Best £200ish card for wow and does overclocking void warranty?

los · 16 Jul 2013 at 21:11

I'm looking for a card again for WOW maybe BF4 when its out as my gigabyte 760 is going back tomorrow (perfcap problem). Would there be much difference between a 7950 and a 760 in wow? I know it favours Nvidia just not sure how much by. Maybe even a 660ti?
I was very tempted for a 7950 but they seem to keep going up in price!
Although I am more favoured for AMD as my motherboard can crossfire but not sli (GA-970a-ds3).
Also any prefered brands? I like MSI, gigabyte or EVGA, but EVGA arent sold on here for some reason?
Also does overclocking your card void the warranty?

los · 16 Jul 2013 at 21:14

Oh and does OCing it make much difference in real world FPS?

spoffle · 16 Jul 2013 at 21:19

Overclocking can make a huge difference, especially with 7950s that tend to overclock quite well.

A lot of people get 50% overclocks over the 7950's reference clocks, which depending on the game and situation nets you close to 50% more performance.

Overclocking also doesn't void your warranty.

It's worth bearing in mind too that with certain 7950s and other cards you get 8 games for free:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?catid=56&groupid=701&sortby=priceAsc&subid=1502

los · 16 Jul 2013 at 21:31

Yeah I keep looking at them, but they are about 250-260 for the ones I want

Sin_Chase · 16 Jul 2013 at 21:41

nVidia > AMD in WoW.

What CPU are you running?

los · 16 Jul 2013 at 21:42

An FX6300 @ 4ghz, I know it prefers intel, but I've looked at my processor usage in task manager and its only about 50%

pipson · 17 Jul 2013 at 00:21

Wow is more to do with the processor than GPU, im using a 7770 (recently returned my 7870 vtx3d) and i use ultra settings without any problems..and you can probably get a 7770 for around £80. and the fx 63000 is not bad either, ive had that before i got the 8350. but if you plan to use it for other games like battlefied then i would go for the current 7950 iceq boost one, you also get 8 games with it

Sin_Chase · 17 Jul 2013 at 00:25

pipson said:
Wow is more to do with the processor than GPU, im using a 7770 (recently returned my 7870 vtx3d) and i use ultra settings without any problems..and you can probably get a 7770 for around £80. and the fx 63000 is not bad either, ive had that before i got the 8350. but if you plan to use it for other games like battlefied then i would go for the current 7950 iceq boost one, you also get 8 games with it

WoW IS CPU dependant but it also needs GPU grunt if you want the eye candy.

Anyone who argues otherwise is misleading themselves.

At ultra even a 4.5GHz 2600k and a heavily overclocked GTX680 will only pull 80-100 FPS, area dependant, less in the more modern zones.

Puppetmaster · 17 Jul 2013 at 01:34

Sin_Chase said:
WoW IS CPU dependant but it also needs GPU grunt if you want the eye candy.

Anyone who argues otherwise is misleading themselves.

At ultra even a 4.5GHz 2600k and a heavily overclocked GTX680 will only pull 80-100 FPS, area dependant, less in the more modern zones.

I found my 2600K @ 4.7GHz + 2 6970's gave me very decent fps anywhere outside of raids. Inside of raids (esp 25 man) fps was slaughtered. I ditched crossfire in favour of windowed mode because even one card in raids wasnt anywhere near 99% gpu usage. I think it more depends on what is more important, world performance or raid performance.

Sin_Chase · 17 Jul 2013 at 01:39

Puppetmaster said:
I found my 2600K @ 4.7GHz + 2 6970's gave me very decent fps anywhere outside of raids. Inside of raids (esp 25 man) fps was slaughtered. I ditched crossfire in favour of windowed mode because even one card in raids wasnt anywhere near 99% gpu usage. I think it more depends on what is more important, world performance or raid performance.

Last time I checked Xfire had negative scaling in WoW? Has it been fixed yet?

