[Kalean]

The cheapest 3850 is 130 dollars for a 256mb model. With the 512 coming in at 150, the 9600 GT can ALSO be had for 150.

You have one major flaw in your calculations, if you are comparing GPU clock speeds of a 3850 and 2600 series...that proves my point. Clock speed for gpu's are only compared in apples to apples comparisons...You can't compare two gpu's of different architectures in terms of performance via clock speed. PLUS...GPU speed means NOTHING if their isn't enough video memory for it to calculate all those textures...It will bottle neck and be held back by the lack of memory..Which is what happens when you take 256 mb cards into a 1650x1050 or 1920x1200 resolution...The ABSOLUTE maximum res I recommend for 256 mb cards is 1280x1024...no higher, at that point, the performance loss becomes huge...

Also keep in mind, this is going to be a UPDATED Farcry engine, you can't just run farcry and take off 15 frames and get an average...Farcry will not have NEARLY as much textures in terms of terrain/characters/mobs/npc's. You need to understand that MMO's have a VAST amount of textures unlike farcry, which used the same tree textures repeatedly..We are talking about TONS of armor textures, each with different colors on dyes, weapon textures, character textures for each character customization (which is MUCH more intricated now). I could go on and on...The fact is, Aion is NOT Farcry with repetitive textures...This is an MMO...Which are far more graphically demanding.

It's not for no reason that MMO's always tend to use older graphical engines compared to going a Crysis like approach going over the edge....MMO's are VERY demanding on resources when they are released, they take textures to a whole new level..and in order to compensate...They must use older engines in order to make sure the game play is smooth. Even those who spent a lot of money on a rig for Lineage 2 know what I'm talking about...it would come to a crawl during castle sieges and in town loading....256mb at those resolutions you stated is NOT enough....Now don't take what I'm saying as a insult or anything. I'm just trying to point this out for you.

In terms of your raptor comment, 10,000 rpm raptors are ideal for full world rendered MMO's. We've all probably run into scenarios where you're running down a path, then the system hiccups and freezes for 1-3 seconds, with a sudden explosion of textures popping up in the distance with a mass load of terrain, characters, and mobs. This lies in the fact that 7,200 rpm hard drive access times can't access the data quickly enough considering we are on magnetic storage technology. A 10,000 rpm raptor drive will increase the access time due to its faster rotations per minute, this will allow the hard drive to locate and pull up the files quickly, which will there by eliminate the load times in towns and scenarios as I explained above...SSD drives would be the holy grail, considering their access times, digitally stored information = no seek times =P...So the access tiles are literally nil. But for those who are on a budget and building a rig for a full world rendered MMO...A raptor drive is a tasty treat, although 7200 rpm drives are still more then capable, they just will fall into the same line of issues as I stated.

I'm actually on a 150 gb raptor right now =P...I'll never go back....But I will go to a SSD once prices come down ^_^.