hard drive bottle neck in WoW

[deamer44]

Sorry I didn't know if i should post it here or in hard drives. I'm wondering if installing a new harddrive would increase framerate and remove choppyness.

my current hard drive is -http://www.ebuyer.com/product/150253
and im considering- http://www.ebuyer.com/product/144339

thanks for your help, also any good drives that are of reasonable price that you could recommend would be greatly appreciated.

 

[nosfe]

won't help, hard drives don't increase frames, only decrease load times.

 

[deamer44]

would it not reduce the stuttering? and speed up the overall desktop experiance (even outside wow)

 

[nosfe]

The thing is, the hard drive is so slow compared to the ram that if a game runs out of ram and goes to the hdd for help you won't see stuttering, you'll see slideshows, <10fps and things like that

the stuttering from what i've understood(i don't play wow) is due to the view draw distance. Blizzard went a little overboard with it in some recent patch(or was it the expansion?). Reduce the draw distance and the shadows maybe and overclock your cpu, that's about it

 

[deamer44]

ok cheers, im having problem with my overclocking (the board/cpu hates it) would it be good for me to add more ram or?

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: nosfe
won't help, hard drives don't increase frames, only decrease load times.

This isn't always true. Some shitty Xbox ported games try to keep a very small footprint in the memory and end up having to read from the hard drive over and over again. This is because an Xbox doesn't have a lot of ram, so stuff is typically loaded from the DVD then quickly dumped from memory when it's not in view. Kane and Lynch is really bad for this; the game pauses whenever I try to turn around.

World of Warcraft is not one of those games. I would guess that your comp is CPU limited. Try turning down the draw distance.

 

[deamer44]

would 6-8gb of ram increase the performance or is wow only limited to using 4gb?

 

[ShawnD1]

I don't even think WoW uses 1gb of ram. The game is almost entirely CPU limited.

 

[nosfe]

the cpu is the problem here; remember that WoW is very very old so it barely has some optimizations for multicore processors. Basically, it loads one core as much as it can while barely using the second core, quad core is way overkill for it.

 

[lupi]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1
I don't even think WoW uses 1gb of ram. The game is almost entirely CPU limited.

It does, but 4gb with a 64bit OS shoul dbe fine.



if the rig you are using is as described in your sig, it sounds like you are having a software problem. i'd try a defrag, check your HD free space, and do a clean reinstall of video drivers. Crank the shadow levels down in game, but you really shouldn't be having much of a problem with those given your hardware.

 

[Emultra]

Set shadows to minimum and draw distance to maximum minus two notches.

 

[deamer44]

ok ill give it a defrag, any good programs for that?

 

[Oakenfold]

Originally posted by: deamer44
ok ill give it a defrag, any good programs for that?

There are programs but for now just use the built in windows. If this doesn't work stop your OC (cpu and videocard), see if that removes the choppiness. What are your temps?

 

[zerocool84]

Originally posted by: deamer44
ok ill give it a defrag, any good programs for that?

http://www.defraggler.com

 

[zerogear]

Originally posted by: Oakenfold

Originally posted by: deamer44
ok ill give it a defrag, any good programs for that?

There are programs but for now just use the built in windows. If this doesn't work stop your OC (cpu and videocard), see if that removes the choppiness. What are your temps?

The top ones are: Diskeeper (Windows XP/Vista has a lite version of this). O&O Defrag and Raxco PerfectDisk.