Thinking of upgrading my cpu/mother/memory

[Dinazzo]

Cheers everyone

i been running a
Intel core quad cpu Q6600 2.4ghz
8Gb memory
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280

i was thinking of upgrading to a
I7 920 proc
with 12 gig memory
same graphics card

i just wanted to know if this would help me alot or would i be wasting my money
the reason is i want better game play in cities and WG battle grounds

my current system lags in Dalaran and WG its not really bad but sometimes its just too much
as overall playing away from the cities and bgs it plays great hardly no lag just in those troublesome areas

cheers and thanks for the advice

Dinazzo

[Dinazzo]

I mean motherboard not my mother lol cheers lol

[alcattle]

The upgrade would help, question is how much. Also need to find where the lag is coming from, like it my be while loading from disk so a SSD might help more. I would try that first, $150 and it can go with you if/when you upgrade. Also how is the latancy? How full is your realm? Anything can cause lag.

[Ualaa]

I went from a Q6600 (stock speed), 8GB of good DDR2 (800mhz), and a 4870 X2 video card.

I upgraded to an i7 920 (stock again), 12GB of DDR3 (1600mhz), on an Asus P6T motherboard.
Unfortunately, the board did not like my 4870X2 Ati card, but I downgraded to a GTX 275 (comparable to the 4870 X1).



With the Q6600...
- I could break follow, mounted in Dalaran.
- I could break follow, flying with quick altitude changes on epic mounts (any toon leading).
- I could lose mounted follow in Alterac Valley.
- The game was playable anywhere, but my CPU would reach 100% in Dalaran/Wintergrasp.

With the i7 920...
- I cannot break follow in Dalaran, unless they get caught on a corner.
- I can only break follow (epic flying) if the Paladin is leading with Crusader Aura on (not including crossing phased areas).
- Alterac Valley is smooth everywhere.
- My CPU does not go over 25% anywhere.
- Dalaran is not high frames per second, but even very expensive computers aren't 60 FPS everywhere in Dal.



The i7 920 was initially purchased shortly after moving to IS Boxer from Keyclone.
IS Boxer is a bit more intensive on the system, so if I was still using KC the improvement would likely be slightly better then it is; and it is a massive improvement.

I've also put warcraft on a 64GB SSD, which was also a huge improvement.
But that was quite a bit after the CPU/Ram/Motherboard upgrade and the video downgrade.

[Dinazzo]

my ping in game goes from 100 to around 500 varies never realy the same most of the time around 200 to 300

i have the same problems ulaa mention pretty much the same thing
i also now use ISboxer

my server is meduim to high some times very high

i was thinking of getting a ssd driver but i have 1Tb and a 300g sata drives 300g not being used atm
i have no idea how to hook the SDD up with my 1Tb drive something about raids and setting them up i not done before

i pretty decent on working on a pc but i never fooled with a raid setup

Dinazzo

[Ualaa]

The easiest upgrade will be a smaller SSD, you won't need more then 30GB.
I went with a Patriot Torqx 64 GB SSD, which was the smallest in its line.
220mb/sec sequential reads, and a 10 year warranty was a good selling point.
It has the wiper.exe utility (if you're running Win7) which is the same thing as TRIM.

I had to format mine, before it was accessible to add/copy warcraft to it.
I could see it in Device Manager, but not My Computer.

If your motherboard supports AHCI drivers or has them installed already, that is a boost for the speed of an SSD.
Pretty much, change to AHCI in Bios, if you start up you have them.
If you don't, then start in safe mode, and use the disc that came with the motherboard to install them.

There are some tricks to increasing the performance of an SSD.
Things like disabling Indexing on that drive.
If your OS is on the drive too, disable System Restore.
Quite a few tricks actually, a forum search on any site for SSD's will have them.

You won't need a RAID for an SSD.
Basically stick wow on the SSD, or even just the Cache and Data folders and use Symbolic Links to connect this to your normal wow folder. I stuck my whole wow folder on mine, its easier that way.

We don't really get any benefit from putting IS Boxer on the SSD; it runs once and then is in memory until you exit out of it.

[heyaz]

I have that exact same setup, except a ATI 4950 (or whatever). I added an SSD and now dalaran, wg, av, etc. are smooth as silk. I can even 5 box in the middle of the courtyard in WG with 100s of people and it stays pretty smooth, although I can't control the server lag. When I zone into a city, bg, or dungeon it is almost instantaneous.

I think you will still have problems if you just upgrade the CPU and RAM as the bottleneck is often the HD constantly loading 1000s of textures.

I run 2 teams, one of them uses mouse broadcasting with ISBoxer so all 5 windows are high resolution. I still get 20-40 fps even in WG with that setup. My other setup has the alt windows rendered at a very low resolution, and I can get nearly 60 fps in WG with that one.

I'd recommend an SSD over any other upgrade, it makes that big of a difference.

[Dinazzo]

ok I will look into trying that next i not sure about the drivers and motherboard drivers i knows it has sata and supports raid thats about all i know about it
ok its a xfx nForce 680i LT SLI motherboard

[Dinazzo]

Onboard Serial ATA II

300MBps data transfer rate

Six Serial ATA II connectors

NVIDIA MediaShield RAID with support for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID
0+1, RAID 5, and JBOD

Supports hot plug and NCQ (Native Command Queuing )

it what it says in the manual

[zenga]

You should consider that cataclysm is around the corner, most likely with increased demands. Which means that doing a costly upgrade now can become obsolete in lets say 6 months.