My flying mount cost $800, and isn’t even epic

[isobelle]

Last weekend I finally hit 70 on my rogue. It’s hardly an accomplishment, but it’s done. Now I can focus on other things, like doing the exact same quests one more time on my warrior. I’ll still be taking all the plate quest rewards, just like I did on my rogue, but will only be vendoring half of them this time. The second I hit 70, I stopped the quest I was on, warmed up the ol’ hearthstone to Shit-Wrath, and was just about to portal to the UC to train when my guildie was like “gratz, what color mount did you get?”

Oh, yeah… I need one of those things, too. Now, don’t get me wrong. At this point I had about 1800 gold on my rogue. I certainly could have had more, but I’m an auction house whore and had bought a few blues on the slow climb to 70. Also, when I’m there, I don’t dick around with that ‘bid’ button. It might as well not even exist.

Anyway, I bought my mount (“Tawny”, for the curious), and proceeded to make my way to Shattrath to catch that port I had mentioned earlier. Shattrath is one of the major hubs in Outland, but god forbid they could have made something simple. Instead, Blizzard creates holes in every wall, and puts groups of NPCs in huge clumps that serve no purpose other than to create lag. You can’t buy anything from these NPCs; they don’t even offer stupid “gossip” windows. They serve two explicit purposes: to eat up frame rates, and look stupid.

The taxi flight lands, and I proceed to equip my new mount for a view of Shattrath from the sky. What I end up with is a PowerPoint slideshow of the various spires surrounding the city. My box is far from ‘bad’. I know there are probably people out there still clinging to a GeForce3, and running WoW on an overclocked Celeron or something. I’m not in the same boat. To cut all the crap, let me just give you a rundown of my specs:

Athlon 64 3800+ @ 2.76Ghz
MSI GeForce 7800GT ==> MSI GeForce 8800GTX
Asus M2N-SLI motherboard
2 Gigs of Corsair DDR2 (512x4)
Onboard Sound, but only because I finally just threw
my Audigy 4 away. Like, in the garbage can.

Flying low around Shattrath’s ‘Inner Ring’ (where you catch the taxi service), I get around 22 FPS. Yes, I was exaggerating a little bit when I said ‘slideshow’, but not much. Making sweeping turns with the camera can chug me down to 8-12, while if I limit my camera to looking straight down at the ground, it can reach 60 or so. Big deal.

I want silky panoramas of WoW from the sky, so I do what any chump with too much money in the bank does. I jump on the internet and begin to read the whoring hardware sites that proclaim that ownership of the GeForce 8800GTX is pretty much tantamount to gulping liquid ecstasy naked in a warm (vibrating) kiddy pool full of KY, while being pleasured by the entire cast of Morning Musume. I drove to the local hardware shop, and plunked down 97,000 yen (roughly $800) for this card and a new monstrous power supply.

Buying hardware is always a bad idea. At first, I try and talk myself out of it. I think of other things I could buy with the money instead. A Playstation 3. A new videocamera. A fucking dresser that’s better than the $20 plastic and particleboard piece of shit I’m using now that can’t even hold all of my socks. In the end, though, I know I’m going to buy it; I’ve already looked at the websites and seen the supposed benchmarks. Plus, if I don’t, I’ll eventually blow thru 800 dollars on just beer and crap, and won’t have anything to show for it at the end.

	I love how both MSI boards use the same image; the new one is just zoomed in a bit more. In 5 or 6 versions, the camera should be inside her left nostril. Maybe it will have passed out the back of her head by then?

The new toys come home, and I load up WoW to try and capture the essence of how pathetic my pitiful experience was just one more time. Shortly thereafter, the box is powered down, the cord is unplugged, and the old PSU is ripped from its spot. Side by side comparisons of the new and old cards do it no justice. Putting one of these things in your case feels like you’re parking a new Hummer in the little spot behind your apartment that your Tercel used to barely fit in. It’s big. It’s heavy. If you attacked someone with it, you’d win. It requires the same amount of power as four hard drives to ‘make it go’.

