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Kind of unfortunate to see if I had gone with an i5 750 instead of a 955 I'd be seeing more fps. Although the money I saved for the same frames in most other games leaves me happy.

WOW only uses 2 cores by default. However youc an configure it to "quasi" use more cores. you have to manually edit your config.wtf and change the variable: SET processAffinityMask "3" (3 is the default meaning 2 cores) to the following values for respective processors:

i7 Qudcore with Ht- 85
Any Quadcore chips with no HT - 15
i5 Quadcore which does not have HT as far as I know - 15
i5 Dualcore with HT- 5
Dualcore with HT- 5
Dualcore without HT - 5
AMD tricore - 7

There used to be a blue post explaining the settings and how to calculate it for different cores. But the old forums got wiped.

not a that big fan of wow, but still happy to see that they do keep in mind that people also have low end hardware too.

I'm impressed, if Chris went to all that trouble to benchmark the new expansion for a mmorpg in such great detail it can me only 2 things:
1. Chris is a closet WoW-player
2. Really bored
With that said, i really do hope to see more of these articles, albeit with a more demanding title on the bench, even if it's from a "lesser" developer/publisher combo.

PS: I do hope ppl appreciate my sense of humor

Damn fine job Mr. Angelini, the most comprehensive hardware guide i've ever seen for WoW. This will save me hours, if not days of time when talking to players about their systems. Much appreciated.

The Intel CPU scaling part was lacking...i7 980X at 3.7GHz? For WoW? Really?

And why only Corei CPUs? Where are all the Core2s? 75% of Intel users still use Core2s and 775s!

i hate you so much tom's hardware ... now i have to go buy an intel proc instead of my phenom ii x4 ... and add a dx11 board on top of it ... oh well, there goes my santa's gift

Simply astounded by the time and effort that must have went into this piece. It also makes me greatly look forward to my new Maingear desktop arriving on the 23rd just in time for Christmas. Dual OC gtx580s in sli with a corei7 FTW. Ultra everything here I come!

It's a little easier to talk about WoW since I've been playing it for way too long, but I definitely want to see us doing more comprehensive coverage of demanding titles on launch day. It's all a matter of trying to convince the software guys to give a hardware site early access to the game. That's the hard part

With hardware-accelerated cursor now enabled, OpenGL has finally become usable in WoW; was there any testing done on that? Not only does it sometimes give a boost to Nvidia cards, it's also the 'default' setting for Linux players - incidentally, the ones who were asking for the feature for a while.

Mitch, the hardware cursor was enabled for all testing. That's one of the features I wouldn't turn off unless I was having problems--none of these configs encountered any errors with it enabled.

It's worth noting, however, that Nvidia told me SLI support required hardware cursor to be enabled. It didn't seem to make a difference in getting SLI working, though. According to the company, it filed a bug report after I submitted my initial testing results a couple of weeks back and they confirmed SLI wasn't scaling.

Thanks very much for finally giving us some data to hang our hats on answering questions about WoW hardware and performance. I've long known that SLI hurt, not helped, FPS in EQ and EQ2, but got laughed at when suggesting WoW players not depend on SLI/xfire. I couldn't prove it because I had abandoned SLI by then. Vindication feels good.

I wonder if you have any info on another general statement that may not apply to WoW . . . that more than 4GB of memory doesn't help games. The three WoW PCs that I run have too many differences to prove the point, but I get inexplicable relative frame rates on an 8GB 64-bit Windows 7 machine with a 5750 compared to a 4GB 32-bit WinXP machine with a 5870. While this could be due to different Intel cpus, mobos, chipsets, etc, I keep thinking getting the OS, Ventrilo, various Logitech and Zboard drivers, Norton, etc out of WoW's address space allows WoW to run as freely as possible. Any thoughts?

That parameter doesn't exist in the two config.wtf files I have access to.

lol my poor 295 only working one of the 260 cards in it well wow newer had a to good engine and they sure hawent made the 295 sli work yet.

cpu with 6 cores and gtx580 for a game that don't look much more better than Unreal! beh! save the planet! conserve power!

The Phenom II x 6 1090t BE only consumes as much power as the Phenom II x4 955BE, so........

The number is calculated with binary addition, you can specify which cores you want WoW to use by setting the affinity mask to the binary number that represents the cores used:
core0 - 1 (2^0)
core1 - 2 (2^1)
core2 - 4 (2^2)
core3 - 8 (2^3)
core4 - 16 (2^4)
core5 - 32 (2^5)
Add these numbers up to get the affinity mask that suits the processor:
Dual core - 3 (11)
Tri core - 7 (111)
Quad core - 15 (1111)
Hexa core - 63 (111111)
Using binary numbers as boolean values for each core (right to left) will convert into the affinity mask needed to use those cores.

Add it.

I am really glad that Tom's has finally got around to giving a detailed review of WOW performance on different hardware (would of like to seen some older and lower hardware as I an many other started playing WOW on far older hardware then what was reviewed).

This game is massive and has been for years and yet every new CPU, RAM, HDD and GFX review completely ignores it (I do understand that it's hard to benchmark WOW but still something could of been worked out) it's about time Tom's works out some way to do benchmarks with it and include it.

My Phenom 945 and my ATI 5850 seem to rock along pretty well in WOW.