Adventures in troubleshooting BF3 Lag

I remember thinking, when I built this desktop last year "Tog ol Boy, you are building quite the beast."

Asus ROG Gene III mATX
Intel I7 960
8GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR3 Ram
Diamond ATI 6970 2GB pciE
OCZ Agility 120GB SSD
ThermalTake Toughpower 750W

Naturally, when the latest game in my favorite series, Battlefield, hit the stores, I had it day-one. It played like crap! As an early adopter of most technologies, I accepted the risk and signed it off as bad software and would patiently wait for a patch to make the game playable. Unfortunately, I still have the video lag problems.

This video shows someone having a similar experience:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwPaUT8X9Uo

I have been reading a great many threads, posts, etc...here are some of the common and not so common things I have tried-

1. Set BF3.exe process priority to High or Real Time (task manager right click option)
   a. I didn't even know this existed in Win7, neato, but it didn't fix the issue

2. Define Processor Core Affinity for BF3 from 8 to 7...1 core(Task Manager right click) option)
   a. Holy crap...that is a cool setting...defining core priority and all...didn't work.

3. Turn off Hyper Threading (aka go to 4 physical cores only)
   a. God I love my Asus ROG Gene III, that was a super easy setting to find in the BIOS, but that wasn't the fix either

4. Update your Video drivers
   a. huh, probably should have done that first...Catalyst 12.3 is the latest right...nope 12.4 is...ok installed...not the fix as well

5. Lower your graphic settings.
   a. already turned off motion blur and vsync...these are usually the first to go with these games
   b. I hate doing this, but I feel like I am running out of options...1440x900...nope...1366x768...sorry...1024x768 (gettign desparate) no way jose...640x480 (AHHHHH MY EYES)...still laggin!

6. Try random Console commands...
   a. hmmmmmm tilde key...
      These are kinda neat
      render.drawfps 1
      render.perfoverlayvisible 1
      RenderDevice.ForceRenderAheadLimit 1 (This setting controls the number of frames prepared by the CPU before being processed by the GPU)
      RenderDevice.TrippleBufferingEnable 0
   b. interesting thread = http://forums.electronicarts.co.uk/battlefield-3-pc/1445046-bf3-performance-graph-pure-goodness.html

My next troubleshooting step...
buying a 680GTX....because I can...and I wanted a bad excuse to do so : )

In 15 days I won't be playing BF3 anyways. It is time for Diablo 3.