Yes the lappy was too painful to play WOW on while raiding and we are going to have another crack at heroic Sindy soon so I cracked and took the overtime at work (weekends are for wimps!) to buy a new rig.
This week those nice people at overclockers delivered me a new budget gaming PC.
- Case: Coolermaster Elite 335 Case - Black
- Power Supply: OCZ 500w II StealthXStream
- CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 Dual Core 245 2.90GHz (Socket AM3)
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA78LMT-US2H AMD 760G (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard
- RAM: OCZ Gold Low Voltage 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel
- Hard Drive: Seagate 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache
- Graphics Card: XFX ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3
- Sound: ALC888B 8-channel High Definition Audio CODEC
- Optical Drive: LG GH22NS50 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter
After a few issues with installing an OS its runs like a dream and it is nice to see WOW running at max detail rather than everything at low. I know a lot of people out there have a great time and do well on low detail settings but for me it basically sucked the enjoyment out of the game after running on a decent system. Running at 10fps in Dalaran/ 15 FPS on raids was not fun and I think would have put me at a disadvantage during Sindy.
One odd thing I encountered though in WOW was running at ultra detail the game caused a critical space error in WOW. Now after updates on Vista had finished and I tweaked the details down a bit it appears to be ok but after a bit of reading on the tech forums it appears poor old WOW has issues with high end system basically overloading the memory allocation from what I can read (caveat I am not a programmer so don't have much of an idea on this so just want the game to work reasonably well). If anyone has a bent that way a detailed explanation can be found here on the O boards
http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=13705342873&sid=1
It was vaguely reassuring to me that my lowish end gaming system was blowing WOW out of the water at high detail levels. Glad its now behaving itself though as I bought the new machine to play WOW on and get set for Cataclysm/ The Old Republic it would have been a pain if it didn't work well on the game it was bough to run.
Zetter
Oh and PS when you install Vista on a new PC and the LAN doesnt work it help to actually install the MotherBoard Drivers for the LAN as then it may work!
