Which CPU for WOW? (but not for me!)

[jolie77]

Yer true

 

[Dr Who]

It also depends on the res he's running at I guess. I could happily do 25-man BT raids on my socket 939 X2 4200 although the frames were around the mid 20's. I'd go for the tri-core as you're likely to get better overall performance out of it IMO.

There is a massive difference between wrath and the old outlands raids.

Massive AoE, big changes to the graphics, and the fact that so much of the graphics is bottlenecked at the cpu.

I will give you an example...

i7 nehalem 2.66ghz, 6gb, Asus NV295 dalran frame rates 38-40

overclock to 3.2ghz framerates up to 52-60

test conducted within 2 mins of each other

In a fight with lots of AoE spells the frame rate can drop to under 30fps on my machine.

A lot of my guild complain of flick screen, even though they are running decent systems with 4870's etc.

I don't know how good the phenom is, but 3-4 cores makes no odds over 2 cores, what I can say is the better single core throughput you have the better the frame rates.

 

[David-Stephens]

Ill break this down. I have a 4870, I run wow on 1920*1200. When i have my E8400 at stock (3ghz) and GPU at stock i have about 30-40 fps, can even drop lower in some fights. When i OC the GPU almost NO GAIN in performance. When i OC the CPU to 4ghz im 60FPS 100% of the time.

If we are all honest here a e8X00 is + 4870/260 is perfect for almost any non bleeding edge game right now. Why spend more when you don't need it

 

[feeddagoat]

Not in a raid... WoW is only lightly threaded, 99% of its graphics engine sits on a single CPU core, and it will eat up as much power as you can give it. A high performance dual core generally offers the best performance for WoW.A high end graphics card will give great "peak" framerates when looking at the sky, but its the CPU that really limits the minimum framerates often observed in Dalaran, or at raids.

WoW has a very simple graphics engine of which a large percentage is running on the CPU rather than offloaded to the graphics card.

I was thinking about posting about wow. Last night I was running Folding@home while on msn. I Loaded up wow and forgot to stop folding, yet I saw little if any damage to my frame rates.

 

[Dr Who]

That sounds about right if you are running a multicore CPU, pretty much all the load on wow is on 1 core

 

[Caseh]

That sounds about right if you are running a multicore CPU, pretty much all the load on wow is on 1 core

But it uses 2 cores, where available?

 

[zeppelin`]

get an e8600 and a p45 motherboard, graphics card makes little differance so get a 4650 or a second hand 8800gt

 

[Corasik]

But it uses 2 cores, where available?

Wow is generally putting most of its work on one core at a time, windows can move tasks from core to core, so you'll see activity on both, but overall load will rarely go much above 65% or so, the gains moving from single core to dual are quite minor for wow, and dual to tri or quad, non existant.

What David said is bob on, overclocking the CPU, or just installing a faster chip, is just what WOW wants.

Nice to know the i7's getting 52-60dps in dalaran @3.2ghz, thats quite a bit faster than my C2D at 3.1Ghz. (around 42fps)

 

[zeppelin`]

also forgot to mention, wow will notice a good overclock more than most games so again i say e8600, get it to 4ghz, any graphics card and sorted