Upgrade suggestions for my wife's rig who's started playing WoW

[paladiin]

I've got the wife playing World of Warcraft with me now, and while she's not really a gamer we do have fun playing together. However, when I watch her playing, I cringe at her frame rate. She's constantly under 30FPS, and in areas with more players (Ironforge especially) her frames drop to ~15FPS. At the same time, I'm running 70+ FPS. I tried reducing her settings (she plays at 1024x768 at medium visual settings) and any lower she complains about it looking "ugly". And I can't blame her. So I'm guessing it's time to upgrade. Normally when she complains about her performance, it's my chance to upgrade my system and pass down my old stuff to her. But my rig is still fine as is (plays WoW/HL2 fine for me) so I really don't feel the need to upgrade quite yet. Here's what we're working with right now:

Her:

Athlon XP 1800+ (Palomino) not OC'd
Abit KT7A (KT133A) mobo
768MB PC133 RAM
GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB (not OC'd)

Me:

Athlon XP 2500+ @ 3200+ (Barton)
Epox 8RDA+
1GB Corsair XMS3200
BFG 6800 OC (unlocked to 16x1/6)

Problem is, since she's really not a gamer (before WoW she would occasionally play games like RTC3) I don't want to drop serious money on upgrades for her. She mainly uses her rig for web surfing and MP3/iPod stuff. We did recently add a NEC3500A to her system but encoding speeds are not an issue. So I want to take a budget route at upgrading her system specifically for increasing performance in WoW at medium settings. I'm thinking that the performance issue is a combination of a fairly slow CPU+Bus (PC133 = yuck) and the 4200 starting to show its age.

But I'm running into a problem trying to design a budget solution. I'm sure she's going to need a new mobo and RAM. And since the 1800+ she has is a Palomino it's a pretty bad overclocker, so I'm thinking that she'll need a new CPU too (WoW seems fairly CPU intensive and 1.5Ghz just isn't cutting it). But then there's that 4200 too. Was fine playing older games, but I'm concerned about it's performance in WoW (and the fact that it's DX8).

So here are a few options I've come up with:

Athlon XP 2400+ (mobile Barton) oc'd to 200Mhz FSB
nForce2 mobo
512MB Corsair Value PC3200 RAM

or

Upgrade my system to a socket 754 A64, pass on my mobo+CPU to her, pick up 512MB of RAM for her. That's more $ now (ouch), and gives me a better system too, but like I said I really don't need it yet.

Then there's trying to decide if we stay with the 4200 or upgrade the video card. Sure, a 6600GT would be wonderful, but $200 is more than we want to spend on just the card since it will just be for WoW. I've been looking at the 6200 AGP as a solution. Overclocked (and possibly softmodded) it would give a noticeable performance boost over the 4200 and take advantage of DX9, but stock I'm concerned it wouldn't give enough 'oomf' to warrant the $120 price tag.

We don't have a specific budget per se, but I'd like to keep it lower rather than higher.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

 

[Cheesetogo]

If your going to upgrade your system, why don't you go with socket 939? It's not that much more expensive, but is considerably better, especially for upgrading. Then, after upgading, see if her system is good for WoW, and if it is not, look around for a refurbished 6600gt for around 150.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Before spending a ton, try running a Radeon 9800 on the slower PC. I'll bet that all by itself, it will make plenty of difference. (Or a 6600, instead?)

 

[nick1985]

if you are on a REAL budget, a used 9700 pro for around $100 would help a ton

 

[Rike]

Since you're upgrading with a very specific goal in mind (make WoW more playable) and on a budget, I would upgrade just one thing at a time until you (or your wife ) are happy. Video cards are the best bang for the buck upgrade and that's where I would start. An 9800 or a 6600GT would be good choices. (edit: nick1985's choice would be good and even more budget conscious.)

Alternately, starting with just a new CPU would give you a good boost. If you take it one thing at a time, you won't spend too much without knowing what you are getting.

