Want to run WOW at full settings...

[speedy2]

My cousin wants me to do a build and I'm just trying to figure out the best card for the money.

We picked out this one yesterday.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150323

This will be going in a AMD Phenom II X4 945 Deneb 3.0GHz build with 4GB of DDR3 and Windows 7. So far the build is at $816.00 which also includes a keyboard and speakers, so he's trying to cut costs a little more if possible.

 

[happy medium]

My cousin wants me to do a build and I'm just trying to figure out the best card for the money.

We picked out this one yesterday.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150323

This will be going in a AMD Phenom II X4 945 Deneb 3.0GHz build with 4GB of DDR3 and Windows 7. So far the build is at $816.00 which also includes a keyboard and speakers, so he's trying to cut costs a little more if possible.

Why buy a 9800gt for 95$ when you can get a gts 250 for 103$ and 80$ after rebate.
A gts 250 should max WOW.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130513

 

[Patrickz0rs]

WOW is more intensive on your CPU rather than your GPU.

 

[TemjinGold]

How did that build hit $816 w/o the video card? Did he get some SSDs or are you getting ripped off?

 

[Binky]

Actually...there's an evga GTS 205 at tigerdirect for ~$61AR after rebate and BCB. Search SD for "EVGA GTS 250."

I'm more of an ATI fan these days, but for $61 thats a great deal.

 

[Soccerman06]

If your playing 2560x1600 with maxed settings you'll need a 480 or greater, I played with 2x260s (and a 3.8ghz i7) and would get consistent slowdowns in high partical density or large amount of players. Maxing out shadows never happened because its taxing/poorly coded.

With that said, what resolution?

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

At 13x7 you can almost max out wow with a 9800gt

 

[speedy2]

How did that build hit $816 w/o the video card? Did he get some SSDs or are you getting ripped off?

Sorry, the way I worded did imply it was WITHOUT, but that's the total WITH the card.

This is the list.

https://secure.newegg.com/WishList/MySavedWishDetail.aspx?ID=14979888

 

[speedy2]

Guess I can't link wish lists?

Case & PSU - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811129065

Mobo - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128419

CPU - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103809

RAM - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231275

HDD - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136284

Optical Drive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827106289

keyboard - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16823175104

OS - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16832116754

speakers - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16836150044

2 extra case fans - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835103063

 

[darkewaffle]

If you can tell us what resolution you're playing WoW at, it will help us pick the right card much more accurately.

Mobo & RAM seem fine. CPU I would consider moving up to a 955; better stock performance and much better (and easier) overclocking headroom for only $10 more (counting the gift card from Newegg atm).

As an educated guess, I would say a radeon 5770 would be a good choice for a GPU; great power and there's a lot of them floating around FS/T (and other forums) for like 120-140$. And even NIB ones aren't all that expensive; though recent news also shows that nvidia's 460 is a good choice if you're getting closer to the $200 mark for a GPU.

HDD I would keep an eye out for a Samsung Spinpoint F3, they're not that hard to find for around $60 whenever superbiiz has a coupon, which could save you $30 while for what amounts to an equivalent drive.

OS if either of you have a .edu email address, or even know anyone who does, take advantage of the Win7 for students program, he can save himself $60-70 and get Win7 pro at the same time.

Personally I would consider seperating the Case/PSU, but I'm not an Antec guy either so that's probably just my own bias. I do know that for the next couple days you can get an excellent 400W Corsair PSU for $22 after rebate at Newegg, which you could couple with -just- the Antec 300 and save yourself about $10 while getting a, in my opinion, superior PSU.

Fans, I'm not an LED guy, but otherwise they look sufficient

 

[Vesku]

Don't skimp on the graphics card. You should get a Radeon 5770 or GeForce 460. Need to at least buy in the $150-200 range at the moment to get a card that will run games over the next couple of years at decent settings on 20+ inch monitors.

 

[thtadthtshldntbe]

Wow almost does not notice the difference between a 50 dollar throw in video card and a top of the line triple crossfire or sli system.

This might very well change with Catacylsm, supposedly the games engine will actually use the card for more than rudimatary processing.

In my experience for WoW a multicore CPU, dual core minimum, of at least 2.5ghz is the very first thing you should consider to optimize your WoW experience. Right from the mouth of one of the games developers, though I don't remember which one, WoW runs two big threads and sometimes two or three little ones.

WoW is also a ram whore. I currently have 8GB of Ram, casual observation,has shown WoW to shoot up over 3GB of usage occasionally.

