graphics card/processor help!

[ispano]

Stable 60 fps means stable 60 fps everywhere. The chokehold in cities is the CPU. Almost all MMOs have the same issue. When I OC those Xeons from 3.33Ghz to 4.3Ghz(high as they'll go :/) my min fps goes up. But a Sandy Bridge chip can easily out do them.

[Bahn]

Stable 60 fps means stable 60 fps everywhere. The chokehold in cities is the CPU. Almost all MMOs have the same issue. When I OC those Xeons from 3.33Ghz to 4.3Ghz(high as they'll go :/) my min fps goes up. But a Sandy Bridge chip can easily out do them.

Eh? I thought part of the reason why we were getting the crazy stuttering in cities was due to the numerous amounts of random reads that are being made from the HD to load everyone's player models. Many people have been able to mitigate this by moving their FFXIV install to a SSD, so I imagine if you were to put FFXIV on a top tier SSD or some sort of striped RAID-0 configuration on a hardware RAID controller, you can pretty much eliminate the stutters (that is the main reason for the framerate drops).

What do you think makes for better FPS with a stronger CPU in town? I know overclocking them can help a bit, but the biggest problem here is that FFXIV is supposedly either a single or dual-threaded game. I can never get the game to max out all 4 cores of my i7 965 myself. :/