Which would improve my system most more ram or Video Card

[Vmpwraith]

Yeah cheers... I did get a 3 day ban when I was playing out of China on the US servers but I got it fixed by talking to a few people at blizzard. The ban was lifted and I could play ok but the lag was a killer. I didn't have any problems with IP blocking or anything, but things may have changed now.

Now I just play Chinese Servers. Yeah I may have to head to HK for the 64 bit Vista. Most of the hardware is cheap enough here if you bargain for it.

In the end I want to upgrade the Motherboard CPU so I dont really want to pay twice for RAM ddr2 >ddr3 and my current board only has two slots for ram and the 4gig sticks are a little harder to find. If only I wasn't moving apartment soon and I could spend that money on new kit.

[Terraelf]

Although I was the one to say as for hard drive upgrades, 'don't bother'... well ok if you decide to go solid state disk (SSD) and you split your hard drive that runs wow off onto another disk from your operating system, there will be a positive impact. In addition, you can have a hard drive for each instance of wow which will help mostly in content like Dalaran where there are a lot of things going on. However, the performance increase for the SSD will be minimal compared to the other upgrades we've been discussing for your system in its current state. I'd recommend saving hard drive for last.... As for going RAID 0... yes technically it would help, but I don't believe there will be appropriate bang for the buck.

Memory still HAS to be first and to fix that you have to fix the 64 bit problem. I don't know why someone said 4 GB is enough. I've been 5 boxing for quite a while now and never have I found 4 GB to be sufficient. I had horrendous performance problems caused by memory prior to making the 64 bit leap and 8 GB upgrade and have been much happier since.

As for the person that suggested the Geforce 260 GTX over the 280 GTX. I would agree with that statment as there's not really a different worth paying for between these two cards. However the suggestion was the 285 GTX. The big break-through with the 285 (and 295) version of the card is the move to the 55 nm architecture, which means less power consumption and yields higher performance. However, since you are tossing out the option of getting the Geforce GTX 295, if you're comfortable spending that kind of money, the 295 is clearly far superior to the 285. I personally didn't find the value in paying that much more for the video card. See: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3501

[elsegundo]

i personally think upgrading your videocard will not improve performance. you will be tempted to improve your graphics to the point that your performance will be just the same as before, only tihs time, things will look a lot nicer. lol.

but if you can avoid turning up the graphic settings, then sure, get the graphics card. it can easily go into a new rig also. not so with the ram/processor, as we're in the time between production models, Core2 quad --> i7. you can wiat til the growth phase of the i7 to start buying the stuff. any pci-e card made today will probably last you a while.

[Catamer]

it sounds like you have the memory maxed out for the OS you are using
if you can only upgrade on thing then it will have to be the video card.

It is my experience that the video card is doing a majority of the work so you should see a pretty hefty improvement with a faster video card.
the only possible drawback would be the 32 bit OS.

Try one with more that 256M , preferably 512M or 1G.

[Vmpwraith]

Woot I got a new gpu today a Nividea gt9600 1gig card. It's working sweet and the framerate is great. I just need to sort out the gamma as it's very dark when I play wow. Once thats done it'll be running sweet. I looked for a gt295 card but they wanted 2500RMB about 350-400US for it which seemed a little excessive.

Anyway I wish I had had a better card fro the last 4 years. The game truley does look amazing with the improved card.

[suicidesspyder]

Nice nice. Im working with fixing my laptop now. Lol duo core for me with 4gb of ram as well. My comps pretty new like 6 months so i have a pretty good video card. Just wish i could upgrade the ram in this bad boy oh well. But also thinking of getting a 500gb hdd due to the 280gb i have now so i think with wow all on the 500gb external one it might give me faster load times which will be nice then just gotta get more ram. Oh yea where do i get the 64 bit vista so i can upgrade outta the 32 i have a legit copy due to buying from dell.