Building a machine for WoW
- Thread starter Zoroaster
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yea shadows kill wow fps best to leave them off, you can run wow on a hd4290 onboard gfx and get atleast 40 fps everywhere even in dalaran if you turn shadows off assuming your cpu is fast enough.
wow barely even utilises a graphics card maybe in cataclysm that will change but i dont see it happening unless they rebuilt the graphics engine from the ground up
3 years ago yes. Now, no where near that.
yea i was doing nax 10 with
amd 64 3200 , 1gb memory and an x800 and getting 50fps though.
the dragon place in lich king i was only getting around 20 fps on the is it 20? 25? man version.
all the HC's were fine and regular zones , a bit of stuttering in dalaran but that was more than likely due to 1gb of memory because i got over 30 fps there.
my cpu was obviously a huge bottlekneck for wow though the graphics card not so much
You only have to spend about 500 for a machine that plays WoW. The more the better, but it's subject to diminishing returns quite rapidly.
This will play WoW effortlessly.
This will play WoW effortlessly.
Soldato
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I run spec in sig but with cpu @ 3.9ghz currently. I play all settings on ultra except for shadows (on lowest) with 1920 x 1200 and a all the usual addons and my fps in 25mans is normally 20 - 30. Saying that i think theres something wrong with my pc / wow as i keep seeing people with i3 / i5 / i7 and even core2 setups getting 40+ fps on same settings and res :s
First of all, WoW only uses 2 cores so you don't need a quad.
Second of all, i7 is overkill for pretty much any game out there unless you're running at really high resolutions, let alone World of Warcraft.
It's not a graphic intensive game, it's a CPU and memory intensive game, so saying that so spending 400 bucks on a GTX 480 to play WoW is just plain silly.
For those reasons I am going to spec you a computer which is future proof and more then enough to run pretty much any game in the market at high settings, including WoW.
If you don't want to build it yourself then get the Titan Xenomorph with a GTX 460 or the Titan Decimator with a GTX 460.
Second of all, i7 is overkill for pretty much any game out there unless you're running at really high resolutions, let alone World of Warcraft.
It's not a graphic intensive game, it's a CPU and memory intensive game, so saying that so spending 400 bucks on a GTX 480 to play WoW is just plain silly.
For those reasons I am going to spec you a computer which is future proof and more then enough to run pretty much any game in the market at high settings, including WoW.
If you don't want to build it yourself then get the Titan Xenomorph with a GTX 460 or the Titan Decimator with a GTX 460.
I see lots of people say things like this, but then I see benchmark charts like the one below
http://i38.tinypic.com/vpdifa.png
GTX480 seems to give almost three times the frame rate as an 8800gtx. This is on a set flight path, for testing consistency. I dont know how these numbers translate into a raid scenario though.
There seems to be so much conflicting information out there. I really appreciate all the posts in this thread so far ... lots of great advice.
u seem to be contradicting yourself there, saying the game is CPU intensive, then stating you dont need a good CPU
some games do benifit from the likes of the i7, and doesn't have anything to do with the resolutions ur running at.
its true the i7 is overkill for most games, but if you happen to play the few that need a good cpu, then its worth it.
also, if a game uses 2 cores, then i would say a quad would most defiantlly be better than a dual core.
with a quad, the game will run on 2 cores, while anything else can run on the third. With a dual core, the game will have to share the 2 cores with the rest of the system.
the same was true with single threaded games running better on dual-cores
I've always thought WoW was CPU heavy.
I also was under the impression they only used a single core.
I have a Quad core at 2.8 and a Nvidia 260
No problems with everything on max at 1920x1080
Can't say you need a mega PC to run it.
Runs very well on my MacBook Pro as well.
I also was under the impression they only used a single core.
I have a Quad core at 2.8 and a Nvidia 260
No problems with everything on max at 1920x1080 Can't say you need a mega PC to run it.
Runs very well on my MacBook Pro as well.
u seem to be contradicting yourself there, saying the game is CPU intensive, then stating you dont need a good CPU
What I meant is that you don't need an i7 or 1090t to play WoW
an i3/955 or even a Quad Athlon Core2Duo or Core2Quad will be more then fine.
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The benchmarks the OP posted are 1920 x 1200 with a 16:10 aspect ratio. But not many people own monitors that support that, at that resolution obviously a high end graphics card is going to be useful.
I say it again... I don't care if you're raiding, it's a CPU + Memory crunching intensive game, you don't need a GTX 480 to achieve high FPS in it.
A 955, i3, i5, 1055t, Core2duo with a single GTX 460 is more then enough to run WoW at high FPS. Shaders and Grass is something that MMO's suffer with and if you want to max that then go for it but I hope you enjoy your 200 pounds shades.
After playing wow on an i7 machine with a 5870 in all raid content on the ultra preset at 1920x1080 with 2xAA 16xAF the only slowdown I ever got was in dalaran due to the sheer amount of players in that area at most given times.
The game engine is terribly optimised for high end pc's as the ultra setting (everything on maximum) has insanely high particle effects which can easily stress the crap out of anything but a decent PC.
Without a decent computer you HAVE to turn these effects down which can interfere with raiding. Turning spell detail down to minimum removes most of the particle effects meaning you can't see certain boss effects like death and decay on lady deathwhisper in icecrown citadel for example.
To all the people saying "lol its wow you can play it on a toaster" style crap, sure you can at minimum settings but if you want it to look nice and maintain good framerates in raids and large scale pvp, you have to spend the pennies.
The game engine is terribly optimised for high end pc's as the ultra setting (everything on maximum) has insanely high particle effects which can easily stress the crap out of anything but a decent PC.
Without a decent computer you HAVE to turn these effects down which can interfere with raiding. Turning spell detail down to minimum removes most of the particle effects meaning you can't see certain boss effects like death and decay on lady deathwhisper in icecrown citadel for example.
To all the people saying "lol its wow you can play it on a toaster" style crap, sure you can at minimum settings but if you want it to look nice and maintain good framerates in raids and large scale pvp, you have to spend the pennies.
Indeed, I see your point, 1920x 1200/1080 monitors are becoming more widespread these days though.
I find it wierd wow the requirements of WoW have gone through the roof personally, it doesn't really look that much different to the classic days. Shadows are obviously a killer but it runs a lot worse even with them turned off.
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