Help a nub out

like to diagnose an issue concerning FPS in WOW. Currently when in an instance, or in Dalaran my fps drops to 4-12 fps, and if in a a 25 man or more raid or bg It gets so bad that i disconnect from the server al-together. Could anyone offer insight into where my issue is likely to be. thanks very much.

Gigabyte GA k8n-sli - mobo

AMD athlon 64x2 4400+ dual core

windows xp pro 64 bit

4sticks(1mb) patriot signature pc 3200 400mhz

xfx geforce 8800gt 512mb ddr3

500w power supply

I have updated the video drivers in just the last few days from xfx website. Will have to get back to you on the version.

Not sure what you mean by saturated network. There are three pc's connected to a router via cat5 cable, with a cable modem connection. Even with the other pc's off I have this same issue.

well, try the driver fromthe Nvidia website , they will be up to date for real, and you should be able to run wow pretty well with your 8800gt so there is deffinately something wrong

I will try the nvidia driver from their website later this evening and come back with the results. thanks for the responses so far

There was one point when a customer brought in his pc that was doing the very same thing. From the start though, I just completely reformatted windows and reinstalled WoW, and the most up to date drivers. It ran fine on our connection. But when he took it back to his place, he was getting very very low fps again. So I finally did a house call, and realized what the problem was. Even though he was on a 10meg cable connection, someone on his pipeline was using up litterally all of the bandwidth.

You see, the way most cable companies work with internet is a shared connection between contained areas. So for instance, you could have anywhere from 2 - 100 subscribers on your connection pipeline. People with a low subscriber count will have increadible connection speeds. But again, for instance, if say you a pipeline with even just 25 people on it, but 5 of those 25 are all running their torrents like they're going out of style, your connection speed and latency will blow very hard.

Dalaran has a ton of people in a small area so no surprise your FPS is bad there. As for raids it could be a problem if you are using add-ons, disable all your add-ons. Trying running on plain vanilla WoW.

thanks everyone for your replies. I updated the vidcard driver to the latest from nvidia.. tried wow with no addons and its same problem.
at this point I am going to try a fresh install of the game from scratch and see if that works as its the easiest thing to eliminate. I will then work on the notes from Zenthar's link and be back if none of those work.

again thanks so much

Reported.

V3nom, I've been agreeing with you more than I'd like lately. It's about time for the ancient WoW game to kick it.

Seriously though, there are 12.5 million players of this game and you can expect there to be some spillover onto big, popular community-driven sites such as tomshardware.

Funny thing is that someones opinion of an MMO game seems to have zero effect on troubleshooting hardware related questions. What is even more funny is that longtime posters on a hardware related community cant understand why someone with little experience in troubleshooting would come to this community to request help.... hmm I could be wrong but im thinking that having a hardware related question has little to do with the software being used other than as a point of reference for performance issues.

I am glad that not everyone in this community is as closed minded as the negative posters above concerning what you use your system for and some are instead interested in assisting someone in their questions when they ask for help.

The problem by the way was a bad stick of Ram.. thanks for the assistance and those that tried to help.

You mean like Tabla Rasa and Hellgate:London right? Oops...

Indeed, it doesn't.

Heh...i imagine the issues are because WoW'ers still assume the original specs on the 4 year old first release still hold true for the xpac.
Aint the case, the graphics are much better (though before anyone says it, yes there are much better looking games), as is the scope of vision.
Additionally the central focal point of the community (the City of Dalaran) is a bloody nightmare to get through even with an amazing machine due to the sheer amount of toons populating it.
Ofc its just a case of tweaking a few options - draw distance, ground clutter, shadows in most cases.
I would agree WAR is a better game, AoC really isnt a patch on WoW though.