1st vid card / CPU
2nd CPU / vid card
3rd mobo
4th RAM (of course, new mobo will likely mean new RAM)

If you're really on a budget, handing down your old system and building a new one isn't much of a buget choice.

 

[thesurge]

One:
If you do not want to spend to much money (without upgrading the processor) you can get a 9600XT
I think anything more would be bottlenecking the processor, right.

 

[nick1985]

Originally posted by: thesurge
One:
If you do not want to spend to much money (without upgrading the processor) you can get a 9600XT
I think anything more would be bottlenecking the processor, right.

pfff...for the price of a 9600XT, you can get a used 9700/9800pro


Text

 

[John P]

I agree with the others, upgrade the vid card to a 6600GT or a plain 6800 for $200 or less. You can always use the vid card in new computer later.

 

[paladiin]

Thanks for the suggestions!

I'm a little unsure of a newer video card working in that old Abit KT7A mobo. It can't run the 4200 at 4X AGP (artifacts like crazy in the Nature test of 3DMark01) and I have to run it at 2X. Guess I can always just try my 6800 in it and see what happens! If that significantly improves performance (meaning the CPU/bus speed isn't a major bottleneck) then I'm sure we can go $200 for a 6600GT. Then when I'm ready to upgrade my rig down the road I'll pass down my Barton to her.

Here's hoping that works!

 

[MrBond]

Keep as much RAM as possible, don't go back to 512mb. My guild mates all tell me 1gb helps a ton (I have 512 now, with the same video card and a 2.6ghz p4), so I'm ordering some from Newegg tonight since it's affordable now.

 

[Cook1]

How much can you spend on that upgrade?

That lil piece of info can help a lot.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

A 9700/9800/6600 series card won't do much of anything for WoW performance without a fast CPU have a look As you can see, even a 6800U isn't worth a damned when coupled with a 2500+. If you check the rest of that guide it is readily apparent you need a decent system not just 1 fast component like a vid card to get good FPS. I would go with a used overclockers nF2 board, Barton-M 35W, 512mb of 3200, and used 9600pro or higher. You can get good prices on all of it in FS/FT since everyone is upgrading to A64's.

 

[Tarrant64]

Upgrading the video card just won't do it alone in your case. The video card can only perform as fast as the rest of the system will allow. I suggest a new CPU, mobo, and memory if you can afford it. And if you can, get a 9600xt/9700 or 6600gt. I've seen WoW perform decently on a ti4200, but not on those cpu/mem specs. The system itself and not just the vid card need to be updated.

Also, you thoughts about possibly moving to 754 is the right direction to go if you want to do that. It's a budget move and you will see the best performance gains for the buck.

 

[imported_fatal]

Originally posted by: Tarrant64
Upgrading the video card just won't do it alone in your case. The video card can only perform as fast as the rest of the system will allow. I suggest a new CPU, mobo, and memory if you can afford it. And if you can, get a 9600xt/9700 or 6600gt. I've seen WoW perform decently on a ti4200, but not on those cpu/mem specs. The system itself and not just the vid card need to be updated.

Also, you thoughts about possibly moving to 754 is the right direction to go if you want to do that. It's a budget move and you will see the best performance gains for the buck.

I agree, I upgraded from geforce 440mx to a 5900xt and saw very little video game performance untill I went from a 1900+ to a 3000+ CPU

 

[Old Man River]

Why not stick with what you have an upgrade her to the upper limits with the Winchester socket 939 and a good motherboard? You never know, you just might have the best loving moment of your life that night and an addition to the family next year.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Originally posted by: DAPUNISHER
A 9700/9800/6600 series card won't do much of anything for WoW performance without a fast CPU (GameSpot Link Clipped Out) As you can see, even a 6800U isn't worth a damned when coupled with a 2500+.

Try again. That is EXACTLY where the man's own personal system is now, and he's basically amenable to the performance he's getting!

