My goal : 1080 gaming ... w/ all video settings maxed

What is your budget?

An AMD HD6970 or Nvidia 570 would be a nice step up for your setup.

The CPU will be a bottleneck at lower resolutions, but at 1920x1080 a beefier video card should help quite a bit. Also, a video card can be carried over into a new build if you decide you need even more processing muscle.

Thanks for the reply.

I'm planning on doing more tests w/ different games. From what I've read, Fallout : New Vegas is prone to stuttering regardless of hardware.

I'm also not impressed with CrossFireX. CCC shows it enabled, but I'm not seeing much of a performance increase.

Lastly, what about buying a small SSD (like 30GB) and installing just the game there? I realize frame rates wouldn't improve, but load times / read time would be much faster. Right?

thanks again.

I totally missed that you were running in crossfire. May have to re-evaluate my earlier post.

SSD would definitely improve load times, but nothing else.

All Settings Maxed is going to take a lot todats games can eat even high end video cards for lunch and still want your CPU for a snack later, I would think you have two bottle necks your CPU and your graphics I would go a single GTX 570 or 580 (if your pockets are DEEP and a I5-750 for a CPU. for a bit more you could go I7-930 and get room to Grow to SLI later.