All this, and yet… upon updating the drivers and relaunching WoW to find myself hovering in Shattrath, I realized that I didn’t really gain… anything. Flying the same loop around the inner ring netted me the same paltry 20-something frames per second. This was a direct relaunch… I didn’t change any settings, didn’t go to another town; just updated drivers, relaunched wow, and let out a sigh of discontent.

At this point it was getting near midnight, and as much as I wanted to tweak and play, it was just time to go to bed. I had second grade classes to teach in the morning, and doing it with a lack of sleep just wasn’t an option.

Next day. A little more time to tinker. I checked the computer properties in Vista, and saw that my CPU had the lowest score in the group at 4.3. Yes. I know. Stop it. Vista sucks. The Vista drivers are beta, and only started supporting the 8800 series last week (go Nvidia). The next logical step would be to try it on XP, which I happily did. A CLEAN install of XP. Update, update, update. Patch, patch, load drivers, load WoW, update, patch, update. launch…. Same. I gained about 3 or 4 frames, but whether it was XP or Shattrath just being more empty is up in the air.

I know WoW isn’t the best platform for running benchmarks, or gauging performance, but it’s about the only game I play on the PC. In the end, I guess I just didn’t realize that WoW was that dependent on the CPU. I try and make myself feel better by saying it will run the LotRO beta better (i honestly havn't even tried it yet), or that i'll be better prepared for when Warhammer Online drops. Things like Counterstrike (which I hate and don’t play anymore) run like butter, but they kind of already did before on my 7800, so big whoop. I might load up Battlefield 2 with max settings, or download this new ‘Supreme Commander’ demo everyone is skidding their pants about, just to see how those work with it. The bottom line, however, looks like I’ll be spending another 300 bucks or so pretty soon to lift my CPU up to a respectable height to take advantage of this new card. Not doing so is a waste of the card, and things like the Playstation or Wii start to make much more sense. A sealed box doesn’t require all this hassle along with it, and devs can write their games KNOWING exactly what hardware you have in your box… there’s no fussing over middle ground to satisfy Joe over here with his Ancient GeForce 2 that still expects to be able to Main Tank BWL.

Anyway… I’ve had about two days with it, but I was hoping to be able to write this week's article with a ‘ZOMGmyNUcardRULZ’ slant to it, but the exact opposite happened. I was taking a bunch of photos of the install process etc, but ended up just getting frustrated and stopped documenting the mess about halfway through it.

The icing on the cake had to have been the Nvidia DirectX10 Tech Demos they give you on the website to run under Vista. It’s like a pathetic joke, because the Vista drivers are beta, so the whole thing has artifacts all over it and just looks like shit. Hooray! Look at what my new card is supposed to be able to do, but can’t, because the jackasses at Nvidia were apparently caught off guard by having only 5 years of beta testing Longhorn.

Ugh. I’ll follow up next week with a progress report… by then I may have a new chip, and can focus on that, but for now I’m just grumpy.

I play wow on a laptop. A crappy one at that.
I try to avoid Shattrath as much as possible these days. Then I fly I usually turn the camera looking upward, at the sky. It helps framerate a little. (Even tho the view isn't very interesting)

[Alihja]

I'm not getting Vista, DX10, or an 8800 yet. Since, there aren't even any games out which require DX10. Hopefully when there are, the 8800 series will be the top of the middle of the road.

I'll have an SLi, (that means TWO video card slots, for you "Dude, I got a Dell" people) so I'm going to be really poor after I upgrade. 8800s are power suckers as Iso knows... with two, it's going to require what I affectionately refer to as... a fuckassalmosta' GHz PSU of which (I'm told) there are only three manufacturers currently.

It's weird. My desktop lags like hell in WoW... and my little handheld Samsung Q1 works fine. Well, not like hell. More like something that is really close to hell. I'm considering getting a second 7800, installing that SLi along with the athlon 64 3700+ that I've had sitting around and running with XP a while longer.

Oh, by the way... I heard a rumor that the prices on Intel Core2Duo processors will be dropping on 4/29. Waiting for a confirmation and exact prices on that.

