Here are the basics of being a Frost specced DPS death knight, stolen from the DPS Compendium thread. For more a more thorough explanation of death knight DPS, I highly reccomend you read that thread. The end of this post has some questions on Frost DPS theorycraft that should make for interesting discussion.

The spec: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

For Frost DPS, use a two handed weapon. Period. The dual-wielding tri-spec is a different thread.

Why bring a Frost DPS DK to a raid?

Horn of Winter (Str and Agi buff)
20% melee haste to the raid (essentially brings enh shaman buffs)
Decent OT ability, even when DPS specced (Lichborne, Unbreakable Armor)

Numbers to know:

Hit cap: 9%/295.11 rating
Spell hit cap: 17%/445.91
Expertise cap:21 skill/172.15 rating

These to hit/expertise caps don't include talents like Virulence and Misery or racial abilities like Draenei's Heroic Presence or any of the various racial expertise skills. The expertise cap does include Tundra Stalker (since this is the Frost DPS thread).

Spells used by Frost:

IT = Icy Touch (causes Frost Fever)
PS = Plague Strike (causes Blood Plague)
BS = Blood Strike (used to convert blood runes to death runes with the talent Blood of the North)
OB = Obliterate
HB = Howling Blast
FS = Frost Strike (uses Runic Power)

Spells not used by Frost:

The Frost DPS rotation doesn't include Death Strike or Death Coil. That's not to say you should never Death Strike (to recover health if you know your healers can't help you) or Death Coil (for instance, if you're out of melee range for Frost Strikes), just that they aren't used if you're looking to maximize your DPS.

Presence:

When DPSing, use Blood Presence. The 15% boost to damage is better than Unholy's GCD reduction.

DPS Priority:

Don't die.
100% disease uptime
Highest damage rune attack (Obliterate)
Blood Strike to convert blood runes to death runes
Frost Strike!

Rotations:

PS -> IT -> BS -> BS -> OB -> FS
PS -> IT -> OB -> OB -> FS

OR

(Blood tap on the opening rotation for a death rune)
IT -> OB -> OB -> BS -> FS
IT -> OB -> BS -> OB -> FS

During the FS section, Frost Strike until out of Runic Power. Use Rime procs to cast HB during this time as well.

The second rotation still needs some testing, but the math suggests that dropping a PS and a BS from the rotation gets an extra OB and FS strike in.

Stat ranking:

Stat (rating) Frost
1 AP 1.0000
1STR 2.3650
1HIT 2.4046 (until capped)
1APR 0.7628
1EXP 1.2453 (until capped)
1CRT 1.1894
1HASTE 0.4978
1DPS (wpn) 10.3610
Spec 17/54/0
DPS TOTAL 3152.79

Major Glyphs:

Icy Touch: The damage loss hurts us more than other specs, but the extra Runic Power is too nice to pass up.
Obliterate: This one is a no brainer.
Plague Strike: A very minor DPS boost. Feel free to swap this out for something else you find more useful.

Minor Glyphs:

Pestilence: Great for AoE situations. Good for all PVE DKs.
Horn of Winter: Reduces the cost by 10 RP. Especially nice if you don't run with an enh shaman.
Third slot: Glyph to taste.

Open questions for this thread:

• Runeforging: Cinderglacier, Razorice, or Fallen Crusader? Has anyone done any modelling with these?
  
• Should we refresh diseases before they expire? Do we lose DPS from not allowing them to tick completely?
  
• Possible 0/50/21 or 3/47/21 Gargoyle build? You get a pet ghoul but lose out on 6% dmg to Frost Fever infected mobs and 3 expertise. Does the addition of pets and longer disease timers make up for this? (I suspect not.)
  
• Obliterate vs. Howling Blast: What's the weapon damage cutoff when Obliterate scales better than Howling Blast?
  
• Why PS before IT? Glacial Rot vs. Tundra Stalker. What's the exact difference? Is it big enough to overcome the fact that you can IT from range much sooner than you can PS?
  
• How important is being hit capped (especially spell hit capped)?
  
• When do you use Empower Rune Weapon, Death Chill, and trinkets?

A few other questions I'd like to add to the pot:

Are 3 points actually needed in Runic Power Mastery? Our main RP dump being 40rp would we actually need a situation where we can spam it 3 times in a row and still end up with 10rp at the end? For that matter would FSing 3 times in a row ever really be warranted and if not why any points in RPM?

With a lot of global cooldowns being crammed into such a short time, if Rime procs is it actually beneficial to use a gcd on it? Each time its cast it sets back the next rotation by about 1 second, if you're swimming in RP already and FSing as much as possible to dump the RP are there times when you will have too many FSs in your rotation that adding a HB into the rotation would cause diseases to lapse? Would this be a noticeable dps loss? What strike would we drop for the HB?

Well, freezing fog / rime procs last 15 seconds so there's ample time to wait until you're at the RP dump phase of your rotation before using it (AoE situations nonwithstanding). Even better, wait until Deathchill is back up before using it if that's an option (again, during AoE) and use the time beforehand to set up a 'perfect' HB (perfect being FF on every mob, deathchill up, any controlable AP buffs up).

Clarification: Frost tends to use a large number of double rune abilities so there tend to be a number of points in a rotation where you can dump either RP or procs like rime.

I've updated the DPS priority list in the OP to reflect this (which is a change from the list in the DPS compendium, but not the standard rotation).

