What to upgrade (WoW Machine)?

[Piano Man]

Ok, so you can check out my sig for system specs. I play WoW, way more than I should. My current computer is fine for WoW, except during those crazy WG encounters, 25 man Raids (not all raids, but when crazy stuff happens), and peak time Dalaran streets. I'm not talking about server lag either, but when my computer starts chunkin' in the FPS department.

Its not bad, but I do drop to 15-20 FPS sometimes, and I want rock solid 60FPS (V-Sync) if possible.

So here's the thing. I'm looking at the i7s and just don't know if those things are going to help in anyway with WoW. First of all, I have my C2D OC'd to 4.5GHz, which is higher than I'm going to get any i7 at (air cooling). WoW is programmed to only run on 2 cores although there has been discussion with spreading it out over more cores, but the results seem to be a little varied.

So anyways, question 1. Should I upgrade the CPU/MoBo?


I have a 22" 1680x1050 monitor that I will upgrade to 1920x1200. I will get the ATI 5850 as soon as ASUS comes out with their voltage tweaked model here in the states. So that upgrade I know about, and hopefully may help.

Question #2. Will an SSD improve performance? I'm not talking about just load times, but actual game performance. I was looking at the 80GB Intel G2 for that.


That's pretty much it. Let me know if there is something else I should be looking at for upgrading. Thanks.

 

[alyarb]

check out these charts:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articl...s-mmorpg_14.html#sect0

they ran the tests on a 3.2 GHz i7, and the 4850 is included among the test subjects. Does your 4850 perform similarly to their 4850? Better? Worse?

I can already see that they don't experience the 15 FPS dips that you describe, but at the same time i'm fairly certain that they didn't take the most stressful aspects of the game into account. The 1.3 GHz clock advantage you have is very significant and shouldn't be overlooked at all. I would wait for a 5850 and see what that does for you. ask people who own a 5850 and play wow to describe their performance during the critical moments you mention.

SSDs are for booting and paging, and you have enough RAM to not worry about paging in wow. once your program is loaded into memory, there's nothing an SSD can do to help you.