Alright... I upgraded. Performance about the same... WTF?

[Korporativ]

Well, I finally found a decent motherboard... went with the MSI k8N neo2 platnum with a 3000+ socket 939 Athlon 64 . I also upgraded the harddrive to a 16 meg cache SATA harddrive. Its not a raptor, but it should be good. I had been using a 2500+ athlon barton core with an NF2 chipset. I just did my clean install of windows XP and installed WoW after installing DX 9.0c etc. newest drivers, etc. ran that NVtuner thing. For some reason WoW is getting worse or roughly the same FPS on my new system as it was with the previous motherboard and harddrive. Does anyone have any suggestions? Do I need a specific processor driver ontop of my nforce chipset??

 

[Korporativ]

Another weird thing... while in windows it gives me the "safe to remove hardware" thing in the tray, and when I click on it, it says I can remove the SATA??

 

[Budman]

when you say installing DX 9.0c etc. newest drivers Did you install the Nvidia platform drivers?

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_udp_winxp_5.10

 

[Sniper82]

am betting your not gonna seem huge difference just by upgrading the CPU. Wouldn't a video card upgrade show a bigger performance increase? What kinda video card you running? Also how much memory?

 

[ssvegeta1010]

The other weird thing is just Windows recognizing that SATA drives are hot-swappable.

 

[Mesaeus]

The latest SATA drives ARE hot swappable. My Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe even came with a backplate which allows you to hook 2 SATA drives up externally. That's why you get the safely remove icon.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

At stock speed 1800mhz you won't see a big performance increase over the Barton.
But if you overclock it to 2400-2500mhz you will get a very noticible increase in performance.

 

[Korporativ]

Yes i'm running the latest platform drivers. I'm using an nvidia 6800 AGP(which is whY I needed an nforce3 ultra motherboard). I am also crashing a bit more. I dunno, its just weird that windows is giving me the hot-swap option on the OS drive.

 

[AnnoyedGrunt]

I guess your performance could be limited by other parts of your system.

For example, I run WoW with an XP1800, 512 MB RAM, and 9700pro. Running 1280x1024 and pretty much all setting maxed out (except view distance, which is about half).

My framerate is pretty good except when many people are around. Then I lag like crazy and usually get killed by dorks before I can do anything. My problem is pretty much RAM and HDD speed I think. I have new computer parts coming - A64 3200+, 1 GB RAM, X800XL, WD Raptor HDD - which should speed things up.

It's possible that you are GPU limited or RAM/HDD limited so you aren't seeing a significant difference. Also, it could by that your old processor was similar in speed to the new one, although that would surprise me a bit.

Anyhow, maybe check into the RAM amount and see if you can add some more of that.

-D'oh!