[isobelle]

zomg, alijha's response just got me all hot and bothered!

Yeah, I was looking for another 7800GT to hook up in SLI, but apparently I ended up with the only one ever made. I remember reading all these great reviews on them (which, oddly, I can still find on the intertrons), but looking for a mate for it was an exercise in futility. I'm sure things are going to work out for the best eventually, I'm just a 'I want it NOW' kinda guy (hence the reference to the AH bid button above).

I'm not a CPU snob or anything, but I have no interest in getting a core duo. Only for the fact that buying that 7800 forced me to future proof my mobo a bit (leaving my 478 + AGP in the dust, and stepping up to the AM2 + PCIe). I'll ride out this board for a bit longer.

r u sure it's yr gfx sys? mb the server can't update coords of all the players, npcs & alliancees fast enough...

[Atredune]

http://www.dailytech.com/NVIDIA+Rele...rticle6174.htm

You'd be surprised how many major corps are considering not supporting Vista until they really lose their XP users. Especially the AV vendors who can't get kernel access.

[Atredune]

Originally Posted by isobelle

I'm not a CPU snob or anything, but I have no interest in getting a core duo. Only for the fact that buying that 7800 forced me to future proof my mobo a bit (leaving my 478 + AGP in the dust, and stepping up to the AM2 + PCIe). I'll ride out this board for a bit longer.

http://www.dailytech.com/AMD+Announc...rticle6165.htm

It's not like the AM2 is dead.. I'd understand if you just wanted to save money since doing an upgrade for most of us is Mobo/CPU/Memory/Video Card, but the AM2 socket is still alive in well. There will be support there at least until the end Q3, if not early Q4 (least for commericial dual-core).

[Mordiceius]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

I play wow on a laptop. A crappy one at that.
I try to avoid Shattrath as much as possible these days. Then I fly I usually turn the camera looking upward, at the sky. It helps framerate a little. (Even tho the view isn't very interesting)

That's where I was three weeks ago. I was running on a laptop with a Pentium 4 and GeForce 4. I had my draw distances and all graphical settings at minimum. In Shattrath I was pulling 5FPS running around on a GOOD DAY. My new setup is pretty nice. Pretty much 60FPS everywhere. A bad day in shattrath yields about 40fps, but I only spend $1600 on this system (that's including my two 19" widescreen monitors).

[oshin]

Its probably bad design more than a machine problem, I mean those towers with the glow could have thousands and thousands of polygons in them or something. Add in alot of defunct npcs and the fact its the new alliance AND horde capital and you have a problem.

The talk of upgrading reminded me of when I couldnt go 6 months without getting a new graphics card or upgrade of some sort so i could keep up with the latest fancy games. Once wow came out with its already dated graphics my interest in one day wonder games with big overheads disappeared.
I doubt im going to bother with vista for a long time, I dont need it to play anything i want (crysis will run on xp right ?) atm, and all it will do at the moment is eat up resources with crap like transparent windows.

I just never ever buy new hardwares unless it have been at least 6 month out, to let time to dev to receive bug report and correct it.

I'll prolly won't buy vista before over a year only because I found silly to upgrade my computer who work well only to be able to run a new OS who will suck all new ressources I just bought. If it's for a video game, it's different, video game are for fun, and if you have fun, money is never wasted. OS are only a tool.

PS: I also heard about Vista not playing MP3 who don't have DRM. woot, nice way to convince me to not get Vista, mister gate.

[colekutz]

We were surprised to find a maiden's picture on such a fancy tech machine.

[Gritz]

24" iMac FTW

24-80fps

(omg Mac are teh suxors, fanboi POS macs are for grandmas and pedaphiles, etc)

but yeah, smooth as butter and stable as hell - except on the crappy Arena server :P

-Gritz

[Deafdumbandblind]

Originally Posted by colekutz

We were surprised to find a maiden's picture on such a fancy tech machine.

At last! For a second there I thought this thread would turn into one of them forums where all the nerds list their PC specs.