My two biggest questions at the moment have to be about the effectiveness of Cinderglacier and Razorice and whether we should let diseases tick completely before refreshing. If we should let diseases tick all the way, then I can see there being more time for 3 FSs or 2 FSs and a HB during the rune dump portion of the rotation.

I think it comes down to Icy Touch being pretty damn good all on it's own. It also does double damage when it crits. IT+PS, even at the cost of two GCDs, seems to be more DPS than one extra OB is. I could be wrong there though.

Has anyone else been playing around with a build that takes Abomination's Might? I've been having great results with variations of it. It's obviously not the right choice if enhancement shamans are often around, but that's not the case for me. The personal DPS seems comparable and the raid contribution and tanking ability skyrocket (the latter depending on specific choices, but to me Blade Barrier vs. random filler or Toughness vs. Killing Machine/RPM are no-brainers).

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft is my current build but I'm playing around with Blood of the North vs. UA/Icy Reach/Merciless Combat and Butchery vs. Bloody Strikes. It's definitely significantly tankier than it has to be, but thats how I like to play it. Depending on enhancement shamans I might even keep this build once I'm geared enough to tank.

Icy Touch is quite good when your talent spec supports it--I've seen >2k crits with after swapping to full Black Ice--but Plague Strike is... not as good and maybe worth a 400 crit at my current gear level. Now, with that said, I've definitely recorded multiple 4k+ Obliterate crits (same instance group as the previous numbers) and I'm probably wearing 'average' gear for a 73 so YMMV but probably not enough for IT/PS to outweigh OB.

Not to mention, Icy Touch is also a spell and therefore subject so spell hit/miss/resist mechanics, which are inherently worse than a melee attack's...

With AE situations the cast sequence would already be using a IT, PS, Pest, HB, BB type of rotation anyways so the rime procs would just mean you'd get a "free" OB in there. At this point the question would become is Obliterate a good use of global cooldowns. Or are we simply limited by pestilence cooldown?

Can someone point me to w/e thread involves standard raid boss armor damage reduction is involved at lvl 80 for these sorts of calculations or has that not been done yet with the new LK stuff?

As for the PS then IT or IT then PS debate, from a standpoint of just the diseases you will net a larger dps increase from casting PS before IT due to Black Ice.

Assuming really low stats of 2k AP and 150 dps 3.5 weapon you'll see numbers like (without glacier rot or tundra stalker):
Icy Touch: (227+2000x0.1)(1.3)(1.3)= 721.63 dmg before CoE/EP
Plague Strike: [(150x3.5)+(2000/14)(3.3)](0.3)+113= 411.92 dmg before armor DR

Assuming good stats for in a raid of 4k AP and 200dps 3.5 weapon:
Icy Touch: (227+4000x0.1)(1.3)(1.3)=1059.63 dmg before CoE/EP
Plague Strike: [(200x3.5)+(4000/14)(3.3)](0.3)+113= 605.85 dmg before mobs armor

So for crud stats IT>PS by a factor of 1.75. With good stats IT>PS by a factor of 1.74. Now when you factor in that killing machine might proc right before casting either PS or IT, then IT beats out PS even more. So it seems like at any gear in the foreseeable future it will be better to cast PS before IT when starting off a rotation. This of course isnt a factor if it turns out that we are always going to be refreshing diseases before they expire for max dps.

btw: both of these still apply if you are using Glyph of IT which leads us to even another discussion of: Is it possible to spec/glyph for too much RP generation?

I'm curious about a Frost / Blood hybrid spec that kurokaze touched on, although I played with it a bit and this one seems to be the most dps oriented I could find

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

although the points in DRM could lead to wasted death runes if such a thing is possible

I am curious about such a hybrid frost/blood build also. I think it would scale better and should actually be higher DPS than a pure frost build.

The reasons being that the entire build focuses on upping the damage of its most frequently used strikes - blood strike, frost strike, IT and Obliterates. So, the majority of its strikes are well supported by talents with this build. It neglects plague strike, but since that is the weakest strike for frost anyway, no amount of talents boosting it is going to make any difference.

Because it has AP and Str modifiers from the sub in blood tree. Hence, I think it will eventually scale better than a pure frost tree that goes all the way down to hungering cold. Only change I would make is the 3 points in death rune mastery. I would put them elsewhere. Maybe blade barrier so that there is a higher chance of rune strikes from parried attacks.

Oh, and one other change that can further boost blood strikes. Shift 3 points from killing machine into 2/2 endless winter and 1 pt into chilblains. This then applies a snared effect to mobs and allows gylph of bloodstrike to do 20% more damage with bloodstrikes. (Only thing is if we are talking about strictly for raiding, then I am not sure if this would work on raid bosses).

Because this build would stick to using IT, Obliterates, and blood strikes and frost strikes each 10 second rotation. There is no neccesity to have a two cycle rotation for this build because its blood strikes are well supported by talents and every bit as powerful on their own, same for the obliterates and ITs.

I'm also in doubt why we should even specc into icy talons and imp. icy talons, my guild always takes a Enhanc. Shaman, always, so i dont see the point on spend 6 points, cause as i understand Haste isn't reallythat good for a death knight anyways.

What i really would like to know with the following specc, is how much dps loss would it be if instead of 5/5 Thundra Stalker, i only use 3/5 so i can reach 3/3 in Vot3W, will the extra 4 points of expertise and 6% of str compensate for the loss of 4% damage.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Edit: some typos.