Ok, so a logical jump here would be that peoples framerates drop in Shattrah not necessarily due to number of polygons but rather the number of textures required since you are flooded with player models which are all unique in some fashion or another... which could explain why my 256mb 7900 doesn't show me the performance I'd expect yet can still run 2 copies of wow as it's having to move textures in and out of video ram as they are needed?

Or am I way off base here...

As to the advice to upgraid mainboard, cpu and ram, there isn't a lot of "up" I can go from an x2 6000, yes, there are higher end intel chips out there, but all said and done I'd be looking at a moderate gain since the CPU doesn't seem to be the chokepoint at all. I already intend to bump up to 4gb of ram, however before I drop that cash I'll be stealing the ram from my 2nd pc to do some benchmarks.

Thanks for the contributions either way, as it's proved an interesting discussion.