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World of Warcraft on an E-350 APU


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#1 SpleenBeGone

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Posted 11 January 2012 - 06:30 PM

This is an article I did a while back, and I thought it was appropriate here. I have a HTPC using an AMD E-350 APU. A very low watt setup at 18w under load. The board and chip cost me less than $100. I used this ASRock board. I added 4 GB of Kingston RAM for $21. I found it cheapest to gut an external dvd drive for the slim drive needed. Though I cannot find the exact model I used, here is a similar one. At the time, the hard drive prices were at their lowest, and I installed a 500gb 2.5" drive for under $50. All housed in this very nice Antec case with a 65w power supply, more than enough for this project. My total for the entire build, with shipping, came out to be right at $275. Overall, a very reasonable price.

Now, the first thing I did was put DOOM 3 on it, and play on a glorious 48" flat screen. It played amazingly easy on the highest settings, so I decided to up the ante a little. I installed World of Warcraft to try. Now, most people assume that since WoW is a very old game (nearing 8 years now) it'll run on most any computer. At the lowest settings, this is true, but it gets much harder to run with more eye candy enabled. On ultra settings, it will bring even the most hardcore gaming rig to it's knees in a populated city.

Here is a screenshot of the settings I used:Posted Image

As you can see, this is rated as "High" settings and full 1080p. Using these settings I managed to average 25fps, and though slightly under what is considered "playable" by most people, it still looked very nice, and was easily playable (or would have been if wireless lag wasn't so bad). In less populated areas I would easily get 35fps and higher, with my lowest being 14fps in the middle of Orgrimmar on a very horde heavy server. A playable 31fps was also achieved in most 5 man dungeons.

Overall, for the power consumption and price, this I believe is an amazing feat from such a tiny setup.
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#2 Chukkzy

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Posted 15 January 2012 - 08:28 AM

I always get low framerates in mmos... not that I play them much. :D
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#3 SpleenBeGone

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Posted 15 January 2012 - 09:18 AM

What kind of hardware are you using? MMO's are surprisingly hard on computers at anything but the lowest levels.
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#4 Chukkzy

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Posted 15 January 2012 - 03:09 PM

Oh I have an Athlon II 2.9 GHz, 4 gigs of ramand a Radeon 5770. I guess it just lags me out more than often. Not that I mind it much, I am really not an MMO person... Most MMO like game I play regularly is Minecraft. :D
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#5 SpleenBeGone

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Posted 15 January 2012 - 03:38 PM

Yeah, you should be able to get away with medium-high settings if you don't have too many addons.
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