Mage shows off his booty!

Epic Christmas loot - a new motherboard, CPU and RAM.

Of course this meant it was time for a complete system rebuild. My older Core2Quad Q6600 and G965 motherboard have been aging well for years now with upgraded GPU, RAM and solid state discs. But I've been at the limit for further upgrades for a while now. I was basically as far as I could go on the old 775 socket.

I haven't noticed it too much in our raids, but with all the AOE in the new 25-man LFR I was getting some lag and lower FPS than I wanted. I run everything at ultra at 1920x1200 resolution normally, although I'm still only on DX9. I was tempted to buy a new GPU again, but with the new 7000 series GPUs coming out in the next month and then Nvidia's response coming a few months after that I figured I'd wait on that for a bit.

I'm actually pretty happy with my install.  I'm normally pretty sloppy with cabling, but I did a pretty good job this time.  (just don't look behind the back plate)  I can't tell any difference temp wise between running the CPU at stock 3.3 GHz or OC'd to 4.0 GHz.  It runs a very cool 36 degrees C under load.  I currently have it at 4.4 GHz, and I'm just starting to see temps climb to the mid-40's, although I haven't really pushed it on an extended raid yet.  Worst I've done was some PvP so far.  I'll see how it does in LFR before I push it higher. 

I don't really know how to do a good FPS comparison between new and old.  Right before I did the swap I noticed that I was running in the low 50 FPS range just flying around Org.  Now I'm sitting in the upper 70's.  It was nice to see that where I used to lag a bit at the end of running an auctioneer scan, it now runs completely smoothly.  I used to hit < 10 FPS for about 15 seconds after running a large scan. 

New Specs:

CPU: Intel i5 2500K - Quad Core 3.3 GHz OC'd to 4.4 GHz

CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus  

MotherBoard: ASRock P67 Extreme 4 Gen 3 socket 1155

RAM: AMD brand 8 GB (2x 4GB) DDR3 1600MHz 9-9-9-24 (I couldn't resist the irony of running AMD brand RAM in an Intel system - guess I'm still an AMD fan.)

GPU: Asus brand AMD 4870 1GB

System Disk: OCZ 120 GB Agility 3 solid state disc

Storage Disks: 2x 1TB Western Digital Black Edition

Optical Drive: OEM 22x DVD Super Multi (DVD+/- RW)

PSU: Corsair 850 Watt

Case: Corsair 500R mid-tower (although this thing is massive for a mid-tower - I've seen smaller full-towers)

OS: Windows 7 64-bit, Home Premium