I did a test (On accident but still it counts) my i7 920 Clocked at 4.3ghz, 12gb DDR3 with ATI 5970. Runs the game pretty well (Since i've finally disabled motionblur) but more onto the point.
I was doing some stress testing on my OverClock and one of the cores failed after 12h+ or so. But I decided that was good enough for me, and closed the stress test program down, loaded up MWLL and started to play. I looked down at my keyboards monitor and noticed the game seemed to be taking 4gb+ of ram, with 3 cores at 100% while one was at 65%. Scratching my head I continued to play the game thinking maybe all the players in the game was doing it, until eventually I relised something was wrong, maybe with my keyboard. I minimized the game and went to the bottom right icon bar and relised I had just shrunk the stress test into the background and not closed it.
So I was running MWLL with 60+ FPS average with only ONE core at 65-75% used, and I barley lost even a frame in FPS.
What does this prove? It proves MWLL is not a CPU heavy game FFS!!! Yes ok it was an i7, and 4.3gz but it was ONE CORE that ran winows, all the crap in the background and MWLL and it ran smooth as a babies bottom. I'm not saying a really old P4 at 3ghz is going to do as well, but it does show how little MWLL needs the CPU for. Ironically my cores are more stressed when I use 2-4 cores for MWLL than if I just use one core.
Conclution, MWLL is not that CPU depdant at all, as long as your CPU is anywhere near the 2.6-2.8ghz mark(Core Duo or better ^^) you should be fine. Would raising the CPU from 2.6 to 3ghz improve the performance in MWLL? Maybe by a couple of FPS, or in 24+ player severs with alot of missile spam.
Oh and to the guy that said the 5970 is worse than 5870, for playing MWLL, i've heard alot of people getting as good FPS as me sometimes better with the 5870. Which kinda sucks when I paid alot more money for crap all. However, I bet they can't run other games anywhere near as good as I can ^^