I have a 9800gtx (I am probably upgrading to one of those gtx460s sometime this year, the time feels right). I have ever setting at max except shadows. Keep that at minimum no matter what rig you have, until Catacylsm, hopefully the engine upgrade will make that setting work. On my system prior to this, AMD64 3200,6600 GT w 2GB I also ran at max settings, albeit at a smaller resolution (I play windowed on my main monitor and have no problem watching hulu, netflix or a dvd on the secondary monitor).

The number one thing that would improve my WoW performance, which I am trying to save up for, is a SSD.

If I were you, I would try to work 8GB of ram, and a SSD to boot from and run Win7 and WoW from. Alternatively, run WoW from its own hard drive. That gives a slight performance boost. WoW is notorious for tons of small file accesses on a continual basis.

 

[beserker15]

Yeah, it seems that WoW is quite cpu intensive so you might consider spending a little more on this combo set:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboB...t=Combo.432236

Better cpu, ram, case, and power supply for less than $100 more. Then just get an Radeon 5770 or any last generation DX10 mid range cards since WoW doesn't use DX11.

 

[Piano Man]

Wow almost does not notice the difference between a 50 dollar throw in video card and a top of the line triple crossfire or sli system.

This might very well change with Catacylsm, supposedly the games engine will actually use the card for more than rudimatary processing.

In my experience for WoW a multicore CPU, dual core minimum, of at least 2.5ghz is the very first thing you should consider to optimize your WoW experience. Right from the mouth of one of the games developers, though I don't remember which one, WoW runs two big threads and sometimes two or three little ones.

WoW is also a ram whore. I currently have 8GB of Ram, casual observation,has shown WoW to shoot up over 3GB of usage occasionally.

I have a 9800gtx (I am probably upgrading to one of those gtx460s sometime this year, the time feels right). I have ever setting at max except shadows. Keep that at minimum no matter what rig you have, until Catacylsm, hopefully the engine upgrade will make that setting work. On my system prior to this, AMD64 3200,6600 GT w 2GB I also ran at max settings, albeit at a smaller resolution (I play windowed on my main monitor and have no problem watching hulu, netflix or a dvd on the secondary monitor).

The number one thing that would improve my WoW performance, which I am trying to save up for, is a SSD.

If I were you, I would try to work 8GB of ram, and a SSD to boot from and run Win7 and WoW from. Alternatively, run WoW from its own hard drive. That gives a slight performance boost. WoW is notorious for tons of small file accesses on a continual basis.

Wow definitely notices the difference between video cards. With WotLK and the introduction of Ultra Settings, WoW is now a total hog in both the CPU and GPU department. A lot of this has to do with just old code, but nevertheless, if you want the best playback, you can't hold out.

However, one doesn't really need more than 4GB for WoW. That's because WoW can only utilize 2GB currently. If it goes over, it will crash. Period. There is no way you are getting 3GB usage from the wow.exe process ( http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25626343765&pageNo=1&sid=1#2 ). The Devs have said they have something coming up to get around this for Cataclysm, but as of now, 4GB is more than enough.

But as far as CPU/GPU, I've ran WoW on a Northwood PIV 2.4, a C2D 8400 @4.5GHZ, and an i7@4.2GHz. Also have played WoW on a 8800GTS 320, ATI 4850, and an ATI 5850.

Since WotLK, GPU does matter when going into heavily populated areas with settings set to Ultra, although your gains are severely hampered by poor coding.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...X-285-SLI-Multi-GPU-Shootout/Reviews/?page=11

Nevertheless, a monster GPU does help.


If you are to achieve 60FPS in Dalaran with everything maxed during peak hours, you need at least a 4 core (phys core, WoW doesn't improve with HT cores) running @ >4.0GHz and a monster video card (5970, GTX480, etc..)


Even with my setup, I can only muster about 40-45 FPS in Dalaran during peak hours. Due to WoW's old coding, you need the best of both worlds, unfortunately.

 

[Grooveriding]

Wow almost does not notice the difference between a 50 dollar throw in video card and a top of the line triple crossfire or sli system.

This might very well change with Catacylsm, supposedly the games engine will actually use the card for more than rudimatary processing.

In my experience for WoW a multicore CPU, dual core minimum, of at least 2.5ghz is the very first thing you should consider to optimize your WoW experience. Right from the mouth of one of the games developers, though I don't remember which one, WoW runs two big threads and sometimes two or three little ones.