If you check the rest of that guide it is readily apparent you need a decent system not just 1 fast component like a vid card to get good FPS. I would go with a used overclockers nF2 board, Barton-M 35W, 512mb of 3200, and used 9600pro or higher. You can get good prices on all of it in FS/FT since everyone is upgrading to A64's.

Again, at least in regard to the current setup he has, other than I don't think an Epox 8RDA+ is as OC-friendly as the Abit NF7-S, and he has the 6800 in the Epox now, I think we can be kinder to his budget.


Here is the original for this thread (somewhat edited down to serve as a reminder without clogging the thread too much):

Originally posted by: paladiin
I've got the wife playing World of Warcraft with me now, and while she's not really a gamer we do have fun playing together. However, when I watch her playing, I cringe at her frame rate. She's constantly under 30FPS, and in areas with more players (Ironforge especially) her frames drop to ~15FPS. At the same time, I'm running 70+ FPS.

Hers:

Athlon XP 1800+ (Palomino) not OC'd
Abit KT7A (KT133A) mobo
768MB PC133 RAM
GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB (not OC'd)

Mine:

Athlon XP 2500+ @ 3200+ (Barton)
Epox 8RDA+
1GB Corsair XMS3200
BFG 6800 OC (unlocked to 16x1/6)

Problem is, since she's really not a gamer (before WoW she would occasionally play games like RTC3) I don't want to drop serious money on upgrades for her. She mainly uses her rig for web surfing and MP3/iPod stuff. We did recently add a NEC3500A to her system but encoding speeds are not an issue. So I want to take a budget route at upgrading her system specifically for increasing performance in WoW at medium settings. I'm thinking that the performance issue is a combination of a fairly slow CPU+Bus (PC133 = yuck) and the 4200 starting to show its age.

Sure, a 6600GT would be wonderful, but $200 is more than we want to spend on just the card since it will just be for WoW. I've been looking at the 6200 AGP as a solution.

Suggestions?

I continue to say to start with the one thing we all know can in most cases produce the largest gain, the video card itself. If that's not enough, I like the idea of staying with the familar and I think he can find another 8RDA+ (still NOS, perhaps) for less than the used cost of the "in-demand" Abit board everyone likes for OC purposes. It's so handy to be able to swap drives back and forth between two PC's with the same MB! And to use the same BIOS settings, etc.

There is going to be a healthy improvement in system efficiency jumping from the old SDRAM to DDR, if the video card isn't enough, but in addition to the MB, there's the cost for the RAM, although perhaps some saving can be obtained by reselling the SDRAM (it's gotten moderately expensive lately to buy new SDRAM, so the used market is has a lot of buyer demand in it ).

 

[paladiin]

Just wanted to update this. Over the weekend I got a pretty decent deal on a 6600GT ($199AR-$23 discount-$7 rewards at Best Buy) so I picked it up. Got home and tried it in her system. It booted up and ran fine in 2D, but when I started WoW, it got all kinds of tearing and artifacting, exactly like the 4200 card does when I set it to 4X AGP. I played around with all kinds of AGP settings, but nothing corrected it. I wasn't too surprised though - I had read that the KT7A has serious issues with newer AGP cards (even though it's AGP 2.0 compliant). But even with the tearing I was able to get into WoW, and it was still very visually laggy. Even if it was working fine, I suspect that simply upgrading the card would not have fixed the low frames problem.

So we're biting the bullet and upgrading. She's getting my old Barton and nForce2 with 1GB of RAM and I'm getting a 3000+ 939 90mm chip and an Epox 939 mobo. Once they come in and I set it up, we'll see how it works.

 

[Appledrop]

Originally posted by: paladiin
Just wanted to update this. Over the weekend I got a pretty decent deal on a 6600GT ($199AR-$23 discount-$7 rewards at Best Buy) so I picked it up. Got home and tried it in her system. It booted up and ran fine in 2D, but when I started WoW, it got all kinds of tearing and artifacting, exactly like the 4200 card does when I set it to 4X AGP. I played around with all kinds of AGP settings, but nothing corrected it. I wasn't too surprised though - I had read that the KT7A has serious issues with newer AGP cards (even though it's AGP 2.0 compliant). But even with the tearing I was able to get into WoW, and it was still very visually laggy. Even if it was working fine, I suspect that simply upgrading the card would not have fixed the low frames problem.