Thank you Colekutz for bringing that NA.com feel back into this thread.

Btw I'm running a Pentium 3.2Ghz Northbridge with 2Gb ram with a shitty GeForce FX5700 Ultra.

My mobo doesn't support PCI-E or SLi so can anyone recommend a shit-hot AGP gfx card?


....sorry, I slipped into nerd mode myself

[(Un)conscious]

Always have 40+fps... running a simple little mac...

[Balthial]

I'm running on a really crappy laptop with below minium specs and Shattrath is very, very painful. In some designer interview they talked about how the new Draenei and Blood Elf capitals were going to relieve lag by having two auction houses and two banks, then they go and put in this monster of a city, which you basically have to use, I don't know what they were thinking.

[colekutz]

Originally Posted by Deafdumbandblind

At last! For a second there I thought this thread would turn into one of them forums where all the nerds list their PC specs.

Thank you Colekutz for bringing that NA.com feel back into this thread.

Btw I'm running a Pentium 3.2Ghz Northbridge with 2Gb ram with a shitty GeForce FX5700 Ultra.

My mobo doesn't support PCI-E or SLi so can anyone recommend a shit-hot AGP gfx card?


....sorry, I slipped into nerd mode myself

We have 4 of this Dell Computer.

http://www.dell.com/content/products...=19&l=en&s=dhs

Can those here who are a tech wiz tell us if they are good and if not how to make them all better?

Thank You

[tribute]

I don't know squat about PC hardware, I just play the game (WoW) and download loads of porn...
Having a latency of about 200-300ms standard seeing as I live in Australia, lag is a way of life, especially if you're with Telstra who somehow got everybody's latency up to over 1000ms for a few hours the other day.

[Ripperjack]

They serve two explicit purposes: to eat up frame rates, and look stupid.

That's pretty much the point of most PLAYERS in WoW today!

[mven]

I finally got around to the PC upgrade a few weeks ago for VG. I was running a P4 2.4ghz w/ 1gb dual channel ddr 400 and an ATI 9600 256 mb allinwonder (how I ended up with this in my gaming box is quite a shameful story)... I would get on average 8-15 FPS in most of VG with a good deal of stuttering on the highest performance settings (i.e. the game looked like a retard drew it with crayons) @1280X1024.

I had been planning on building a sexified box since late last year and had picked up a nice case (Cooler Master Stacker 830) a decent HD (WD Raptor X 150g that was supposed to be the first of 3) and a few odds and ends like fans for the case, optical drives, etc. I decided fuck trying to build an expensive box and just threw together something inexpensive with my income tax refund using the stuff I had already picked up.

Soooo... Now I have a Core2Duo E6600, BFG 8800GTX 768mb, eVGA nVidia 680i motherboard, 2gb Buffalo Firestix DDR2 800mhz, etc. Now VG runs at like 80-100 FPS in the settings I used previously and averages around 50 fps on the highest settings everywhere except the larger towns @1600X1200. It was completely and utterly worth it. Now hopefully I will get a bonus check so I can actually pick up a sexified monitor.

Gritz, one of my friends plays WoW on his macbook and says it runs better than it did on his PC desktop. *shrug*

Deafdumbandblind, the best AGP card would probably be the Radeon x1950pro AGP for 250-300ish. There are a couple of suped up nVidia agp cards that like gainward or someone makes but they are crazy over priced. Or if you are just hardcore into nVidia you can pick up a 6800GT or 7800GS that would probably still do a pretty good number on your FX card for 180-200ish.

[tribute]

Oh and btw Iso, I paid about 8g and got my flying form, sorry that was mean...