Add-ons will destroy FPS, especially data heavy ones like damage meters. Raids will always present some FPS issues, purely for the amount of other stuff the CPU needs to deal with.

oldestgregg · 17 Jul 2013 at 02:43

Sin_Chase said:
Last time I checked Xfire had negative scaling in WoW? Has it been fixed yet?

Add-ons will destroy FPS, especially data heavy ones like damage meters. Raids will always present some FPS issues, purely for the amount of other stuff the CPU needs to deal with.

Yeah thats right, Blizzard games in general dont scale with Xfire. Starcraft 2 gives me 40% usage on mt 7970s and thats with a 4770k at 4.6ghz. I just made the jump from a 2600k though and I noticed that SC2 runs a lot better maxed out. For some reason Blizzard games are super CPU intensive.

Marine-RX179 · 17 Jul 2013 at 06:01

Sin_Chase said:
WoW IS CPU dependant but it also needs GPU grunt if you want the eye candy.

Anyone who argues otherwise is misleading themselves.

At ultra even a 4.5GHz 2600k and a heavily overclocked GTX680 will only pull 80-100 FPS, area dependant, less in the more modern zones.

The difference between Nvidia or AMD isn't gonna make any difference, if people are only using 60Hz monitor. I mean let's say your GTX680 does 80-100fps, and the 7950 does 70-90fps...it hardly matters.

And OP's 6300 at 4GHz would be a bigger limitation anyway, considering WOW is still mainly single-threaded, with some lesser taskes offloaded to other cores.

oldestgregg said:
For some reason Blizzard games are super CPU intensive.

Because most of them hardly scale beyond 2 CPU cores...things would be hugely different, if they would use 3rd-8th cores properly.

Puppetmaster · 17 Jul 2013 at 07:13

Sin_Chase said:
Last time I checked Xfire had negative scaling in WoW? Has it been fixed yet?

Add-ons will destroy FPS, especially data heavy ones like damage meters. Raids will always present some FPS issues, purely for the amount of other stuff the CPU needs to deal with.

Last time I played it was around November 2012 and hadn't used crossfire since around September that year. Used to work then at least. No idea about now.

Martini1991 · 17 Jul 2013 at 08:35

los said:
An FX6300 @ 4ghz, I know it prefers intel, but I've looked at my processor usage in task manager and its only about 50%

Because it can't use the other half of your CPU since it's not threaded enough, which means it's bottlenecking as you're pretty much maxing out what's available to you.
Clock it to 4.8GHZ or something.

Doomedspeed · 17 Jul 2013 at 08:54

Martini1991 said:
Because it can't use the other half of your CPU since it's not threaded enough, which means it's bottlenecking as you're pretty much maxing out what's available to you.
Clock it to 4.8GHZ or something.

That's the major downfall with amd cpu's there single thread performance is poor. They counter it by having more threads but not many games/program utilise them all yet..

Whereas intros single thread performance is spot on.

thisiswar88 · 17 Jul 2013 at 10:16

so overclocking defiantly doesn't void your warranty? i don't want to risk it haha

spoffle · 17 Jul 2013 at 10:20

thisiswar88 said:
so overclocking defiantly doesn't void your warranty? i don't want to risk it haha

It definitely doesn't.

Martini1991 · 17 Jul 2013 at 14:06

I'm pretty sure you'll still see loads of disclaimers which will say overclocking voids warranty.
It's just more accepted these days and they're generally very lenient on overclocking, but if one day they decided to reject warranties due to overclocking, we probably wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

Sin_Chase · 17 Jul 2013 at 14:11

Marine-RX179 said:
The difference between Nvidia or AMD isn't gonna make any difference, if people are only using 60Hz monitor. I mean let's say your GTX680 does 80-100fps, and the 7950 does 70-90fps...it hardly matters. .

It does matter. It's widely accepted WoW runs better on nVidia hardware. If he is buying FOR WoW and has a choice he should go nVidia.

oldestgregg · 17 Jul 2013 at 14:13

If you put crazy volts through your GPU they may moan a bit though!