Best upgrade for my system?

[heyaz]

I've got a pretty mediocre system I'm 5 boxing on (sometimes 6). It does good enough with Innerspace and quad boxing arenas, but I told myself once I started doing well in arenas I'd throw in some upgrades

It's not a gaming system and the video card is not very good. The specs are:
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz
8GB DDR2 RAM
1066Mhz Bus (kinda slow)
ATI Radeon 3650 HD
350w power supply (need a new one if I upgrade the video card for sure)
750GB SATA II disk

My main issue is the video settings are very low, and I still get little blips when I cast big nukes or chain lightning sometimes (with <100 ms latency)

My first idea is to just got with a new power supply (600-800w should do it, I won't run SLI), and an nvidia GTX 350, 375, or whatever the upgrade of that one is. 1GB video ram for sure

Power supply + video card upgrade will run me maybe $350-$400. Would this be a worthwhile upgrade (I could probably re-use the card if I buitl a new system), or should I consider just building a new one? Can a significantly upgraded machine from what I have be built for under $1000?

Thanks

[Eloxy]

The things that catches my eyes is

1. the psu =)

2. the gfx card
and
3. the processor

As for a cheaper uppgrade i'd go for a new gfx card and psu to start with. As changing the cpu would mean that you would have to change the motherboard. =)

[-silencer-]

PSU, videocard, then get a SSD to host the WoW/Data directory (or the entire folder if you like). Q6600 is still a good CPU for multiple instances of WoW and you'll see a better benefit from faster texture fetching on a SSD. I ran 6 instances of WoW on an E6600, and adding the SSD back then was a good performance boost in busy areas and an easier/cheaper upgrade than moving to the i7-965EE/X58 platform.

Videocard will help with overall frame rates.
SSD will help prevent stuttering from fetching too many textures at once (like when many players are entering the area - BG/city areas or flying fast over terrain).
Slower quad core to faster quad core will slightly help run 4-6 instances of WoW, but I'd bet video/disk access is your real bottleneck.

[burningforce]

Fursphere is correct, try using perfmon in windows to see what is causing you to lag and what not. I bet it is the hard drive and windows background processes running while playing(i.e. defrag, windows indexing, etc).also make sure you defrag your hard drive monthly(i do mine every 2 weeks) for optimal performance.

[Bovidae]

I approve of all the suggestions above, and add one more:

Overclock your processor, it's FREE. I still have not seen a Q6600 that did not love 3.0ghz or above

[wowphreak]

There a ton of other thing yeh can tweak instead of trying to throw more hardware at it.

The operating system pare it down to bare min I bet there a ton of services that yeh can get rid of, that'll help

What resolution do you play at? the higher the res the more cpu it'll take, wow does allot of the graphics on the cpu. Adding a new grpahics card will do next to nothing.

Do you have max background frames set ?

affinity set?

what kind of addons are you running?

@burningforce: defragging your drive aint gonna make a difference I could see defragging after a major patch but even then yer not gonna notice any performance improvements

[heyaz]

The operating system pare it down to bare min I bet there a ton of services that yeh can get rid of, that'll help

Have done every software/OS tweak I could find. Turned off every service I could find, run no unnecessary background processes during play, indexing is completely disabled, paging is disabled, all vista effects are disabled at the service level. Ton of registry tweaks as well.

What resolution do you play at? the higher the res the more cpu it'll take, wow does allot of the graphics on the cpu. Adding a new grpahics card will do next to nothing.

800x600, looks terrible

I'm curious if your statement about a new gfx card doing nothing is true. The one I have is pretty bad, and people with my same CPU and better gfx cards seem to be getting much better performance.

Do you have max background frames set ?

13 in background, 45 in foreground

affinity set?

Yes, but I've noticed very little difference with different combinations. Finally just gave the foreground 1 extra core.

what kind of addons are you running?

Bare minimum. Gladius, jamba, and a cooldown timer. No UIs, no quest helper, nothing I don't absolutely need.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

The statement that "wow does a lot of graphics on the cpu" is a meaningless comment. WoW does experience bottlenecks on lower-end CPUs in 5-box situations but your Q6600 is known to be a stellar performer with a good graphics card in it. Any number of folks (me included) have zero issues with that CPU, so ignore CPU for now. (The exception is if you haven't yet set your wows up to use either all 4 cores or dedicated 2 to the first two and 3 to the second two cores. If you leave 'em at defaults, the system will only use the first two cores.)

Your graphics card is roughly equivalent to an NVidia 9600GS, which is a sucktastic card for multiboxing WoW. Upgrade to a 9800GT/GTX series, NVidia GTX260 series or an ATI 4870 series, or better, depending on how much money you want to spend (all of those are under $200). I run 4 WoWs on a 9600GT 256mb card with a Q6600 at 2.4GHz and it runs like a champ.

Your PSU will have to go but you knew that already. Otherwise you're fine.

[heyaz]

What would be a decent card to go with, in the $200-$300 range? I've seen the GTX 275 in that range from several vendors, as well as the ATI 48xx ones, but I don't know how they compare. I plan on grabbing a 600-700w power supply for the thing.

[Fef]

The statement that "wow does a lot of graphics on the cpu" is a meaningless comment. WoW does experience bottlenecks on lower-end CPUs in 5-box situations but your Q6600 is known to be a stellar performer with a good graphics card in it. Any number of folks (me included) have zero issues with that CPU, so ignore CPU for now. (The exception is if you haven't yet set your wows up to use either all 4 cores or dedicated 2 to the first two and 3 to the second two cores. If you leave 'em at defaults, the system will only use the first two cores.)

QFT.

I would say, get a 4870, the PSU to juice it up, and a good (can be small in volume) SSD to run your WoW folder from.