PC for WoW

Hey guys,

I decided some days ago that I want to change my current PC since we do 25 man raids and sometimes I have freeze effect during the fight. I am looking for your valuable information from those who follow up the IT world. I have some criterias as well, so maybe you could help me. The important thing for me to run WoW with nice fps (40-50-60) in 25 man, no other purpose. I use WoW on a 27" screen so 1920*1080 would be a must and I am gonna use 8 GB memory. I don't have budget for that, but I don't wanna waste money on a computer what I will replace in 1-2 years, so I prefer average or high average equipment.

My questions are basiacally about the CPU and VGA card such as:-

- AMD X6, X8 or Intel i5: I know Intel is better but is it worth to spend more money on it even if I play only with WoW? Which processor do you suggest from these brands?
- Motherboard: Which motherboard brand do you suggest for the CPU? I use Gigabyte at the moment and I am happy with. Anything special do you sugegst to CPU?
- VGA card: I was thinking to buy an average card such as ATI Sapphire HD 7770 or Nvidia GTX650. Memory for the VGA card (1GB, 2GB or 4GB) is so important? As far as I know for those games which you play in 1920*1080 the CPU is not as important as the VGA card's memory capacity. Is it true? So I should buy minimum a 2GB card? If yes, then which one do you suggest? Any sugegstion, experience are warmly welcome.

If you can suggest a configuration, I would be very happy as well.

Thanks for your anwser,

Stakka

 

wow like many other MMO-RPGs are very cpu intensive, gpu doesn't make as much of a difference to frame rates as what a good cpu does with these kind of games, would always recommend intel i5 k for MMOs, sandybridge or ivybridge doesn't really matter to much will only be like 5 fps difference.

Motherboard is upto you really almost all do the same just depends if you plan on going for crossfireX or SLI at some point, can't go wrong Asrock, Asus or gigabyte, Gigabyte G1 Assassin or G1 sniper are good boards aimed for gamers, if you just having 1 graphics card mini ATX boards are good and can be quite cheap.

For 1080 resolution 2 GB should be fine the only time you ever want more than that is with bigger resolutions or 3 screen set up, i would recommend spending a little more and going with Nvidia 660 or AMD 7870 as you with get almost double FPS with most other games than what you would with the graphic cards u suggested as you can see in this video.

Watch any other of Linus videos if you want more information on any thing to do with PC and his works video channel NCIX

 

The ram on the card wont really matter so much. As long as the card can process fast enough this is the primary concern. I am an Intel person, just because I havent had any issues with them, motherbords and chipset doesnt matter too much but I tend to stay away from MSI and anything with a SIS-chipset. Depends on as earlier said do you want to be able to upgrade later (usually cheaper to just buy a new cpu and motherboard later and not spending extra money on something you wont be using now)

What will matter is that you should get a SSD, run the operating system as well as WoW on that drive. Textures will load much faster yielding shorter loadingtimes which in turn will gain you FPS.

 

I consider intel cpus a bit over hyped (in games there's no difference between i5 and amd phenom 2 cpus ).

I've recently upgraded my computer and i'm happy with it.

CPU is AMD FX8350 (Vishera core, this core brings in theory a performance jump compared to earlier cores).
Motherboard is Gigabyte GA-990XA-UD3.
16 GB RAM (overkill but couldn't help myself)


Graphic card: Sapphire Radeon HD5770 Vapor-X (around 3 years old )
SSDs: Ocz Vortex 2 120 GB (more than 2 years old).
Samsung 840 Basic 120 GB (bought it really cheap a few months ago, so far worked great).

 

Hi Stakka,

As many has stated the most important thing is the CPU, and the speed of the frontsidebus, any newer vga card either Nvidia or Radeon will do the job just fine, i can write down my pc

CPU: Intel i7 4,2 GHz
MB: Asus Rampage Extreme
RAM: 24 GB
VGA: Nvidia 680 GTX
SSD: 240 GB Samsung 840 performance series

I know this computer is WAY overkill, but im an enthusiast, and it does 80+ frames even in the most stressfull WoW inviroment, most of the time its about 200 frames.

Kind Regards,
/Kieron

 

When you play a pc game, it utilizes components like the CPU, video card, and memory(RAM) with very little resources being dependent on your storage. An SSD may allow for you to load levels slightly faster and will only make like 2-3 fps difference, u would be better off spending that £150-£200 on some thing else.

 

Since stakka has brought this up I might as well jump in; I've been meaning to upgrade for a while but haven't got around to it until now. I've got a friend that's going to help me build it and we've more or less decided on parts (can get them at an amazing price from a local pc shop). Let me know if it looks okay, or if you could recommend a better one that'd be good

Zalman Z11 Case (Just because I like bulky things with shiny fans and it's got a good inside layout)
Corsair 600X PSU (Easy to upgrade to a larger gfx card later)
Intel Core i5-3570K 3.4Ghz Processor (If i'm spending money on an upgrade I like to at least double performance; can also increase clock speed at a later date)
Gigabyte Z77-D3H motherboard
2GB Radeon HD7850 Card
8GB RAM
2TB HDD with a 120GB Samsung 840 SSD (2TB is only £10 more than 1TB so it's a good deal)

Any feedback is welcomed, the only thing I wasn't really certain about was the SSD.

 

Personally i prefer NVIDIAs line of graphichs card (using 660Ti atm) and i would go for Intels 250Gb SSD as boot drive and primary game disk, using the slower 2TB disk for storage. I choose the 250Gb over the 120GB due to games becomming increasingly larger and i really want a fast bootup.