Hey guys, I'm running on an:
ATI Radeon 5870 1GB
AMD Phenom 955 II X4 Black Edition 3.2GHz
4GB RAM
1920x1080
Windows 7 64-bit

I'm hoping I can play it on at least high settings at 60fps+ but one thing is starting to worry me a little. Won't the dragons inflict a big performance hit? Imagine it, you're in the centre of a town when a huge dragon suddenly lands and starts firing well.. fire out of his mouth. With all the NPC's running around, etc etc, I'm worried the game will turn into a slideshow. Also, does this game feature DirectX 10/11? Apparently Dead Island was supposed to, but seemingly it only runs on DirectX9. Thanks.

DX11 is only to optimize the engine, no eye candy.
The dragons are not causing problems on the consoles so it's safe to assume they will be fine on the PC.

I hope you're right, I'm super worried my PC will slow down. Games like Dead Island etc are fine.

You'll be fine. Your specs are more than capable to run Skyrim well.

You'll be just fine with that setup.

Model: HP Pavilion dv7 Notebook PC
Processor: Intel? Core? i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00GHz 2.00 GHz
Installed memory (RAM): 8.00 GB
Graphics card: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6570 (1 GB RAM)
System type: 64-bit Operating System
Hard drive: 950-ish Gigabytes (900 available)

I'm just hoping that the game runs smoothly on low for me.

The dragons don't cause any hit at all...its their effects like fire and terrain destruction that might cause a 4-5 fps hit but probably nothing more. Thats how it looks on xbox at least so PC should be fine