Phenom II X6 VS. Quad-Core i7-930

[Ualaa]

Certain aspects of warcraft will take advantage of multiple processors now; a patch a few months back mentioned this, along with a Config.wtf setting which can disable this new default behavior.

For the most part, if you have one (actual or logical) cores or if you have several, the game only takes advantage of the first one.

I personally get slightly better performance, when I have four physical cores on warcraft and none of the logical cores on warcraft. The difference is slight, but not using logical cores is a performance improvement over using the logical cores too.

I also have all my physical cores on all instances of warcraft that are running, as in allow Windows to manage which processor is used for which instance of the game at any given time, which again is a slight improvement over setting a given core to a given instance of warcraft.

I'd go with the i7, and assign all physical cores to all instances of warcraft.

[Tim]

I remember hearing somewhere that WoW still can only use 2 cpus. So if you were to assign it 4, whether in windows or in WoW, it still will only use 2.

[burningforce]

Originally Posted by Tim

I remember hearing somewhere that WoW still can only use 2 cpus. So if you were to assign it 4, whether in windows or in WoW, it still will only use 2.

i believe that limit is gone and blizz made it so you can offload wow onto all cpu cores to enhance performance rather then having core 0 being used to %75+ or more (depending on cpu) of its processing power.

This allows windows operating system to not override these settings when in wow.

if you are not sure if it is enabled or not, back up your "config.wtf" file in the "WTF" folder of your WoW folder and open up the config.wtf on notepad and see if these value(s) are in there.

(i got this from the wow forums, should not be anything bad, but your milage may vary)

Dual-cores:

SET processAffinityMask "3"

Tri-cores:

SET processAffinityMask "7"

Quad-cores & I5s:

SET processAffinityMask "15"

I7s:

SET processAffinityMask "255"