Both my fiancee and I play WoW, and she's been using my secondary computer since hers crapped out when she moved in. However, even though her computer (tornado) is older than mine (storm), she is able to turn on more options in WoW than I am. I have to turn down most of the settings to be able to play without severe lag issues.

I just benchmarked both systems with 3dmark 2003 (these are older computers), and hers scored 1470 while mine scored 1585. Here are the 3dmark system info pages (only seems to be viewable in IE):

Storm
Tornado

As you can see, they both have a GeForce 5500, but storm is running at AGP 8x and tornado is running at AGP 4x. Storm is running at a 133 MHz clock, tornado is running at 100 MHz. Storm has a 1M L2 cache, tornado has a 256KB L2 cache. Storm has a 2.4GHz with 1GB RAM, tornado has a 1.8GHz with 784MB RAM.

I don't see why storm isn't strongly outperforming tornado, both in benchmarks and in WoW. Can someone suggest what I should take a look at?

Take a look at what other programs are running down by the clock.
Defrag the drive, scan for spyware. Video drivers the same on both computers? Both computers running same resolution in WoW?

I've closed all the apps in the systray before running the benchmark, outside of Norton (which I disabled) and my UPS software (which is also on her computer).

I'm defragging the drive now, but we've both reinstalled recently (me to get rid of an adware app, and her because her old 40GB hard drive died) so everything should be pretty clean. In my case I'm sure the fragmentation was a result of copying files back over after reinstalling and forgetting to auto-schedule SpeedDisk. This issue existed before the reinstall so I can safely say fragmentation is not the main cause of the problem. I'll rebench it and update after it's complete.

We're also both running the same nVidia drivers... 91.47. She does run WoW at 1024x768, I run it at 1152x864. (I would much rather run it at 1440x1050 which is the max on my LCD, but it just can't handle it.)

After defrag, 1586 3DMarks (again, '03 version).

woa woa...did you say lcd?
is she on a crt?

i don't play wow but is there a way to turn on fps counters to see what's going on exactly? if this is a case of lcd against crt...you lose, refresh rates are better on crt so it may create the illusion that it's running more smoothly, but if you compare fps i think it would be just about the same

Yes, I did, and yes, she is. However, WoW supports addons such as Titan Panel which does show your FPS and that is what I was basing things on. The LCD I have is a WestingHouse LCM-20v5 which has an 8ms response time.

WoW tech support did point me to an option (Triple Buffering) which seems to alleviate the worst of my problems so I can kick things up to 1440x1050, but I've yet to test it under true load (PvP or an instance). Initial test with spell effects in a populated area seems to run fine.

I still think that given the architecture differences between the two computers I should be seeing a larger difference in the 3DMark scores, but maybe I'm mistaken in that.

Both systems will be upgraded in the near-ish future so it'll be a moot point soon. Looking to build two Core2 Duo systems with GeForce 7900GTOs.

tripple buffering is only useful if you've enabled vertical sync refresh options
altho disabling vsync and disabling tripple buffering should show some slight fps improvements, but you might start seeing tearing in the gfx

i'd switch up the monitors just for the hell of it and see if there's a major change or something...