[isobelle]

Originally Posted by Atredune

http://www.dailytech.com/AMD+Announc...rticle6165.htm

It's not like the AM2 is dead.. I'd understand if you just wanted to save money since doing an upgrade for most of us is Mobo/CPU/Memory/Video Card, but the AM2 socket is still alive in well. There will be support there at least until the end Q3, if not early Q4 (least for commericial dual-core).

oh, not at all... i'm more than happy that my board is future proofed for the time being. the AM2 is still coming into its prime, i just have to fork over a bit more money for a dualcore chip at this point. and yes, i know some benchmarks have proven that single cores are faster in some regards, but my chip is definitely the bottleneck at this point.

anyway, as a basic followup, i never should have used shattrath as a guage for performance... once i left that crap hole, i did definitely notice an improvement. within the nvidia control panel, there are ways to force 8 or 16x AA on games that don't fully support it (WoW goes to 4x), and once i left shat, i actually cranked up all the sliders to maximum draw distance (had one or two at like 66% or 75%), turned the terrain textures up (had those at low), and set the anisotropic filtering to like 8x or something.

the game looks better, and i'm noticing an increase in framrates even with the extra eye candy.

my first initial impression is to load up a game, and immediately go into doom and gloom 'zomg this was such a waste of money' mode. i'm a gemini, i love to bitch at myself over everything.

it still gets chunky flying around places like netherstorm where the draw distance just goes on and on, but in instances? yum!

i'll follow up next week with a few tips i found for squeezing extra oomph out of the card and vista... my clean XP install borked my dual boot settings, and i can't seem to figure out how i did it with bcdedit.exe last time to set it straight. i hate dual booting anyway, so i'll probably just ride out vista while they work out the kinks.

ah! one more thing... i really am curious about vanguard, and now that i have the uber card, i might go looking to see if i can find a demo / trial today.

[mven]

If they still have it on file planet I recommend downloading it from there. I have heard horror stories of people downloading it with the Sony patcher thing. It was like a 6gb download 17gb install in beta not sure what it is now.

Originally Posted by Colekutz

We have 4 of this Dell Computer.

http://www.dell.com/content/products...=19&l=en&s=dhs

Can those here who are a tech wiz tell us if they are good and if not how to make them all better?

Thank You

It would really depend on what you picked up with it. Looks like that model goes from costing 380$ up to like $2200 based on which hardware you choose. I think even with the lowest end hardware it should do okay for running WoW though I think you might encounter some issues if you tried EQ2 or Vanguard.

[Ged]

I don't know my computer too well:P

[Gouka]

Lemme derail for a moment

Small-Llama Buster of the Llama.
Gun
134-56000 damage Speed 2.70
(6700 damage per second)
+15m to all stats
+45000 Ranged Attack Power
Durability 7500/7500
Requires level 2
Proof that Llamas are uber!

134 + 56000 = 56134 / 2 = 28067 / 2.70 = 10395.2 DPS

fix it please, or I'll die a little inside...
P.S. crap minimum damage imho

on the subject: my PC sucks rectum, but I've been running WoW on max since the moment I got it, if I lag, I'll get over it. At least I'm consoled by the fact the game looks as pretty as possible.

Originally Posted by mven

If they still have it on file planet I recommend downloading it from there. I have heard horror stories of people downloading it with the Sony patcher thing. It was like a 6gb download 17gb install in beta not sure what it is now.

You can get the actual installer from here. When I grabbed it the other day I was pulling 800+ kb/s. The patch will take a little while, but it wasn't too bad.


Vanguard looks absolutely AMAZING on a good box.

[colekutz]

Originally Posted by mven

It would really depend on what you picked up with it. Looks like that model goes from costing 380$ up to like $2200 based on which hardware you choose. I think even with the lowest end hardware it should do okay for running WoW though I think you might encounter some issues if you tried EQ2 or Vanguard.

We now understand your question and have found the emails from the Dell corporation which made a confirmation of the 4 computers when ordered. A tech whiz who was also a friend assisted us in the selection. The email said this was chosen.

Base AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core 3800+
Memory 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz- 2DIMMs
Video Card 256MB NVIDIA Geforce 7300LE TurboCache
Hard Drive 160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™

[oshin]

Originally Posted by colekutz

We now understand your question and have found the emails from the Dell corporation which made a confirmation of the 4 computers when ordered. A tech whiz who was also a friend assisted us in the selection. The email said this was chosen.

