WOW Players might want to avoid SLI...

We've mentioned the lack of performance gain when using SLI in World of Warcraft before, but one of our customers has actually been crashing and/or seeing odd visual phenomenon in SLI mode, most likely due to recent nvidia driver updates. We recommend running WOW in single-card mode anyway, since it can actually run faster that way, but now you might need to do so if you're getting BSODs or weirdness.

Why the non-SLI friendly nature of WOW isn't more common knowledge is a mystery to us - it's very repeatable on multiple rigs. Maybe Blizzard has the technology to$##^^!$BLOG.SUPPRESS_WOWBOTendofline

Core i7 Overclock Speeds...

We've managed to come up with some target speeds for the i7's:

i7 920 ~3.5GHz
i7 940 ~3.7GHz
i7 965 ~3.9GHz

The 965 will exceed our target more often than the others, but we don't want to promise 4GHz when we know some people will end up with less (4.0 is such a psychologically alluring number!) The chips do run a little hotter than their Core 2 counterparts, but not dramatically so. We're seeing a shortage of our preferred CPU coolers for the i7, so for a little while we'll be using whatever we can order. Mostly we've been using the Thermatake Ultima-90 with a socket 1366 bolt-through kit. The tricky thing is finding a 1366-compatable option with a backplate that weighs less than 700 grams (heavier coolers cause shipping issues.)

Don't forget that the i7 chips use a more efficient architecture than the Core 2 series (particualrly with respect to memory bandwidth) so an i7 at 3.5GHz will outperform a Q9550 at 3.5GHz by a fair margin. Perhaps we can run a side-by-side test to see just how much...