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i bought one for the compute that i built a few months ago.... at first, it was working fine, but for some reason lately (not even multiboxing) my framerate has dropped drastically
i used to be able to have 2 WoWs, firefox, and iTunes up all at the same time while getting high 50s FPS on both sessions
i don't quite know the specs of my computer because my dad bought everything, but i know i have about 2gb of ram, 8600 GT, ddr 800 (whatever that is), and a 750 watt power supply
I would think an 8600 GT should have no problem with 2 sessions, I used to run 2 on less of a card than that no problem. Something else must be wrong. If you're on XP, did you recently add a monitor? There's a known issue with bad frame rates on multiple monitors in XP. Otherwise, I'd have a look at your task manager and see if there's any process that's eating up a large amount of CPU time (other than WoW of course). A good virus scan would also be a good idea if you haven't done that recently to make sure there's nothing malicious going on.
Another possibility is that your CPU fan or heat sink is clogged with dust and not cooling properly or the heat sink is not properly installed. Pentium 4 and above chips will automatically slow themselves down if they start to overheat to prevent them from burning themselves up. Once after taking off my heat sink to clean it, I failed to reinstall it properly and my computer's performance dropped dramatically until I realized what was wrong and fixed it. If your motherboard maker has any CPU temperature monitoring tools, it might be worth checking that too. The normal range depends on your chip, but I think about 70C is where most of them start to slow down.
From what I've read & heard in other threads, the 8600 is a piece of shit; this kinda backs up that claim ;p Just like 7600s weren't all that hot and 7900s were tons better, 8600s suck and 8800s are far far superior. If you can still return it, trade up =x
i have the 8600 on my main and have had no issues at all
Step 1: start deleting all that junk crap on your computer ( that ram gets eaten up, espesialy if your running vista.)
Step2: Virus scan
Step3 (optional): If your runing Vista, there are some issues with reduced framrate in certain videogames. Im not sure if WoW is one of them ( it wasnt listed) but Im sure these hotfixes wouldnt do you any harm.
Here is the link for the patches on nvidia.com
http://www.nvidia.com/object/windows..._hotfixes.html
step4: Worse case scenraio, format. It fixes almost any software problem ;)
Hope this helps!