Looking for upgrade advice

[Tehtsuo]

So I built this system a while back to be the be-all and end-all of 5 box WoW multiboxing. At that time pretty much every part was top of the line. With Cataclysm, I know it's now a little more dated, but it still does a top-rate job for the most part. I get max fps at 60 foreground and 30 background 95% of the time, but I have noticed that when I drop 5 sets of totems I lose a massive amount of fps, and it gets hard to control. Where can I improve for the best bang for buck?

ASRock X58 Supercomputer Mobo
Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz
CORSAIR XMS3 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2M080G2XXX 2.5" 80GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
BFGTech GTX 260

I don't get model-loading lag in Orgrimmar except in very rare circumstances, usually during prime time, and I don't consider that a deal-breaker. My first impulse is to say my video card would be the best upgrade, it's probably one of the more dated pieces of the puzzle. If so, do I need to go overboard with it, or are mid-range cards going to give me more than what I need for this application?

Also: Should I consider overclocking the vid card before I replace it to squeeze out the performance I need, or is it not a good candidiate? Keep in mind, I don't believe it's worth anything because resell value on video cards isn't exactly a factor, so it wouldn't bother me to blow it up and get a new one...

[Noids]

Two areas stand out to me, video and RAM. Very cheap to drop in another 6GB in that setup, either another 3x2GB set or even swapping to a 3x4GB set should be ~$100. Video wise something like an Nvidia 570 would be the way to go IMO. If you can afford it, the 580 is amazing (I switched from a 295GTX which had very similar performance to your 260 thanks to SLI issues and the improvement was quite tangible on a 2560x1600 screen). I have never found GPUs to be particularly rewarding to overclock personally. If you want to overclock anything, the CPU is a good candidate and relatively straightforward to get up to 4GHz from the standard 2.66 on air, espeically if you drop in memory around 1866MHz into it.

Cheers

[daviddoran]

I was gonna type a response, then I read Noids response, and I was gonna say the exact same thing.

[Tehtsuo]

Tried overclocking. The ROI was minimal because I couldn't go very high at all without introducting instability. Oh well, I'll be ordering a 580 in a few days, that should take care of the problem. I might add a 12gb batch of memory, but so far I haven't seen my memory utilization max out. Does wow only use up to a percentage of your max memory and that amount will increase if I get more, or will I not benefit from additional memory?

[ebony]

ram be a good update, 6gb is hard to 5 box on

[Tehtsuo]

ram be a good update, 6gb is hard to 5 box on

Hmm. I was running 5 and never had problems outside of Orgrimmar when I had Win 7 32 bit installed, so that was 3gb. Now that I reloaded to 64 bit I don't see much performance hit at all even running around Orgrimmar. I guess 12gb would make Orgrimmar run smooth as glass.

[Toned]

64 bit OS + atleast 8gigs of ram + atleast 1-2gb video + 1 SSD for wow/OS = profit