World of Warcraft: Mount Collection Guide - Raids (35)

DROPS - 23
ACHIEVEMENTS - 12


Vanilla/Classic - Lvl 60 - (4)

Ahn'Qiraj (4)

The resonating crystal mounts can drop from most of the trash in the 40 man AQ raid instance, located in the south of Silithus. Unfortunately they can only be used inside the instance but do count to your total:

Blue Qiraji Resonating Crystal - DROP - 14%

Green Qiraji Resonating Crystal - DROP - 14%

Yellow Qiraji Resonating Crystal - DROP - 14%

Red Qiraji Resonating Crystal - DROP - 1.2%

The Black Qiraji Resonating Crystal is no longer obtainable and was originally obtained by ringing the Scarab Gong within 10 hours of the first person to ring it on your server.
 It is also the only legendary mount within the game.

The Burning Crusade - Lvl 70 - (2)

Karazhan (1)

Fiery Warhorse's Reins - DROP - Attumen the Huntsman - 0.85%

Tempest Keep (1)

Ashes of Al'ar - DROP - Kael'Thas - 2%

Wrath of the Lich King - Lvl 80 - (12)

Eye of Eternity (2)

These mounts were originally assigned to either 10 or 25, however they can now drop from both difficulties:

Reins of the Azure Drake - DROP - Malygos - 3%
Reins of the Blue Drake - DROP - Malygos - 4%

Icecrown Citadel (3)

Invincible's Reins - DROP - The Lich King Heroic - 1%
Reins of the Bloodbathed Frostbrood Vanquisher - ACHIEVEMENT - Glory of the Icecrown Raider (10 player)
Reins of the Icebound Frostbrood Vanquisher - ACHIEVEMENT - Glory of the Icecrown Raider (25 player)

Obsidian Sanctum (2)

To enable these mounts to drop, you must leave all 3 mini boss drakes alive before attacking Sartharion. They do not drop if this pre-requisite is not met. 

Reins of the Black Drake - DROP - Sartharion 10 Man - 100%
Reins of the Twilight Drake - DROP - Sartharion 25 Man - 100%

Onyxia's Lair (1)

Reins of the Onyxian Drake - DROP - Onyxia - 1.4%

Ulduar (3)

Mimiron's Head - DROP - Yogg-Saron via Alone in the Darkness (25 player) - 1.1%
Reins of the Rusted Proto-Drake - ACHIEVEMENT - Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10 player)
Reins of the Ironbound Proto-Drake - ACHIEVEMENT - Glory of the Ulduar Raider (25 player)

Vault of Archavon (1)

Reins of the Grand Black War Mammoth - DROP - All Bosses - 0.8%

Cataclysm - Lvl 85 - (10)

General (2)

Requires contributions from Blackwing Descent, Bastion of Twilight and Throne of the Four Winds:
Reins of the Drake of the East Wind - ACHIEVEMENT -  Glory of the Cataclysm Raider

Requires 8/10 or 20/25 guild group to gain the achievement, requires exalted with guild to purchase (does not require participation in achievement):
Reins of the Dark Phoenix - Guild Glory of the Cataclysm Raider

Dragon Soul (4)

Experiment 12-B - DROP - Ultraxion - 1%
Reins of the Blazing Drake - DROP - Deathwing - 4%
Life-Binder's Handmaiden - DROP - Deathwing Heroic - 2%
Reins of the Twilight Harbinger - ACHIEVEMENT - Glory of the Dragon Soul Raider

Firelands (3)

Flametalon of Alysrazor - DROP - Alysrazor - 2%
Smoldering Egg of Millagazor - DROP - Ragnaros - 1.3%

Corrupted Egg of Millagazor - ACHIEVEMENT - Glory of the Firelands Raider

Throne of the Four Winds (1)

Reins of the Drake of the South Wind - DROP - Al'Akir- 1.5%

Mists of Pandaria - Lvl 90 - (7)

General (2)
Requires contributions from Mogu'shan Vaults, Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring:
Reins of the Heavenly Crimson Cloud Serpent - ACHIEVEMENT - Glory of the Pandaria Raider

Requires 8/10 or 20/25 guild group to gain the achievement, requires exalted with guild to purchase (does not require participation in achievement):
Reins of the Thundering Jade Cloud Serpent - Guild Glory of the Pandaria Raider

Mogu'shan Vaults (1)

Reins of the Astral Cloud Serpent - DROP - Elegon- 1.3%

Throne of Thunder (3)

Spawn of Horridon - DROP - Horridon- 1.6%
Clutch of Ji-Kun - DROP - Ji-Kun- 1.9%
Reins of the Armored Skyscreamer - ACHIEVEMENT - Glory of the Thundering Raider

Siege of Orgrimmar (1)

Reins of Galakras - ACHIEVEMENT - Glory of the Orgrimmar Raider

World of Warcraft: Mount Collection Guide

I will slowly be adding to this guide over time, each section is broken down not into the traditional Drop/Achievement/etc method, but by zone.

For instance, under the raiding section, there are mounts listed under Icecrown that are obtained by drops and other mounts listed that are obtained via achievements. I hope this makes it easier for you to decide what you can do within each zone to get the most contribution to other mounts you might not have heard of!