WoW is also a ram whore. I currently have 8GB of Ram, casual observation,has shown WoW to shoot up over 3GB of usage occasionally.

I have a 9800gtx (I am probably upgrading to one of those gtx460s sometime this year, the time feels right). I have ever setting at max except shadows. Keep that at minimum no matter what rig you have, until Catacylsm, hopefully the engine upgrade will make that setting work. On my system prior to this, AMD64 3200,6600 GT w 2GB I also ran at max settings, albeit at a smaller resolution (I play windowed on my main monitor and have no problem watching hulu, netflix or a dvd on the secondary monitor).

The number one thing that would improve my WoW performance, which I am trying to save up for, is a SSD.

If I were you, I would try to work 8GB of ram, and a SSD to boot from and run Win7 and WoW from. Alternatively, run WoW from its own hard drive. That gives a slight performance boost. WoW is notorious for tons of small file accesses on a continual basis.

I would have to challenge the statement that world of warcraft does not have gpu dependencies.

In reference to your comment on shadows on low, I don't play much anymore, but have run through all of the wrath zones as well as 25 man raids with all settings on the max possible, including shadows.

It played smoothly without issue, this was on my current setup and a 5870 crossfire system.

 

[thtadthtshldntbe]

Wow definitely notices the difference between video cards. With WotLK and the introduction of Ultra Settings, WoW is now a total hog in both the CPU and GPU department. A lot of this has to do with just old code, but nevertheless, if you want the best playback, you can't hold out.

That might be because of Vista/Win7 and Aero finally offloading the UI onto the video card though.

I still run at max settings and my 9800gtx does not do much more than if I have it at low settings.

However, one doesn't really need more than 4GB for WoW. That's because WoW can only utilize 2GB currently. If it goes over, it will crash. Period. There is no way you are getting 3GB usage from the wow.exe process ( http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25626343765&pageNo=1&sid=1#2 ). The Devs have said they have something coming up to get around this for Cataclysm, but as of now, 4GB is more than enough.

I think this is because of the Win 7 memory model. The superfetch thing loading as much of WoW into ram as it can, in terms of prediction, basically using your ram kind of like an active ramdisk for WoW. WoW itself might not go over 2 GB (its a 32 bit program etc) but it accesses more than 2GB of files constantly and Win 7 just preemptively loads them into ram now. I wonder if I can force the issue on this somehow, make it load even more, to speed up the game a bit more.

But as far as CPU/GPU, I've ran WoW on a Northwood PIV 2.4, a C2D 8400 @4.5GHZ, and an i7@4.2GHz. Also have played WoW on a 8800GTS 320, ATI 4850, and an ATI 5850.

Since WotLK, GPU does matter when going into heavily populated areas with settings set to Ultra, although your gains are severely hampered by poor coding.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...X-285-SLI-Multi-GPU-Shootout/Reviews/?page=11

Nevertheless, a monster GPU does help.

If you are to achieve 60FPS in Dalaran with everything maxed during peak hours, you need at least a 4 core (phys core, WoW doesn't improve with HT cores) running @ >4.0GHz and a monster video card (5970, GTX480, etc..)

My current rig, Athlon 7750 BE running at 2.7 GHz stock , 8GB RAM and a 9800gtx with a first gen SATA hd that is just holding a spot until i can save for a SSD later this year (my real hard drive died with my motherboard earlier this year and only the motherboard has been replaced so far) has no problem running WoW at all settings maxed except shadows. I get 40 to 50 fps in Dal at peak hours with two monitors running and video playing on the secondary monitory. If I disable the secondary, I get well over 70 fps, not that my eyes are capable of noticing a difference between 45 and 70 fps.

I would have to challenge the statement that world of warcraft does not have gpu dependencies.

It does, they are just relatively minor. If you spend 100 to 200 on a video card, it will have the exact same impact on WoW as a 1000 dollar dual SLI/Crossfire setup simply because WoW does not take advantage of all that power (yet).

In reference to your comment on shadows on low, I don't play much anymore, but have run through all of the wrath zones as well as 25 man raids with all settings on the max possible, including shadows.

It played smoothly without issue, this was on my current setup and a 5870 crossfire system.

Some people systems have problems with it, due to how poorly blizzard coded their shadow features. I probably could max it out now, I just don't bother, because their is no visible difference. Its not like WoW is the latest and greatest in graphical display software engineering. Almost every MMO done in the last three years make WoW look like garbage. They just don't play as well as WoW does.