For some reason I'm getting anywhere from 15-75fps with a 4850 in World of Warcraft, I would of thought that I could easily stay minimum 60fps with such a card and I've heard others doing better with lesser cards. I get better fps in bf2, fear and unrealtournament3 with everything fully maxed. Whats going on?

specs
e8400
4gb ddr2-800 5-5-5-18
ga ep35-ds3r
HD 4850

Well I do not understand this I have a 2600XT OC edition from Diamond with everything maxed out I get an average of 13-15 consistently. Well is the fps random it jumps? another thing is with drivers do you have the Use application settings checked?

Drivers are the biggest problem with ATI cards.
Try the hotfix for the latest drivers, then try successive previous versions.

yea I had some issues with 8.5 drivers then I updated to 8.6 and never had any promblems since.

Here is the strange thing about the 4850. I just bought one and I have the same processor as you. I get 60 constant will all filtering turned up. However, sometimes when I load FRAPS the FPS drops like a rock, but not all of the time. Closing FRAPS and WOW and restarting both restores FPS to normal levels. This happens in other games as well. I don't know if this is a normal FRAPS issue or not since I never used it with my Nvidia card. Are you using FRAPS for your FPS measurement?