Bouncing FPS in WoW

Well I finally put together my PC and it runs great but when I play WoW. I play on Max setting x8 mult, everything enabled /disabled in game that will give me the best graphics.

But my problem is that my frame rates like to bounce around a lot. If I am standing in an open zone standing still my fps will go from 55-75 and sometimes drop to 38~ giving me a stutter affect. I've tried messing with all options ingame and AA on my graphics card and even a fresh game install.

Some things that I have thought of that i'm not quite sure about.

Windows XP 32 bit using 4 gigs of ram
My cpu might be over heating, I downloaded HWmonitor but i'm not quite sure what my heat should be.
An online friend said that a bad stick of ram can cause this, I will be testing it tomorrow.
My Motherboard drivers are slightly out of date. But i'm not quite sure how I should properly update them.


When I built my PC I stuck with the stock heatsink/fan to save some money until Christmas got here. The E8400 came with this thermal paste that was only three decent size strips. Don't know sense its not completely covered this could cause problems. I also ended up reusing my old XP home 32 bit OS to save some money, but now that christmas has come and gone I can afford to upgrade these things if need be.

If there is anything else that I can post. Maybe DxDiag, HWmonitor or CPU-Z Screen shots please let me know and I will have them up right away.

Also this is the link to my old thread so you can see exactly what I have. Also I ended up going with a combo deal on the CPU/MoBo and went for the E8400/Asus PQ5 Pro combo
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] s#t1874697

I forgot to add that the last pic was while I had the side panel open and a box fan blowing on it to test.

This image is after gaming for an hour with the side panel on and no box fans.

Does that count for the second image too? If that rules out my heat theory I could post some CPU-Z stats and see if i'm getting some weird readings. i will get to that tomorrow, its just to late to post Screenshot and post things now.

Bah its fine, WoW causes stutter coz its big and a lot goes on locally = a lot to process / compute or whatever.

I still get horrble stutter when im cruising through somewhere like Dragonblight with max draw distance up. Try turning off the Ground Clutter option, that helps a lot and it doesnt ruin the gaming experience.

its a mmo many ppl in one place

What notch is your draw distance set on?
Just do a little test - Start at the Nelf camp in Western Dragonblight (just south of the 2 instances), and take a flight path to the fort in East Dragonblight. That path takes you over the middle of the zone, past the temple and the massive (really really massive!) view distances on display.

I predict it will stutter most the way if draw distance is maxed, and the problem will subside as you slide draw distance down.
Just see if that helps at all, and once you get an optimum where you can do that flight path with no stutter or bearable stutter, you got your max world setting. If it does work, make sure you up the distance for any Battlegrounds though...might save your digital life

If I'm wrong ill stop harping on about it being a software issue.

Well last night I copied my WoW folder over to another hard drive and removed the Data, WTF and Interface folders so that I would have a new game. I dropped all the settings to bottom and then went out and tried doing questing a bit. My fps will sit at a constant 60 at the default 60 refresh rate instead of jumping from 55-75, but I still do get the 38~ sutters.

To be a little deeper. If I sat in one spot and jumped around moving my screen I would get the 38~ stutter effects every once and a while for about 30 seconds. Then they would go away until I moved into a new area, basically just running for 30 seconds until I had all new terrain, then the problem would start all over as I jumped around for another 30 seconds. But when you add that together running around and not sticking in the same spot for very long so my pc has to keep loading new terrain it adds up to the constant stutters I see.

Another thing I have had a problem with is that people seem to be lagging on my screen a lot latley. No matter where I am, no matter who I am looking at they will lag a little infront of me. They do not lag at the same time, but every lags if I look at them for long enough. I called my ISP and they were running some tests as I was playing. They kept saying that my connection looked good for about five minutes, then all of a sudden he says that he is starting to see problems. So I have a tech on their way to check that out now.

But why I am bringing this up is because I have no idea if it could be causing my overall problem. I sit at a 100-350 latency but it will spike inbetween those numbers while i'm playing at any point.

Ahh ok... Guess for now wait and see what the tech says about things.

I'm glad the queues have finished... when wotlk first came out, if you logged on after 7pm on an aus server there was 1500+ q (2-3 hours)... Eventually, i just logged on early n afk'd til i could go on n play lol!

Was worse with TBC. Makes ya wonder considering the userbase is apparantly growing
XP 64 is great kirvinb, if you set it up right nd have the rig to run it.

pr2thej - i was lucky when tbc came out... me and a mate had just rerolled servers/factions so least we didn't have to deal with everyone moving to OL! was good in the pre-bc areas, was deserted =D. But still got q's


wdcook - That power supply should be more then enough for your system...

If the ram was playing up, I'm pretty sure you would get lag on anything that your comp does that actually requires some effort not just the game by itself... can someone clarify that for me? lol

I dunno if drivers affect something like that... maybe pr2thej might know?