M17 + World of Warcraft

Hey folks,

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but i will try since its regarding my M17.

I got my M17 roughly a week ago and its been a good ride so far.

I modded the 9.1 drivers with mobility modder and installed it with the instructions posted by e-wrecked. Im running dual 3870's.

I'm a gamer and actually only play 1 game at the moment: World of Warcraft.

I noticed my temperature levels while playing the game stayed around 50-60 CPU and 60-70 GPU (depending where i am) with the fans at bearable noise levels (the temp levels idle are 40/45 & 50/55 cpu/gpu).

However, as soon as i go into an area where there is snow (this leads me to believe its related to white-ish areas and surroundings) my temp levels shoot to 70 CPU and 80 GPU with the fans blowing like a madman.

Now i did see some posts from others with an M17 that are playing this game, and i wondered if they encountered anything like this or had a workaround.

Looking forward to some responses.

Regards,

DHC

 

that's normal. snow usually means lots of work for the GPUs (particle effects etc), so the GPUs will generate more heat. nothing to worry about, and nothing you can change.

 

Thanks whizzo, i guess its good to know that its "normal" and wont harm my system...and bad that it cannot be prevented..though i do tend to avoid snowy areas haha .

 

whizzo is right! I realiced this with my desktop PC as well when I played wow^^ (I stopped playing bevor getting the m17^^) Snow gives even highend GPUs mutch to do^^

Greetings
Julian

 

Sorry for coming here and sneaking in a question but i thought i was appropiate considering we are talking about the subject,

I also recently got mine M17 and it's beutifull. I am as DHC a wow fan and play it daily but what happens for me is that after some playing, it's all from 5 minutes to 2 hours (thou recently its only been like 5-10 minutes) Wow freezes/stops responding and i cant do anything in the game but i can tab out and continue surfing or whatever i want to do. If i hit ctrl alt delete the comp freezes totaly.
As i mostly play wow this is disaster but after hours of googling and trixing back and forth i managed to fix it by changing my screen settings to 16bit colour from 32bit, wich also disables Aero. But it's still irritating and i dont want it this way!
Do anyone know why this happens and why reducing colour bits fixes it? Is it anything wrong with the Comp or a bug in vista maybe?

I have this problem with both the original AW graphic drivers and E-wrecks 8.12 wich i use now.

 

I had this aswell..ALOT...every 5 minutes when using stock drivers...when i switched to 9.1 i only get it sometimes...and at certain areas in the game (storm peaks). You get a black screen, with ctrl-alt-del you can open task manager and see that there is a display error in vista atixxxxx-something stopped responding and has recovered.

 

Are you running in Windowed mode or native mote?

 

Might want to add something myself to the windowed mode...WoW + 3870 (or any recent ati card according to many) cannot be played in windowed mode..mine wasnt atleast..when i switched back to native it worked fine...except for the errors above..

 

What FPS do you guys average? I have cranked everything to high, and though I have vsync on, I still drop to 40-50 in some areas. Anyone else experiencing this?

 

If i crank everything to high i even drop to 30...

 

Same here. Seems like it depends on what expansion I'm playing on too. In Thousand Needles or Mulgore I can have everything cranked and never drop below 60. In Hellfire Peninsula, I have to dial the graphics down a bit more. Now in Northrend, I have to kill the shadows completely and use 2xAA or I'm screwed. 8xAA is overkill, and I don't mind 2x. But having a small dot for a shadow kind of sucks.

 

Phew! Atleast it's not just me....

 

You manage to get WoW working on 9.1 ? lucky you, mine crashes after 30-40mins of game play and from what ive seen from google its quite common with the 9.1

Temps during playing WoW max at 83c so your temps sound about right.
At the moment im using 8xAA and full settings apart from shadows which even on the first lvl there are some areas that are really bugged and the fps drop is massive. A place in icecrown, forgot the name

Other than that on those settings it pretty much stays at 50-100 fps while you move around and around 40~ fps in 25man raids.

 

That cant be right, there are claims that WoW runs at 200+ fps at 1900x1200 in dalaran, etc. on the m17.

 

At 3am with not full settings perhaps

Depends whats the population of your server and how many people are around at that moment. And of course where you point the camera If you watch the sky sure you can get 200 fps

 

I've also seen the guy claiming outrageous framerates in WoW. There are so many factors, you almost need to tune your graphics settings for the worst case scenario. I just tune to run at a decent framerate in Northrend, and everywhere else seems to be just fine.

WoW's graphics are not very optimized either.

 

Yea same here. I just try to tune it that way so i have always be above 30-40 frames in 25mans. Dont care about the rest that much since im in a raiding guild

Shadows seem to have the most impact on the game and they are pretty much useless in many occasions and buggy. I dont really see big difference from 2xAA to 8xAA in fps so i always keep it at 8xAA.

