Christmas upgrades: GPU or other

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Phranq

Gawd
Joined
Jul 19, 2004
Messages
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My current specs that I'm gaming on are as follows (they are pretty not-HARD, but I've got college loans and stuff these days)

Intel e5300 @3.2ghz
4GB ddr2 RAM
HD 4830
WD 640gb hdd
The brand escapes me, but a nice brand 650w psu (so it shouldn't be a limiting factor here)
19" 1440x900 monitor (ya, lots of people are going to say GET A NEW MONITOR, but I am completely ok with this one I promise)

I mostly play WoW and anything new that my friends get into (L4D2, CoD, etc.)

Believe it or not, on that machine when I play WoW in an active environment (lots of characters/spell effects on my screen) my FPS can drop below 20, which really affects the game play quite a bit.

So I am really focusing on what I can do to help in that kind of environment. I BELIEVE WoW to be CPU bound these days, but I am almost positive that it doesn't play nice with anything beyond 2 cores (would love to be corrected on that one).

If I ask my mom and my brother for something they would probably be willing to spend around $150, and I also have about $50 in newegg gift certificates. I have narrowed down what I want to one of the following:

Option #1
Upgrade HD4830 to GTX 460

Option #2
Upgrade CPU to phenom II x4 945 (or 955 BE if I can swing it). Would have to go with a cheapy motherboard, and then get a new 4GB of DDR3 with my gift certificate

Option #3
Upgrade HDD with an OCZ Vertex 2 60gb SSD. I'm not sure what exactly it is WoW loads from the HDD while playing though.


Any insight would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
 
you can resell your ram to offset the costs (fwiw my 4gb ddr2 went for more than I paid for 4gb ddr3)

I cannot give an honest recommendation as I do not play wow. but the phenom series doesn't seem to pull out much faster than a core 2 quad, or at least that's what I've heard speculation of here. so in terms of clock for clock, I think you'd just be adding 2 more cores that wow wont recognize. your video card is actually a nice card for what you're playing if I remember correctly. I will say though my phenom 945 @ 3.3 feels significantly faster than my old e5200 @ 3.7. I think the ssd would be nice, but wont solve your lag issues if that's what you're trying to fix.

good luck with the decision.
 
Phranq said:
The brand escapes me, but a nice brand 650w psu (so it shouldn't be a limiting factor here)
Click to expand...
Find out what brand. Wat's a good brand to you may be a shitty brand to everyone else. So find out what PSU you have.

Phranq said:
So I am really focusing on what I can do to help in that kind of environment. I BELIEVE WoW to be CPU bound these days, but I am almost positive that it doesn't play nice with anything beyond 2 cores (would love to be corrected on that one).
Click to expand...
WOW is CPU, GPU, and HDD bound and yes it does not scale beyond 2 cores at the moment.



Phranq said:
Option #1
Upgrade HD4830 to GTX 460

Option #2
Upgrade CPU to phenom II x4 945 (or 955 BE if I can swing it). Would have to go with a cheapy motherboard, and then get a new 4GB of DDR3 with my gift certificate

Option #3
Upgrade HDD with an OCZ Vertex 2 60gb SSD. I'm not sure what exactly it is WoW loads from the HDD while playing though.
Click to expand...

I'd go with option 1.
 
Thanks for the input.

WoW is a strange beast, at my low resolution I can pretty much play whatever I want with decent settings, except WoW in a populated area. The engine seems to be coded horribly, but at the same time I do have some friends with nicer computers who don't suffer from some of the low FPS issues that I do.

Ya, the SSD would be more of I "because I can" kind of upgrade I think.
 
Meh, upgrade the graphics card.
Even at that resolution, the new bells and whistles in WoW are going to hurt the 4830.

Also run that E5300 up a bit more. You're making me sad.
 
UtopiA said:
Meh, upgrade the graphics card.
Even at that resolution, the new bells and whistles in WoW are going to hurt the 4830.

Also run that E5300 up a bit more. You're making me sad.
Click to expand...

I've been meaning to up that for a year now...

Good call, I guess I just haven't felt like making sure it's stable before I wipe everyone in WoW on an unstable clock.
 
Damn, was only able to get my current proc to 3.3, it won't even POST with any combination of voltage fsb and multiplier above that.
 
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