Best upgrade for my system?

[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.

[wowphreak]

At the moment I'm seeing just how much a difference graphic card actually does I just got a new comp.

Gonna try with an older graphics card first see how it runs the compare it to a newer one I have then I'm gonna get a brand spanking new one

first card is an old ati card with 256 megs ram pci its like 10 years old
after that I'll try a newer one ati with 512 megs of ram pci-e

Still trying to figure out what card I'm gonna buy been eyeballing a radeon hd 5850

With my old comp 5 boxing places like old kingdom, tournament area and dalaran it would just bog down and thats with everything turned down/off at 800X600.

[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.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Still trying to figure out what card I'm gonna buy been eyeballing a radeon hd 5850

Be very careful when shopping for video cards. I don't know how ATI's cards stack up but the first digit in the model number isn't usually very significant in terms of performance. Example: NVidia 8800GT is much faster than a 9600GT/GS.

Some links for you to check out for performance reviews:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17652/3
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3650&p=13
http://www.google.com/search?q=radeo...ient=firefox-a

[heyaz]

Thanks, looked at those. Although I'm a bit concerned about how relevant those are to multiboxing wow and handling several clients which all need memory/processing for textures. All these reviews just run the same 1 or 2 fps games like Crysis.

I guess I've narrowed it down to about the $200-$250 price range, in which I found the GTX 275 with 1GB ram, or the ATI 4890 overclocked with about the same ram. The next step up from those looks to be about $500 and I just don't think I need that.

My only experience with the nvidia 2xx cards is on my dad's machine which has a 260. It ran a single client, max everything (except shadows, forget 30fps hit for something that doesn't even look cool) at 1650x1080 (or w/e) at 60-90 fps no problem. Multiboxing 6 cleints, it did very well - no lag really at all, with the main at about 75% and the alts at 50% settings or so.