thrill of the upgrade...