1. EverQuest (the ordinal) Its at the top because it was my 1st and it was pretty awesome for what it was, when it was. 2. Star Wars Galaxies (preCU) 3. Fallen Earth They all took up a lot of my time, gave a lot of fun. I played a LOT of Eve Online, but in the end all it did was take a lot of my time, and fun, well that's for noobs right? and quit saying WoW clone..because all those so-called clones are truly EVERQUEST clones. WoW is just EQ with the rough edges sanded down. LOTRO, AoC, all of them EQ clones. EQ was the FIRST themepark, hotbar using, tank n spank, raiding, quest on a rail and grind till you puke MMO.

One additional note..this of course helped out ALL my games, but it also showed that the SWTOR client may not be all that optimized yet. That is I jumped into some other MMOs that are a LOT more graphically demanding, such as Fallen Earth, Age of Conan, and Dungeons & Dragons Online, and guess what...with the same resolution and color depth, with settings univerally jacks up..and even using anti-aliasing and antroscopic filtering, I was pulling 80-100 FPS in those games with the same setup. Now I know , not the same render engine, but SWTOR is spose to be low end as far as rendering engines go, its goal is to aim for the low-end PC, but thats does not mean give low performance on high end PCs. Also TOR is a CPU hog. Fallen Earth only eats about 25% CPU, and thats on the high side, TOR eats up 50-70% CPU on all 4 cores ALL THE TIME (and thats even after being able to throttle up) I have to wonder what TOR is doing that is so CPU intensive for a game with such basic gfx that also shewilds you from the effects of other players as a result of heavy instancing. I mean what..are they distributing the CPU load of the servers across the clients like this is SETI at Home or something? I dunno, but its a LOT of CPU activity for a game like TOR and other games that have use higher settings, use far less CPU than TOR. Optimization..still work to do there.

Throttling does not always work..and again whether or not it throttles up depends on if the threshold used by the power management profile has been reached or not. If for whatever reason the OS thinks that threshold is not met, the CPU will NOT switch to a higher P-state and will remain at the lower P-state. If throttling is working as it should, you can watch it in actions using the Windows performance monitor (access via the task manager). The P-state is shown by a solid blue line on the CPU activity monitor. If throttling if workins, you whould see the blue line rising and falling along with your CPU activity. (the blue line wont have peaks, as there are only a few P-states) but it should go up in unison with spikes in CPU activity. However, if that blue line is riding near the bottom of the graph in a flat line and never goes up, it means your CPU is in its lowest P-state and your CPU performance is being capped. anyway, if you play games, the performance profile needs to be used. Forget trying to save power on a gaming rig.

WRONG, this is why; The CPU is OBLIVIOUS to your game or application settings. All it cares about is if whatever threshold of CPU activity that has been pre-determined by the power plan is reached. If that threshold is not reached, the CPU will NOT shift up to a higher clock speed. Also, as in my case, for some reason the CPU would NEVER shift up even with LOTS of CPU activity. It was capped at the minimum even though that power plan is supposed to allow dynamic shifting of clock speed. As such, its ALWAYS running on minimum. Also Windows 7 DEFAULTS to using that power plan, so unless you alter it, its always going to run the CPU as low and as slow as it can. Its supposed to shift up when the demand is there, but obviously that does not always work. EDIT: There are ways for a program to be smart about CPU usage and ask to see what is going on but games SUCK at working with power management, and really want everything you can toss at them. Also coding apps and games to work well with power management is still a relatively new thing, that is mostly ignored. Most apps and game just make do with what the OS is willing to give them

oh my..I wonder if I stumbled upon something here. one of those rare time we can honestly blame it all on Windows LOL

Its important to clarify WHY Power Management works to save power. It makes your CPU run at lower clock speeds, that's why it saves power. Less speed, less power required, but that also means LESS PERFORMANCE. It basically makes A 3.0 ghz cpu run at like 1.8 ghz (varies based on CPU type). As such, you have less CPU..a LOT less, and it then becomes a big ol bottleneck.

No I didn't say that The GPU fan seems to be going steady with TOR running regardless of my settings..that hasn't changed. (which leads into that whole issue about TOR over-working the GPU even when the settings are low.) TOR is the only game I have that runs the GPU fan like this. THen again I run full-screen windowed all the time (if you run full-screen exclusive, then alt-tab out, then the GPU gets a break as its not doing much as it doesnt render anything when its not the exclusive to the display, but in full screen windowed, its always working)

Some more details: Shadow Quality is the real boat anchor now on my FPS. With every other setting to HIGH (inc the Anti-aliasing set to HIGH) and the shadows turned on, I can even get into the 70-80 FPS range (depending on location) If I turn BLOOM on, i go down to the 45-50 FPS range , but more than playable. Also have the grass and tree quality to max now.

Well it SHOULDN'T make your PC overheat, but no promises as it is using more power, and more power does = more heat. IF you have good cooling, not an issue. But it can be an issue for laptops

I wasn't but I will now..though my GPU fan is running non-stop which is not something I am not used to hearing. My GPU currently is running at 101c with the fan speed at 93% (though the GPU is not even close to its highest GPU clock or memory clock settings) GPU is certainly being worked..its always at 90+ % with TOR going and it still uses about 50% CPU across all 4 cores. Also noticed there are actually TWO swtor.exe processes running, one using about 26% of the CPU, the other about 17%

Here is how... While playing, I noticed that TOR was using an awful lot of CPU..in fact 58-74% of all 4 of my CPU cores. That caught my attention as no single app, game, whatever, should use that kind of CPU, and certainly NOT on a high performance system with plenty of RAM, high speed HDDs, and high speed multi-Core CPU. As it turns out the solution had NOTHING to do with tweaking game settings or my GPU's setting eithers. It had EVERYTHING to do with altering my PC's POWER MANAGEMENT settings. See, Win 7/WS2008 defaults to a power management plan it calls 'Balanced', which tries to keep the CPU from switching up to higher frequencies to save power, supposedly only switching up when the app wants more CPU. Well in my case, instead of the CPU frequency dynamically going up and down like it should, it stayed CAPPED on the LOWEST frequency. Thus the strangely high CPU usage, I was only getting the MINIMUM my quad-core CPU could offer. SO..w/o changing any game settings or GPU settings at all, I switched the Windows power plan to "High Performance" and BAM..I leapt from a solid 14-22 FPS to a solid 50-60 FPS. Anyway..the technical story is it seems SWTOR.exe actually is a multi-threaded app (38 at current count) so it can actually spread its load over all CPU cores. That silly power plan had my CPU P-state running at the minimum all the time, never dynamically adjusting like it should, and TOR simply spread the load across the CPU cores and made do. The CPU is an AMD Athlon II X4 630, and I have an Radeon 5770 PCI-E card w/ 1 GB RAM, and 6 GB of DDR3 RAM, and a pair of SATA II 1TB HDDs for reference. Anyway..pay heed to those default power plan setting, especially if you run the game on laptops, but check anyway as manufacturers mess with them extensively these days and load up their own power management apps that can kill your performance.

My 30 days does not end yet..I bought my copy at retail on Dec 24th But I I will resub because I am having fun. Period. If it becomes not fun at some point I will quit. SO I have no need to post a threadnaught on the topic