I'm interested in this thread, so here's a few comments..

- Interesting lack of difference between a 4870 and x2 4870 (does this mean two 4870 videocards or a 4870x2 videocard? which 4870.. 1GB or 512MB?).

- Sam's post is something I mentioned months ago, but it's got a few major drawbacks:
----- 24GB of DDR3 is going to cost around $2000 in RAM alone (Crucial's 3x4GB (12GB) ECC/registered module kits are $960 each), so good luck finding the memory or even a motherboard that supports ECC/registered modules without issues. (Yes, many claim 24GB support, because that's Intel's X58 spec, but the mobo doesn't have proper BIOS support for it yet.) 2x RAID0 30GB SSDs will cost under $200 and offer better performance than Velociraptors. Also, since the problem with fetching /data isn't bandwidth! It's access time, and although the ram drive will be faster, the price-performance & *hassle* isn't even close to the benefit of SSDs.. on to the hassle aspect:
----- *EVERY* time your computer is turned off or rebooted, you have to reload your ram drive with the WoW/data directory. That's why I was hoping for a new Gigabyte i-RAM drive supporting ddr2 modules and at least 16GB - battery backup while using system memory for data. Looks like the original i-RAM didn't sell well enough to encourage them to make a newer version - maybe because using a PCI slot sucks, 4GB is small, DDR1 is more expensive than DDR2, and SATA 1.5 is slower than SATA 3.0. The i-RAMBOX was an improvement, but still needed more max capacity, DDR2, and SATA 3.0.

- For the flight path, I would have picked something that flies over/near Dalaran - at least enough to pick up on the massive amount of objects/textures in the area. The primary downside of this is that the fps will be dependent on how busy Dalaran is with players at a given time.

Nice data though.. it's cool to see actual tests being done..