some very dodge reasoning above in some posts. Anyway.
1. At 1920x1200 CPU bottleneck is not so prevalent, however given that you're using A K8 CPU and not a B3 Phenom X4 for instance it would be best to balance out your system before the VGA card. You will lose performance on that CPU with either card unless you're running 4XAA at that res in which case neither of those cards would cope with Crysis at Full tilt (DX10) anyway.
2. Crysis isn't made to be faster on NVIDIA cards, NVIDIA cards have stronger stream processors but fewwer than R700 and more texture samplers. Yes 4870X2 has twice of everything, but Crossfire and SLI have data duplication and overhead for multi GPU mode.
3. Don't hold your breath for Core i7, I've been using this for a number of days now on the Asus P6T-Deluxe and while synthetic and game performance is good, the price for just mobo and CPU change will cost you more than what you would spend on 4870X2.
4. 4870X2 is in general much faster than GTX280, in fact its pointelss to compare, however GTX280 has Physics support (quiet a number of games support it and more to follow. Havoc is losing ground to custom libraries as it hasn't had a big stellar triple A title in a very long time), hardware video encoding, greater and better compatibility. Runs cooler, lower power consumption as well. As an everyday card GTX280 is by far easier to live with no question even though 4870X2 is the faster card.
5. Investment into a VGA card of this price on your current system would be a bad idea. Unfortunately a big screen needs to match the rig and that's not the situation right now. Depending on motherboard maybe get a Phenom X4 9850 BE or 9950 if its not that much more, then get two 4850 cards for CFX or if you have an SLi board get two 9800GTX cards
1. At 1920x1200 CPU bottleneck is not so prevalent, however given that you're using A K8 CPU and not a B3 Phenom X4 for instance it would be best to balance out your system before the VGA card. You will lose performance on that CPU with either card unless you're running 4XAA at that res in which case neither of those cards would cope with Crysis at Full tilt (DX10) anyway.
2. Crysis isn't made to be faster on NVIDIA cards, NVIDIA cards have stronger stream processors but fewwer than R700 and more texture samplers. Yes 4870X2 has twice of everything, but Crossfire and SLI have data duplication and overhead for multi GPU mode.
3. Don't hold your breath for Core i7, I've been using this for a number of days now on the Asus P6T-Deluxe and while synthetic and game performance is good, the price for just mobo and CPU change will cost you more than what you would spend on 4870X2.
4. 4870X2 is in general much faster than GTX280, in fact its pointelss to compare, however GTX280 has Physics support (quiet a number of games support it and more to follow. Havoc is losing ground to custom libraries as it hasn't had a big stellar triple A title in a very long time), hardware video encoding, greater and better compatibility. Runs cooler, lower power consumption as well. As an everyday card GTX280 is by far easier to live with no question even though 4870X2 is the faster card.
5. Investment into a VGA card of this price on your current system would be a bad idea. Unfortunately a big screen needs to match the rig and that's not the situation right now. Depending on motherboard maybe get a Phenom X4 9850 BE or 9950 if its not that much more, then get two 4850 cards for CFX or if you have an SLi board get two 9800GTX cards