So we're biting the bullet and upgrading. She's getting my old Barton and nForce2 with 1GB of RAM and I'm getting a 3000+ 939 90mm chip and an Epox 939 mobo. Once they come in and I set it up, we'll see how it works.

have you tested the 6600GT in another system??? It may be that you got one that needs to be returned :/

 

[paladiin]

Didn't really consider that since it does exactly like the 4200 does (which I have tested in my system and works fine at 4X AGP) but I guess I could throw it in my rig to verify that it's ok. Would only take a few minutes and I could show her how her system would perform as well.

Sounds like a project for tonight!

 

[bunker]

I'll give you my rig and you can judge upgrades from that:

Athlon 2600+
Gigabyte w/ Via KT333 chipset (running at 266 cuz the 333 support on this board sucks)
1gb pc2700
9700pro

I get 50-60 fps with drops no lower than 35 in WoW.

EDIT: forgot to say I'm running at 1280x960 with the visuals set at medium to high depending on the visual. I can't tell you exactly what's set at what as I'm at work right now.

EDIT2: I really need to start finishing reading the whole thread before I reply. I see you've taken action already

 

[Dravic]

Your biggest issue is the memory bandwidth of that motherboard. The cpu is also lacking punch but a kt133a chipset if really killing you. That board has no chance of feeding a modern vid card enough work.

I would recommend upgrading to a cheap dual channel kt880 board like the asrock k8upgrade-880 (upgradable to a 754 a64 later on with a daughter card). Newegg has this board for ~$45. you will need new DDR memory, but 512Mb of value pc3200 should be ~$50-$60.


This should give you the bandwdith to at least put the bottleneck squarely on the CPU, and heck for ~$75 down the road you can put in a 2500+ sempron and run it at 200mhz FSB (3200+)



kt880 = $45
512 pc3200 = $55
2500+ sempron = $75

$175 total

if done in stages it shouldn't be to bad. The motherboard switch an OS reinstall will be the biggest task.

 

[CALIKUSH]

the geforce6600gt has issues with older AGP slots

 

[paladiin]

Got the 6600GT up and running in my rig. 3DMark03 was a little lower than I expected until I hit up Futuremark and checked out ORB scores for a similar system. I scored 7700 at stock which seems at or above comparable scores. So seems about right for my rig.

Anyway, loaded up WoW and she ran around Ironforge and it was a huge improvement. With medium-high settings at 1024x768 she was usually at 50+ FPS (hitting 75 quite often) and only briefly dropped to 28FPS inside the auction house. Didn't bother having her go outside, since I'm confident she'd be pegged at 75fps. Best of all, it was just so much "smoother" than her current setup. No visual choppiness at all, even spinning around in circles at the bank or at the forge area (that would produce major stuttering on her system).

So looks like the card is good, and she's happy with it. Won't mess around with OC'ing it until the new parts are here and everything's up and running fine. At stock it's good, but I can tell it's just a tad slower than my unlocked (but not oc'd) 6800nu.

 

[MDE]

WoW is ridiculously CPU intensive. My Winchester 3000+ @ 2.5GHz hovers around 75% when playing WoW.

 

[Gurck]

Originally posted by: MDE
WoW is ridiculously CPU intensive. My Winchester 3000+ @ 2.5GHz hovers around 75% when playing WoW.

My thoughts as well. I say this because I get virtually the same low framerates, as low as 10-15 in intensive or crowded zones (west. plaguelands, especially in Andorhol, and STV, for example) regardless of whether I'm in 8x6, 10x7, 12x10 or even 16x12. My rig is a p4b 2.67 (533fsb), gb ram, 9800pro 128/256.