Even Scrabble Runs Better in Vista Than WoW

The power supply and video card installation went splendidly. I had it in my head that the power supply and motherboard overlapped each other and that I was going to have to remove both. But the power supply resides well above the motherboard so popping the old one out and the new one in was a breeze. I already like this RaidMax better than my old 450 watt Antec. It’s quieter and the cables are sheathed in some sort of mesh that makes them more pliable and malleable; I shove them in place and they don’t rubber-bounce back.

The 8800 GT is a monster-long card. I barely had room to spare when I slid it in place. If you look out its back window, you’re eyeballs will be inches from the back-end of my secondary hard drive. They either need to work on shrinking these cards or adding an inch of width to cases.

Everything installed, I cranked the system up and fired up Lord of the Rings Online. I made a bee-line for the graphics settings and cranked it to the ultimate setting: ultra. My system hiccuped at first, I guess from loading all those textures. But after that, it settled down to a smooth 70 fps. The game looks incredible at its highest setting. Shadow rendering is especially outstanding. If you stand under a tree while the sun is out, the leaves cast a kaleidoscope of shadows around you rather than a single dark block.

Thoroughly satisfied, I existed out of LoTRO and started World of Warcraft. Not surprisingly, I got the same bulls*$% 25 fps I’d been getting with the 8600. More than ever I’m convinced that Vista is the culprit. Or that WoW is the culprit for not optimizing its code for Vista. Before I made the switch to Vista, WoW ran well in XP. So well, fps was never an issue for me. But the moment I transitioned to Vista, WoW started running like a PowerPoint presentation. And upgrading to an 8800 hasn’t made an appreciable improvement in frame rate. So if you’re a WoW enthusiast running XP, hold off on switching to Vista as long as you. My suspicion is that WoW will never run that well in Vista and that only Blizzard’s next MMO (either WoW II or Starcraft) will be optimized it.

As it stands, Vista has all my components listed at the highest ranking, 5.9, except for my CPU at 4.9 and my RAM at 4.5. I’m not going to replace my mobo and processor, but I am going to order 4 gigs of Kingston RAM. It’s faster than the value RAM I currently have and my 64-bit configuration should be able to take advantage of 4 full megs. In about a year, I build an entirely new system and give this computer to Wifezilla.

I just hope it has the horses to play her Scrabble game.