Thanks for the results, have been using as reference for future purchases.
Only bummed testing did not involve the intel gulftowns (hexacores) I7-980x =(. If CPU scaling is that much of a factor, kinda surprised 990x was not on here (smaller/newer technology, 12mb cache) other than non-mainstream/cost issues (who are we kidding, these are $500+ video cards when you can run TW2 on $150 GPUs)). If people are shelling out that kind of dough to kill time, ie high quality $500+ videocards, $100+ CPU coolers, $100+ aftermarket enclosures, multiple $300+ LCDs, an unknown amount of time lost due to testing/fiddling around... what people would pay for productivity/multitasking (and a little gaming wont hurt!). I most certainly see no reason for compromise when I can justify a xxx GPU, running on my workstation.
Regardless, good to see I've invested on futureproofing (my workstation, also runs TW2, DA2, etc, just fine):
Sager 9280 laptop (X58 chipset)
Desktop I7-960 CPU in laptop form factor (upgradeable to 990X)
Nvidia GTX285 (upgradeable to 485)
12GB RAM (upgradeable to 24GB)
Operating System Drive: Raid0 intel x25 SSDs x2
Data Drive: SATA Western Digital Scorpio Blue 1tb.