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intel released the i7 970 today its a 6core 12threaded beast, it is identical the the $1000 980x but with a locked multi and a tad slower, it is stock at 3.33GHz and from what i can tell will be about 1/3 the cost. im replacing my i7 920 with one just 'cause i want to.
The i7-970 is on newegg for $899 where the i7-980X is $999, not that big a difference, prices might be wrong?
Does CPU architecture and number of cores (past minimum of 4) really make a big difference, or do we have any indication that it will in cataclysm? I got my best performance in WOTLK with high amounts of RAM and paging disabled entirely, plus a solid state drive. Given a good amount of RAM where swapping never happens anda video card with enough power and RAM to hold all the textures, and a solid state drive to load them near instant, how much is left for the CPU to process? I may be wrong but I never thought WoW to be that dependent on just the CPU... can remember reading a lot of stories of people with top end i7s not being able to get the performance they were hoping for.... I never went past my Q6600...
From everything I've read WoW is more CPU limited than GPU (seen benchmarks that show a 5750 and a 5970 both getting same framerate) so my thinking is that since it is CPU limited and doesn't take advantage of multi-cores or multi-threading that putting 1 client per core would be essentially as effective as running 1 client on a single-core standalone box. It won't be exactly as good due to sharing of memory and buses etc but still should show improvement over 5 clients + OS sharing 4 cores
I think RAM and data transfer are the biggest areas that WoW slows down with. Many people do fine with core duo's and older GPUs. My quad and 8800 w/320 megs were fine. Get over 4 gigs and a 64 bit OS for the best upgrade for the money
alcattle is correct. Once you get the wow folder into ram you are gold.
its not the I7 its the X58 that is the benifit.
I run 7 clients on amd X2 (30 fps in the field and 10fps in daralan (oh well ....) and under 100ms ping all the time) cpu isnt the problem.
All the lag is from moving textures from the hard drive to the gpu.
Although all my computers are AMD the only logical advise at this point is X58 and 920 (bang for the buck).
Get X58 and 24G ram end of story, once you have those two you don't need much of anything else to be of the highest quality for no lag play.
Buy in this order:
X58 MB with ability to go to 24G ram
24G ram
920
best video card you can afford (but again not needing top price stuff if you have other 3 items).
If you have 24G ram you dont need SSD ....
No way you need 24g of ram.
i have 12g of ram and 5 box and it only uses up 4-5gig max with 5 clients, internet explorer, pandora and a couple other background apps running.
24gig of ram is just ludicrous.
I think he was referring to utilizing excess RAM as a ramdisk, and run wow off of that, which would be significantly faster than an SSD, but a whole lot more complex and expensive. For the amount of money you'd spend on 24GB of ram you could purchase a very nice RAID of quality SSDs, and save yourself a lot of headache.
I think 12GB is the ideal amount for a triple channel system, unless 3GB chips start becoming popular, and 9GB triple channel configurations would be a good bargain. I have 8GB ram in a dual channel setup and its just enough.
Im not saying you NEED to put the wow folder in ram but if you do then you get no lag.
My point is instead of buying better cpu or better video card or SSD your money is better spent on more ram.
A cheap SSD does the trick... upgrading it to a RAM drive seems like nothing but overkill.