Upgrade For Wow

Puppetmaster

Puppetmaster

Puppetmaster

Soldato
Joined
17 Jun 2005
Posts
6,514
Location
Near Brighton
I play wow fair amount and looking to upgrade for some better performance. Im not looking to moving to I7 yet and i suspect that leaves me with little choice but il ask anyway.


Current specs:

Q9550 @ 3.4GHz
Ati 4870 1GB @ Stock
2x 2GB Ocz Gold Memory @ 800mhz (Rated for 1066)
Asus Maximus Forumla II Mobo

Using an Acer G24 (1920 x 1200) and a 19" Samsung as second monitor (1280 x 1024)


I Run the game @ 1920 x 1200 with all settings maxxed apart from shadows, they are 1 or 2 down (ruin fps outside)


Any ideas? Would a new graphics card help at all?

Thanks
 
depends how much you're willing to spend.
I think possibily the cheapest yet most noticeable upgrade would be to get 4GB of RAM (will run a lot smoother).
Out of curiousity what sort of fps are you getting normally? Presuming you just play WoW on the Acer?
 
WoW for the win !!!! (sorry had to do that i just felt the an uncontrollable need)
Try sticking a better cooler on the CPU and overclocking a bit more do q9550's get any higher than that???
Im not sure about GPU upgrading because wow is more cpu dependant
and about shadows thats perfectly normal apparently 4ghz i7's with new graphics cards dont manage to deal with shadows properly
 
Do you mean 4gb more? as i have 4gb currently , 2 sticks of 2gb.


Fps most of the time is fine, but in 25man raids on bosses or stuff with a lot of aoe, i get between well 10 and 25 i guess. Fights like anub 25man hc detroys my fps, sometimes below 10 :P


edit: my cpu is watercooled, should probably over clock more. Not tried a lot.
 
Vicious said:
Do you mean 4gb more? as i have 4gb currently , 2 sticks of 2gb.


Fps most of the time is fine, but in 25man raids on bosses or stuff with a lot of aoe, i get between well 10 and 25 i guess. Fights like anub 25man hc detroys my fps, sometimes below 10 :P


edit: my cpu is watercooled, should probably over clock more. Not tried a lot.
Click to expand...

WoW is more CPU bound than anything. Try overclocking your CPU a bit more and I reckon you will be quite pleased. If you have shadow effects on max notch it down a tad as well, you won't see any vsible difference in raids.

EDIT : Ooops see you already have shadows notched down :p.
 
As the 4870 currently outperforms the 5770, then I'd say that. Als0 the 4870 upgrade will be cheaper as it's classed as old tech (even though it can spank newer tech).
 
Before you get a new graphics card make sure the one you have is struggling. Use MSI Afterburner to see if the card is struggling. Wow isnt the best of games to use graphics cards properly, I have 2 4890s with max settings and it sits at 60fps solid most of the time, there is the odd bit though where will drop to 40, cpu is at 20% pleanty of ram free and both cards are running at 30%. If i run with one card it runs at 60% so all crossfire seems to do is split the load between both cards rather than improve performance :(
 
From you specs, that PC should totally destroy WOW. Are you sure its not the servers that are slow? or your internet connection?
 
Temi_D said:
From you specs, that PC should totally destroy WOW. Are you sure its not the servers that are slow? or your internet connection?
Click to expand...

WOW defies almost all logic as to how it runs on any PC. Its just such a badly written game (the code not the content.. this is not a WOW bash thread)
As said, your set-up should run it with ease, but I know of people running even higher end machines and having issues with fps, where some of my old guild mates were running it on 4 year old machines without problem, getting good fps in even the heaviest AoE encounters.

As suggested, up the OC on your CPU if you can, this will probably see you the biggest gains.

Then I'd check forums for any known hardware problems or suggestions.. no point getting a second ATI card if wow does not like crossfired cards or prefers Nvidea cards for example, you may be better of selling your 4870 and getting a higher end GeForce.

What OS are you using?
 
Using Vista 64 Home Prem

I will try ocing my cpu some more. I was running it at 3.5ghz a few months ago, but then pc refused to boot till i dropped it a bit, might of just been a blip.

Wow doesnt support sli or xfire so getting a 2nd card is pointless.

But yeh wow doesnt seem to run well anyway.

A year ago when i built the pc it seemed to run wow pretty good even in aoe fights but now its fair bit slower.

I doubt its an internet thing, as i dont lag in the game but the fps physically is low.

My server has a huge population and can lag sometimes, but as said my fps is low.

Do you think upgrading to Win 7 64 would boost performance much?
 
Vicious said:
Do you think upgrading to Win 7 64 would boost performance much?
Click to expand...

I've recently gone from a q6600 3.10Ghz/4GB/4890/XP to an I7 3.80Ghz/6GB/5870/W7 64Bit.
I can hardly see any performance gain at all @ 1900x1200 which is really dissapointing considering the amount of money spent . In fact in 25 mans using my new system the performance is really laggy & "lumpy". With XP on my old rig it was smooth as silk.
My recommendation would be upgrade to a 4890 if you can do it cheaply.
Also try a fresh install and delete all those add ons.
Your processor and memory is more than adequate imo.
 
Try the cheap option first, as suggeted by Insomniak, that of cleaning out your system. Not neccesarily as going as far as a clean install but use something like Auslogics Boostspeed that will clean out all those temp files and unused registry enteries and defrag your system partition etc. If you were running a lot quicker a while ago and nothing hardware wise as changed it's the most logical and cheapest first thing to do.

Hope this helps

PS Win 7 64 bit is lighter on system resources
 
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