You're right about that, Gunny.  We put in a new heat pump about six months ago and my wife couldn't figure out why we weren't seeing big reductions in our electric bill right away.    (The office is nice and toasty during the winter months, though.)  My rig has two Xeon E5450s running at 3GHz per core with 12MB L2 cache per CPU.  LOTRO isn't highly multithreaded (most games aren't -- yet) and doesn't really benefit all that much, but lots of other stuff I run is and does.  In fact, I can actually do serious work or prime number hunting while the game is running full blast at max settings.  I think I'm going to pop into the Moors for a bit tomorrow at the latest.

I've got 32GB of quad-channel RAM in my dual quad-core Xeon workstation so I run LOTRO on a huge 16GB RAMdisk, which means that all of the game files are loaded into (and run from) memory.  Superb performance (no hard drive access whatsoever), and I've got a GTX 295 to crunch the graphics, but nothing can solve the horrid server-side lag we've all seen.  Now if I could just get motivated to play -- maybe later today or tomorrow I'll give it a shot.

I think the non server related fps hit we get in raid vs raid conditions are mainly from lack of CPU power.

Of course in your case with the i7 it is a non issue.

The 5xxx series of cards have hardware DX11 support which is supposedly huge improvement over DX10.

As for the best, the sky is the limit. A HD5850 is not the most expensive but still a hell of a card. One level down would be the new HD5770