There are very few games that utilize hyperthreading. In theory, you should see comparable benchmarks i5 vs i7, maybe off by 1k or less depending on background applications running. The performance increase jumping to SLI for single monitor is not that great to be honest. SLI isn't really worth it unless you are running multiple monitors. Even then, a single GTX 680 is going to run the game fine at max settings. The visual improvement bumping up to 2560x1440 is pretty nice, but I may switch to 2 1920x1080 monitors soon. I've done triple screen gaming in the past and for a game like this it's a vast improvement. Chat windows, map and other UI junk really eat up the screen real estate and you don't see a lot of the really pretty stuff in-game going on behind it all.