I bolted the Zerotherm BTF90 CPU cooler to the motherboard, and Alar booted up and stayed up. CPU temperature is locked at 43°C forever.
VISTA installed itself without even asking me how to partition the hard drive, good thing I didn't care. It found the network and all the OS updates, and some of the chipset drivers. It left me with nothing to do but to hunt down and turn off an annoying "account security" feature that brought up a confirmation window every time I executed a program. There are many obscure features to the directory structure and system utilities, but to play WoW, I don't need to know.
I copied over the World of Warcraft directory from Medivh into the Program Files(x86) directory on Alar. My bank alt on Xendivious told me that the 3 Hour Blackout was over and Stormrage was up, so I clicked the Launcher icon, and to my surprise, WoW executed just as it did on Medivh. WoW doesn't need registry entries, apparently.
I am accustomed to running with all video settings maxed except shadow, so I ran out of the Aldor bank and maxed shadow detail. Nothing much happened, either to the detail of the shadows, or the frame rate, which was about 40 fps. Setting shadow detail higher than the first click froze my previous machine, so this was a noticeable improvement. Frame rates varied from 35 to 50 fps as I moved around. It felt like pre-3.0 Shatt: no stuttering, no critical errors. Shatt becomes a ghost town in 30 hours, so we won't persue this further.
Trolls in trade chat were howling about free PvP epics, so I went to Champion's Hall to check it out. Lieutenant Tristia was buried in the thickest mob that I have ever seen, kicking and biting for a free Guardian's Band of Dominance. Latency was up to 200 ms, a bit high, but frame rates held at 30 - 35 fps. This bodes well for world PvP in the future. I won't have a chance to test the system in a raid before the expansion.
GPU temperatures range from 40°C while doing nothing to more than 50°C under load. The cooling fan kicks on at 42°C and its velocity, and noise, increase with temperature. Although the system has space and power for another video card, there is no way I could tolerate the noise from another GPU cooling fan, even if a Crossfire setup provided better performance.
Long term stability, and performance in raiding, remain to be seen but Alar has made a good start, just in time for the expansion.
VISTA installed itself without even asking me how to partition the hard drive, good thing I didn't care. It found the network and all the OS updates, and some of the chipset drivers. It left me with nothing to do but to hunt down and turn off an annoying "account security" feature that brought up a confirmation window every time I executed a program. There are many obscure features to the directory structure and system utilities, but to play WoW, I don't need to know.
I copied over the World of Warcraft directory from Medivh into the Program Files(x86) directory on Alar. My bank alt on Xendivious told me that the 3 Hour Blackout was over and Stormrage was up, so I clicked the Launcher icon, and to my surprise, WoW executed just as it did on Medivh. WoW doesn't need registry entries, apparently.
I am accustomed to running with all video settings maxed except shadow, so I ran out of the Aldor bank and maxed shadow detail. Nothing much happened, either to the detail of the shadows, or the frame rate, which was about 40 fps. Setting shadow detail higher than the first click froze my previous machine, so this was a noticeable improvement. Frame rates varied from 35 to 50 fps as I moved around. It felt like pre-3.0 Shatt: no stuttering, no critical errors. Shatt becomes a ghost town in 30 hours, so we won't persue this further.
Trolls in trade chat were howling about free PvP epics, so I went to Champion's Hall to check it out. Lieutenant Tristia was buried in the thickest mob that I have ever seen, kicking and biting for a free Guardian's Band of Dominance. Latency was up to 200 ms, a bit high, but frame rates held at 30 - 35 fps. This bodes well for world PvP in the future. I won't have a chance to test the system in a raid before the expansion.
GPU temperatures range from 40°C while doing nothing to more than 50°C under load. The cooling fan kicks on at 42°C and its velocity, and noise, increase with temperature. Although the system has space and power for another video card, there is no way I could tolerate the noise from another GPU cooling fan, even if a Crossfire setup provided better performance.
Long term stability, and performance in raiding, remain to be seen but Alar has made a good start, just in time for the expansion.
![[Image: spangles_sig_3.jpg]](https://home.comcast.net/~swesson5/spangles_sig_3.jpg)