For LTC gpu's are now usable. Cgminer and Reaper are capable of mining LTC on gpu's
Do they still use the CPU as well though? Basically what I am looking at is that I am going to need a CPU either way, so would it be worth it for me to get a little better of one that will help my hash rate?
cgminer only uses about 40k of memory and 1% CPU for me, regardless of whether I have it set to mine bitcoin or litecoin.
When it's mining litecoin, my GPU has almost all of it's 2 GBs of memory in use, compared to almost none of it in use when it's mining bitcoin. If the GPU had more memory, I could probably run a higher thread concurrency and get a better hash rate.