The new computer arrived and I have played on it for one night. Here are a few of my observations:

1.) The OS was installed on the SSD and made the default drive. Although there wasn't any bloatware, and Office 2007 was promptly uninstalled, a large portion of the 64GB was already used. After installing WoW, I have 20GB left... I'm a bit shocked and unsure what is taking up so much space.

2.) Boot-up time is fast, but nothing mind blowing. WoW loads just as fast, but in cities there isn't that extra 2 min trying to load 5 clients at once. I have only tested this in Shat and will test in Dalaran this weekend. Other simple applications, such as internet browsing, seem to be much faster, but that could be because I'm used to my system struggling with WoW while browsing the internet.

3.) Shutting down the computer seems to take a much longer time than I'm used to. I'm not sure why or if there is a tweak I need to do. I have told the computer to not use a pagefile on the SSD, but to use one on the data drive. Defrag, prefetch, and superfetch is turned off. I have not messed with the Windows backup because I'm not sure what that really does. Also, I turned off hibernation mode which did seem to free space on my small SSD.

4.) I tried all video settings in Shat on high and it was pretty laggy. Please note that this is before I turned the maxfpsbk to 10, so the computer may have really been straining to get maximum FPS out of all clients. Although I should have tested it incrementally, instead I turned the settings to good (75%) and set my background FPS to 10. It works extremely smoothly and I haven't seen any lag since. It's amazing how much of the game I was missing playing on the lowest video settings (especially view distance). Note that I play at 1360x768 settings since I'm sitting so far back from my TV... many wouldn't dream of playing at that low of resolution so it may not be an accurate measure.

5.) While I was doing my initial testing in Shat (on high video settings) I took a look at the resource monitor. Eight processors are shown and the first two out of the eight were at full utilization while the other 6 looked low (under 25%). There were some reponses about setting the affinity in the other thread I commented on, but I want to do some research into hyperthreading and get more input before I mess with the default settings.

6.) The computer is very quiet. Between the water cooling and the SSD it's very hard to hear it over my laptop or regular noise. The biggest difference in noise is my keyboard which apparently isn't the quiet key type like my laptop.

7.) I used to experience a little bit of problem with summoning my treants. I believe this is due to HKN trying to quickly switch between each window and my computer just not being able to handle it. That problem is gone and the treants summon smoothly... it's wonderful. That's probably my favorite aspect of the new computer and I can't wait to get all 5 of my moonkins going at once. However, mouseover healing still seems to be buggy and I'm wondering what's going on. I'm going to chat with Freddie about it and hopefully get a system that works nearly 100% of the time.


I'm happy with my system and think that it will run 5 clients at enjoyable video settings without much problem. I'm getting a bit burned out on leveling which is coming at an unfortunate time... pally tanks are so damn boring that it's like work to quest, but I'm sick of running BC instances. I may just say screw it and start running 5 druids... hopefully one as a tank and one as a healer is doable in the heroic world. Although I have yet to go to Dalaran, so far RAM isn't even close to an issue. When my computer was laggy due to the high settings and not setting maximum background FPS, the used RAM was still less than 6GB. That may change when I go to Dalaran, but I can't imagine it getting anywhere near 12GB. Really I think the current bottleneck is figuring out to get all the processors working at once instead of beating the hell out of one core.