I've been thinking of the list of "benchmarks" I'm going to go through with for this weekend and here's what
I've come up with:

5-Boxing World of Warcraft

CPU Usage Tests [2600K]

  • Hyper-Threading VS No Hyper-Threading
  • 3.4GHz Stock VS 4.4GHz OC

Since WoW is CPU intensive I will cycle through all the available video setting presets (Low - Ultra) on all five
clients and find where the average CPU usage lies for each one in each of those categories. I am going to throw
my custom window swapping macro into the mix as well so we can see how much of a benefit something like
this gives versus having all clients on the same settings. I believe the GTX 580 3GB GPU will not be a
bottleneck until around High/Ultra so it should initially put a lot of pressure on the CPU.

FPS/GPU Usage Tests [EVGA GTX 580 3GB]

  • Total VRAM Usage With Each Built-In Preset / My Custom Preset(s)
  • Main Window FPS / Alt Window FPS
  • SLI VS No SLI [Windowed]
  • An Attempt To Split Loads Between GPUs

I plan to head to either Stormwind or Orgrimmar during peak play times this weekend to conduct testing. Since
I've re-RaF'd I'm dealing with lower level characters and can't reach anywhere else that might be useful at the
moment. I don't feel that testing in BGs or Raids will give a good average amount of FPS results, although, it
may give results for minimum FPS in heavy situations. I would say it's a trade off between View
Distance/Environmental versus lots of Particle Density. With 50 - 100 players and NPCs in view in either major
city at peak times on Kil'jaeden, I feel that it should give enough stress on Particle Density as well as View
Distance and the environmental settings. Raids have "spikey" Particle Density hits depending on who is casting
what spell and all of that, when a city will have more of a constant flow of Particle Density.

The above tests might sound a little confusing to some of you at the moment but they make sense to me and
are a baseline for what I'll be touching on. If anyone has anything they'd like to see tested just post in this
thread and let me know (you've got 48 hours). Also, if you believe I'm completely retarded with anything I've
mentioned here, again, let me know and perhaps we can come to an agreement on what situation is best for
testing (although, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to test it out).