If you do end up going with an i7 disable HyperThreading for The Witcher (just set core affinity in Task Manager). For some reason I was dropping into the 30fps', disabled hyperthreading and never went below 60fps.
Yeah, I still found it quite strange that HyperThreading was taking such a toll on the framerates. (I honestly never expected to go under 60fps with my current setup but wow was I wrong).
I was messing around today and discovered that if you have a Core i7 you are getting worse performance than you should be. I was getting 45fps outside of Vizima on the bridge and thought it to be rather strange. If you go into Task Manager, go to the Witcher process, and set the Affinity to...