  Gauge/string duality is a potentially important framework for addressing the
properties of the strongly coupled quark gluon plasma produced at RHIC.
However, constructing an actual string theory dual to QCD has so far proven
elusive. In this paper, we take a partial step towards exploring the QCD plasma
by investigating the thermodynamics of a non-conformal system, namely the N=2^*
theory, which is obtained as a mass deformation of the conformal N=4 gauge
theory. We find that at temperatures of order the mass scale, the
thermodynamics of the mass deformed plasma is surprisingly close to that of the
conformal gauge theory plasma. This suggests that many properties of the quark
gluon plasma at RHIC may in fact be well described by even relatively simple
models such as that of the conformal N=4 plasma.
