Decided to test out World of Warcraft 6.2.4 on a computer I built that I never intended for World of Warcraft. But curiosity got the best of me and so I installed it to this low power consumption system to see how it would run if it could actually run it.
System Specs:
Gigabyte Socket AM1 Motherboard
Sempron 3850 Kabini Quadcore 1300Mhz 2MB Cache APU
with Radeon HD 8280 Graphics 512MB with 1507MB shared for total of 2019MB graphics memory available ( 400Mhz )
4GB DDR3 ( 2 x 2GB ) single-channel because the kabini doesnt support dual-channel 1333Mhz
90GB OCZ SSD
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS
At normal running conditions with clock at 1300Mhz for the CPU and all 4 cores active World of Warcraft ran actually very well with normal graphics settings. Frame rate was in the 25-30 range depending on what was being rendered.
I decided to set core affinity to cripple the execution of World of Warcraft down to a single core at 1300Mhz and it still continued to run pretty well. Only a small hit in the frame rate performance so the CPU with only 1 core available was acting as a bottleneck to the GPU.
Then I decided to go into the BIOS and change my multiplier to 8 from 13 which dropped the APU, CPU to 798Mhz. Started up World of Warcraft and it ran, load time was longer but once loaded it was running pretty good on all 4 cores active, but the CPU use was pretty heavy for all 4 cores with occasional fraction of a second freeze frames.
Then I set core affinity to a single 798Mhz core for WoW to run on and it still continued to run, but it took a 10 frame per second hit in graphics performance and the game was getting choppy.
Surprisingly the frame rate was about the same between running 798Mhz for all 4 cores as well as running 1 core at 1300Mhz for World of Warcraft.
Pic Below is lowest performance I could cripple World of Warcraft to for CPU at 798Mhz and a single core. Frame rate standing in place was hovering around 18 FPS.
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