Low FPS in WoW

it's the vista

Actually I think it is your video card. I am using an X1650XT and still get fairly low FPS in the expansion areas. Other than that, your rig should handle it with no problem. I also ran my exact same rig with Windows XP Home and got the same thing.

What resolution are you trying to run WoW at? any AA?

I haven't played WoW in a few months but if I recall correctly, doing Raids was next to impossible even on the lowest settings at 1280x1024.

Umm... I don't think it's your hardware.

It was a few months ago but I was playing WoW with Maxed settings at 1680X1050 with the following computer.

Athlon XP 3200+
GeForce 6800 GS
1G DDR400
SB Audigy 2
XP Pro

I had virtually no slowdown or performance problems other then a bit of stuttering when Shatrath(sp?) loaded up.

It's a combination of a very weak video card and Vista. I was running Vista Ultimate with most anything that I didn't need turned off (Aero, ect...) and still had terrible issues with FPS and crashes even with an 8800 GTS SLI configuration. I'm running an X2 6000 and 4 GB of DDR2 800 as well. There's no real reason I should have had the issues, but it was a problem. I switched back to XP yesterday and it runs like a scalded dog. I get FPS that was out of reach using Vista. I have no more crashing either. Do yourself a favor and switch back to XP. Even running the underground patches on Vista that supposedly fixes everything you'll still have issues. Just wait for the SP to come out or get a better video card. Vista is a FPS killer in general.

And to the guy who thought that your 6800 wasn't as good as that 1550...you need to do your research. Your card will crunch data MUCH more efficiently than the 1550.

Probably a combination of things as stated above. Vista uses it's Aero GUI crap and places the load on your (already old, and underpowered) GPU. Do you play windowed mode perhaps? Also, Vista will eat 700MB-1GB of your Memory just idling.

That's why I disabled prefetch and superfetch (prefetch on steroids from what ive read), I might re-enable prefetch though.

**edit: posted the XP link instead of Vista link** here you go: http://www.technipages.com/article565.html

I thought superfetch was just Vista's version of prefect renamed. I don't use Vista, so I could be wrong.

Yes apps load a little slower, but I rarely use apps, home pc for gaming, work pc (**** pc with fx5200 wtf, can only play quake3) for work.. moslty.

Did I tell you Google is your friend once? lol I used to say that, can't remember where.

I have recently encountered this similar low fps problem. I have read a lot of forums and finally one thread gave me a clue for the reason. Graphics effects during an 25 man raid on a boss would require a lot of CPU processing. If your CPU is overheat (esp. Intel chips), it will protect itself from being burnt and slow down it's processing speed and thus result in low fps. Therefore, check if your CPU is overheat by installing software like PC Probe (for ASUS motherboard) and if it is the case, you have to solve the overheat problem and the low fps problem may then be gone.

For me, I found that I have CPU overheat problem right at the beginning of WOW start up =.=". So, I have reinstalled the CPU heatsink by cleaning all the dust and removing the old thermal compound and replace with new compound like Arctic Silver 5. After the treatment, even though I may still get overheat warning at the time during boss raid, the fps has greatly improved and I can play 25 man raid without any computer restart now

Hope it can help if anyone got this similar problem.

You can downgrade with a clean install. It's preferable.