Best part to upgrade

G-Man

G-Man

G-Man

Soldato
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
3,737
Location
Scotland
Trying to decide whether to upgrade my CPU or my graphics card, current spec is:

Athlon64 X2 6000 (3ghz)
6Gb DDR2-667
Radeon 4850 512Mb
Asus M4A78 Motherboard (Supports AM2+ and AM3 CPU's)

Budget would be around £100-130 max and its mostly for games, WoW especially since it runs like a 3 legged dog in 25man raids atm.

Most likely options would be a Phenom II of some sort or a Radeon 5770 but i really have no idea which is the better upgrade so suggestions welcome...
 
Motherboard doesn't do crossfire (and i'm not a huge fan of the whole dual graphics thing in general)
Still trying to get my head around what makes Phenoms noticably faster than my current CPU since not a great deal of my games (if any) use quad cores, feel free to enlighten me ^^
 
I've got same CPU, 2GB of DDR2 RAM and a 9800GT, Windows XP running on 1440x900 res with a custom UI and a fair few addons - all settings are maxed in game apart from shadows I think which I dropped down two notches, 25 mans I'm getting a good 25+ fps which is perfectly playable tbh, and thats as a healer as well :p

What res you running and addons? Also have you thought about overclocking the CPU a tad? I had a go at it once with the 6000+ and got it to just under 3.2 and things seemed alright, that was on an old motherboard though and I haven't bothered with this one :)
 
I'm running 1920x1080 (monitors native res) with a decent number of addons but not a huge amount, just things like bartender, grid, dbm and some information/timer stuff. Game settings are sitting on the "Good" option but with shadows off.
Recently done a complete reinstall and resetup the ui to trim out some addons but i haven't really noticed much difference.

I'm lucky to get 15fps on boss fights but outside of raids its fine :/

Not really thought of overclocking too much since its all stock cooling and the heat from my 4850 makes the entire computer a bit like an oven (gotta clear the dust out every couple of months or the graphics fan goes full speed just idling in a game >.>)
 
What case you got? If there's not great airflow it might be worth buying a single fan to stick on the case, you'd be amazed at how much lower temps would be with both an intake and exhaust fan compared to a single intake/exhaust.

The overclocking on these chips aren't the best (think they were the fastest on the 92 chip?) and there isn't much room for gains, you'd be quite lucky to get pass 3.3 stable. The res is quite a bit higher than mine so I'm not too suprised the fps dips a bit. It might be worth looking into perhaps a 5770 or 5850, but I'd try the fan first as it's a cheap way to test things and even if it doesn't help much, an extra fan is always a good thing to have in a case :)

I'll try and find out whether addons are more CPU-intensive than I thought, but do bare in mind these CPUs were like "the best" when they came out and they still do bloody well today! 3GHz+ still hold well in most games, some newer ones though are becoming more suited to quad cores and actually utilizing all four cores so it appears that duals are slowly starting to be phased out...
 
Its an Antec 300 and all but one of the fan slots are filled, my guess is the general heat of my room and all the cables messes around with the temps.

The CPU's stock speed is actually 3.1ghz (i keep forgetting) so it doesn't seem worth frying it for 200mhz.

If i remember right, WoW didnt exactly run all that amazingly on my old monitor at 1280x1024 - better but still not very high fps. Found an old screenshot from Ulduar showing me at 22fps in combat so not much better :confused:

a 5770 isn't MUCH better than a 4850, very small upgrade, the only thing that might help you is the 1gig @ that resolution
Click to expand...

Thats what i thought from reading the reviews when the 57xx was launched

Gah, i'm confused as hell on this :p
 
I know you might not like doing this but try running windowed mode at a very low res.

I used to hate WoW it's ****ing terrible in my opinion but when i played COD4 @ high level sometimes i would minimize my COD4 and go wow and **** around whilst i was dead, wow in windowed mode... I had a level 30 mage, i really wanted to get ot 40 so i could ride a pony but i never made it that far....
 
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