Anywhere you have to load textures from your wow data folder (i.e. cities with lots of characters) your lag is cause by the hdd churning.

Easy to prove; go to Darlen and look at your HDD light. Light off in someplace where there are no people (look at wall) FPS is high. Turn and look at people HHD light starts blinking big time and FPS is low. See for yourself.

The only reason that your CPU is limited, if it is, is because its moveing data from the HHD to System Ram to itself to video ram. Ya I7 is super fast System/CPU/Video lanes but once the HDD gets in there everything goes downhill. By having the wow folder in system ram you take away the overhead from your cpu of moving data from HDD to SystemRam.

I doubt WoW uses the CPU for much at all, just some calculations, why do you think the CPU is pegged even with 8 clients? Lax would know better then I would though, but I think a lot of posts show people getting good results going from 4-8G ram rather then moving to I7 cpu.

Also its not that the I7 cpu is all that (see the clock speed); its that the I7 Platform is 24GByte/sec SystemRam/CPU/VideoCard which blows everything else away.

Thats not to say the I7 isnt a very excellent choice, expically when you can get 24G (can you put the whole wow folder in ram with 24G and 5 clients?); just its not the current cost effective choice. What would 24G of DDR3 ram cost lol ....

And that board I recomend has "propietary power connectors" and no audio. Still its used in a lot of servers; so it can't be bad either.