Oops! Multicore FTW!

Well, I just had a lovely evening with Phè kicking some rat ass and discovering that killing 10 Reds is more challenging than 10 Rats and that I can stretch a pun too far.
After Phè logged for dinner I decided to try a performance tip I saw fly by in regional chat and set my anisotrophic filter to 2x which supposedly is good with ATI cards.

As is often the case when Vanguard is involved, this GFX engine doesn't just have quircks it runs on quirk mechanics, this experiment hung the client. When I finally got my shiny new Windows 7 desktop back I noticed something on my CPU monitor. On a side note, Windows 7 shows that Microsoft still can't make Dekstop Gadgets that don't look like shit. I find myself still using Yahoo Widgets which predate the Vista versions.

Anyhoo, I saw that one of my 8 cores was still running at 100%, so I figured there'd be a runaway VG process. Nope. It turns out that after setting it up to make screenies the way I want it, I'd never bothered to properly configure Fraps' video side and this means that every time I accidentally hit F9 I was making a full-scale dual monitor resolution video, unless I happened to be playing in FUll screen mode. As it happened tonight I'd been taping almost our entire play session :-)

I also got about 3 hours worth of Lord of the Rings and a little bit of Aion on my harddisk.
The cool thing is that apparently I can have Fraps do full-scale video without me noticing any performance loss. I love my I7 CPU :-D
The RAID1 probably helped too.