Raids

Update: Full Watercooling Loop!

I'm finding less and less time to update this nowadays.

Just a few shots first:

Most of the hardware is the same, bar the case! A lovely Corsair Air 540. SLI Titans still remain, this time enclosed in EK waterblocks. Alphacool radiators with Corsair SP120 fans. Some fantastic gaming on it now! GPUs running around 1250MHz 24/7 and never push too much over 45-50ish during gaming. CPU (now with XSPC Raystorm block) doesn't normally head upwards of 60 even when tested!

System Update: TITAN SLI

After the recent price drops both sides have seen, along with the release of the R9 series cards and the 780Ti, there was a wave of people changing up their GPUs.

I managed to snag two Titans in this upgrade bonanza. One is an Asus, the other a Gigabyte.

System looks quite nice now with the glowing green LEDs.

With just an ever so slight bump on the cores, it manage to blast over 21k 3DMark11 score.

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/7535813

I'll be hopefully adding some benchmark FPS tests later on, to perhaps use as a rough point of comparison to when I ran the GTX 680 SLI benchmarks.

Hoping to test games such as WoW, BF4, Crysis 3 and possibly something fairly basic such as Starcraft 2.

Quick specs:

i7 3930K @ 4.2GHz

SLI Titan +100 core (though that never accurately translates)

X79 - UD5

16GB Corsair Vengeance

Quick System Update - Samsung EVO 740GB

So, I dropped my RAID Crucial M4 drives. For a few reasons, first because I was quickly running out of storage, but also that didn't do my research and for some reason thought I had 4x Intel SATA3 ports on the board. Due to this I'd have to RAID two drives across the SATA3 ports and stick one drive on the SATA2. Due to potential performance limitations of doing this, plus the large amount of space that would be stolen for RAID overheads, I sold the M4s and bought a single Samsung EVO 740GB drive.

A few of you may know this has a feature called RAPID (Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data), which in effect uses your system RAM as a 'cache' of sorts to buffer the SSD read/writes.

The effect of this is shown as you access the same data several times.

For instance, in a speed test, you can get some incredible figures. These were probably helped by the quad channel memory you have in X79 boards too.

Now I have disabled the RAID controller so bootup time through BIOS is a lot quicker, plus the insane speeds of the drive itself are just fantastic!

AMD and nVidia Price Wars - R9 290X and 780 Ti

We've had a few interesting establishments over the last 6 months or so. From the green team we've had the new 700 series cards, some fairly good performance shown there, right the way up to the TITAN, which shows some monster performance and compute power.

Then from the reds we've had the 7950 and 7970, two cards which do a very good job of dominating the price/performance sectors of the market. After some drivers issues I think most of the crossfire stuttering problems should be solved now, higher resolution and multi screens may have small issues though.

Recently however, AMD are pushing their new release of the R9 series. The 280X seems to be selling fairly well at the price point of £220-£280, which is a point at which you will see either the high end nVidia 760 cards or the lower end 770's.

Currently, the 770s edge out the 280X on lower resolutions of 1080p, but the 280X overtakes it in certain games as you start hitting 4K resolutions., though some still play better on the 770.

Their new 'flagship' R9 290X card however has hit mixed reviews. While it does have TITAN/780 rivalling performance, it does seem to get extremely hot. We're talking almost 95 degrees here. I've heard some people use the argument "Ah but you have to watercool it, then it's fine.". Just stop it, watercooling should not be mandatory, even with flagship cards. They should work just perfectly well out of the box (and not be heating my entire room), and function just as any other card would. I feel the performance gain here was not worth the immense heat they put out. I'm not certain if the new cooler design is to be blamed, or just the huge die. We'll see when the non-reference cards arrive.

As the news of these cards hit the masses though, nVidia decided that a blanket price slash on their 700 series cards was in order. The 780 dropped $150, while the 770 lost $70 from its RRP. This can only be good news to the consumers looking for a decent upgrade!

Soon to arrive is nVidia's next bump up, the 780Ti. Rumours are that it will be close/better than TITAN performance with a larger amount of VRAM (good news for me as I need more than 3GB, preferably 4GB with some games nowadays).

I'm hoping it brings a card that will run newer games at good fps on a surround system (5760*1080), while sporting some decent VRAM (4GB+) and hopefully in the £500-£600 price range. Cheaper is obviously better though!

New Desk Build

After a lot of deliberation over what I wanted my new desk to look like I decided to have some large pieces of real wood cut to size. I had a large main section done and a long shelf for the screens along with a smaller end section if the other half wanted to join hers onto it. The wood cost me £240. I spent the weekend waxing and staining it with medium stain. Got the legs from B&Q and they weren't bloody cheap either. £98 for 7 of them! Finally a top shelf from IKEA for my world of warcraft server that my little mage started its life on back in vanilla WoW (the best gaming experience I've ever had in my life I think). Then a few LED strip lights to finish it off.

I'm thinking the server at the top needs a bit more lighting but I'm just not sure what I want to do yet.
I'm so flipping pleased with it though! Took me ages to get it all organised and constructed.