http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20...charts-23.html
This is a link to a page of an older article at tomshardware that shows 3dmark does help determine cpu power... even though you have a fancy video card, the cpu still needs to be able to keep up. They used a radeon 9700 pro and 512mb ram in all the systems they compared.
I found it interesting to see how all the new cpus+m/b's compared to the old cpus+m/b's.