Base AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core 3800+
Memory 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz- 2DIMMs
Video Card 256MB NVIDIA Geforce 7300LE TurboCache
Hard Drive 160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™

Looks alright apart from the graphics card, cards that have less 500 (i.e 7500) are generally poo, and if they have something like LE attached its even worse (L = light or some crap like that).

[mven]

Originally Posted by colekutz

We now understand your question and have found the emails from the Dell corporation which made a confirmation of the 4 computers when ordered. A tech whiz who was also a friend assisted us in the selection. The email said this was chosen.

Base AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core 3800+
Memory 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz- 2DIMMs
Video Card 256MB NVIDIA Geforce 7300LE TurboCache
Hard Drive 160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™

Yeah I am not sure if that card is PCI-Express or AGP. You could probably see a fairly decent improvement by upgrading it a bit. If it's PCI-Express then upgrading it could be pretty inexpensive. AGP cards are a bit more pricy these days as the standard is going away. I wouldn't go crazy and pick up a top of the line card as I think you would end up in the same situation ISO is in where his processor is limiting the performance increase he is seeing to a degree.

Most importantly, if all you are playing is WoW then the machine should be fine. The only real reason to upgrade a PC in my opinion is if you are dissatisfied with how it's running something you use regularly. If your performance in WoW is good then why bother until something new comes out that may require you to upgrade. If you wait, better hardware usually just becomes cheaper. So only upgrade if you feel you need it.

[Vic]

Originally Posted by mven

Yeah I am not sure if that card is PCI-Express or AGP.

It looks like all 7300LEs are PCI-E: Newegg
If you hit up Dell's site the "high end" Dimension desktops shows their 7300LE is PCI-E. As are the rest of Dell's video cards in that desktop class.

/threadjack off
Thanks isobelle, this article will save me some cash on a video card upgrade.

[colekutz]

The thought of a new egg, poached, makes us tingle.

[isobelle]

poaching is like 'barely' cooking right?

bleh. undercooked eggs are gross. over medium or scrambled FTW.

hard boiled even, and diced for egg salad sammiches... mmmmmmm

[Deafdumbandblind]

ooooommmmelleeeeetttteeeeesss....mmmmm

Originally Posted by Gritz

24" iMac FTW

24-80fps

(omg Mac are teh suxors, fanboi POS macs are for grandmas and pedaphiles, etc)

but yeah, smooth as butter and stable as hell - except on the crappy Arena server :P

-Gritz

Yeah and here I am sitting on something that cost the same amount of money and I hit 80-160 fps. Where did I go wrong?

[mven]

80-160 fps playing Mario Bros?

[colekutz]

Originally Posted by isobelle

poaching is like 'barely' cooking right?

bleh. undercooked eggs are gross. over medium or scrambled FTW.

hard boiled even, and diced for egg salad sammiches... mmmmmmm

Oh no isso!, one can poach HARD or soft, to poach is to simply boil one's egg OUTSIDE the shell into a swirled and stirred pan of water with traces of vinegar.

Perhaps a past dine has been on eggs benedict which would have been a clandestine introduction to eggs that have been poached.

[WeEatDeadPeople]

My pc is over a year old and similar to you, Something is very wrong =P

I had a 5.3 cpu score and that was far and away my lowest.
I have an AMD x2 4200+ running at 2.65ghz (took it down a little.. supcom was being weird )
2 7200RPM drives in raid 0
and 2 gigs of OCZ ram @ 265.

I got 5.3,5.9,5.9,5.9.

Havent upgraded anything since I put it together... Something in your bios is seriously wacked

[WeEatDeadPeople]

As for vista, used it for a month or two, dont like, will not use.

DX10 isnt going to do anything unless you have a DX10 card. I have two 7800GTs in sli and im not ready to throw them away yet.

Memory usage is like 2-3x XP. For most people who play shit like wow... your gonna be playing wow, and browsing... and XP certainly does that better.

plate quest rewards are worth less than mail or leather nowadays, if you vender them.
had to get that off my chest, no one knows it