And then its the distance, you dont really need it to be at max. The only reason i have it at max its mostly for bg's so i can check all the area around me Other than that you can put it at 3/4 without noticing any difference but you will get a decent fps boost.

 

dr. moo claims 200 fps at 1900x1200, he should get in on this thread and tell us his secret.

 

Ok lets try this one more time... Depends where you are, how many people are around you and where the camera points.

Made you an example

 

Dude, dalaran lags you where ever you go, unless your on a very low pop server. Someone saying they get 200 fps at 1900x1200 in dalaran? I dont think they ment when they looked up at the sky or at the floor or in buildings zoomed in at the wall, or no one would be complaining !

 

Doubt its possible to get 200 fps in dalaran with full settings But ow well thats what i believe

 

I think you're referring to Mr. Moo, and he's only sporting a 1440x900 LCD, if I'm not mistaken. The difference between the two LCDs is in the million pixel ballpark. So yeah, maybe those numbers are possible with his setup.

 

I'm gonna tune my video settings later tonight and let you guys know how it goes. I usually run with my shadows high with 4x AA.

As long as I'm 60+ constant, I'm a happy camper. If you ask me, I don't care about 100+ FPS in WoW because it's an RPG, and not FPS dependent like a first-person shooter.

 

Just make sure you do your tests in a proper environment. Lets say in a 5man while in fight Having 100 fps while jumping around and dropping to 20 while in fights isnt any good

 

Anything over 60, obviously, isn't even rendered due to the LCD.

 

you mean people still play WoW....

 

Yes, yes they do ryujin lol

 

I get terrific frame rates, but the server I play on is a ghost town. On weeknights I can do a /who in Dalraan on horde side and come back with maybe 8 people. My frame rates reflect that.

Also, there's SOO many other factor's that come into play with frame rates in WoW. Mods in the game can cause frame rate changes, playing wirelessly vs wired can cause frame rate changes, having a wife that's streaming the latest episode of The Bachelor over your connection while you're trying to do a 25 man raid can cause your frame rates to drop.

I'm well into the 100's anytime I'm anywhere in the game. During 25 man runs I've dropped as low as 23 FPS, but typically travel around 120-160 fps. Keep in mind the only 25's we can usually do are the Wintergrasp PVP one because that's the only time we end up getting 25 people together for anything on the server.

The one setting that I toy with is shadows. I've found the worst place for shadows for me is the basin, with all the trees in there. If it wouldn't be for all the saronite nodes in there, I'd skip the area completely!

But, like I said, I don't really have many secrets to high frame rates. I'm running 8.12 drivers, because like a previous poster stated the 9.1 and 9.2 drivers and WoW don't play nice. The WoW tech support boards aren't really giving much support on it, as there are 20-30 page posts about the 9.1 driver set and not a single blue post.

 

You tried 9.1 or 9.2 ?

9.1 drivers played WoW really smooth in contrast with 8.12. I could really see the difference between those two drivers but sadly 9.1 gave me an error after a while so it wasnt an option anymore. At the moment im waiting to see if people can mod the 9.2 without the scaling issue, hopefully they will have the same or better performance as 9.1 and without that annoying error.

 

Yes it's true I only run 1440 and my Fps have only got down to 150 that was in org and there was ALOT of PEOPLE lol I have every thing cranked and in full screen . I did hit 300 running around out side of org. Sorry for the confusion my temps have hit 80c and I idle about 45-48

I have been runnin 9.1 and I ran 9.2 both gave me good fps but I haven't ever crashed werid ?

 

Sounds to me like the laptop cannot handle 1900 resolution and the 1440 is the way to go..

 

no 1900 is the way to go....most other games can be 90% maxed out on 1900 i just was on a budget

BTW i turn the AA to x16 the highest and in mulgore with every thing i can put up i hit 80's as low just for some info

 

If you think that running the game at 1920x1200 with 60+ average frames means that it cant handle it sure go for the 1440

How can you use 16xAA i can only see x8 as an option.

 

that was really my bad 8x, it is the last one on the list that i ment. WoW isnt really my first game of choice and forgot....

 

Would have to play that game at 16xAA Probably gonna try someday and force some options from the CCC

But for now, just waiting for the 9.3's to come out to see if we can mod those successfully

 

i highly doubt it...there building on each driver and what ever they changed are proably going to build off of it, THUS more problems lol i found a 32 bit vista inf people said would work on the mob mod folder. i posted it in the 9.2 thread

 

Yea already tried that .inf a week ago when someone posted it

Even if that worked, which it didnt, it would still cause the scaling issue

 

Well i'm playing windows mode all the time. Maybe thats why wow is freezing but it works when i lower my screen colour to 16bit. I havent really tested native because i love using 2 screens and surfing the web on the other one.