Upgrade choice?

[dancook]

Off my head I have a Q6600, 4gb ram. I think it's a 4970 graphics card. The graphics card and my SSD I expect are fine.

I five box WOW, and want to improve performance.

For me a quick fix is something like this

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...odid=BU-030-OB

CPU: Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz @ 4.00GHz
Motherboard: Asus Rampage II Extreme (Socket 1366) DDR3 Motherboard
RAM: Corsair XMS3 (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Triple Channel

What I want to know is, if this upgrade is fine - or if I should have goals in mind when choosing hardware?

Cheers, Dan

[Buetzel]

i think your upgrade plans are fine.

i personally went with 12gb ram (2gb per instance - which is the maximum wow can possibly use for one instance, also fiveboxing, which leaves another 2gb for the os) - but that never maxes out. i think i see around 8gb used with wow - using isboxer with instant switch, so basically running 5 instances at 1680x1050 and a lot of addons on all instances (i don't disable those for slaves).

i also switched to a geforce gtx 460 (factory oc'd one), as i wanted to use directx11, but my card before was a rather aged 8800 gts 512. so i think you could still wait with a gpu upgrade.

as to specifics:
cpu is a fine choice. probably the best bang for the buck at the moment.
edit: just saw you plan on oc'ing the cpu - so make sure to get a good aftermarket cooler or even watercooling. i would check tomshardware.com for a decision on which one. perhaps more oc'ing-savvy people might be able to recommend a better source for cooling reviews.

board is mainly a preference question of manufacturer and features like raid, i/o options and stuff. i´m running an asus p6t se myself. it's okay i guess. your choice here seems fine to me.

ram is something i never seem to get right. just be sure to look in the list of compatible ram modules for that asus board on the asus website. saves a lot of trouble.

[dancook]

Thanks

Ok I'll look into the possibilities of 12gb ram then.

The CPU comes overclocked - the hardware is setup to work together and has warranty as an overclocked bundle.

However I may do my own research into a combination to be use 12gb ram.

I read the performance of wow can be increased putting it in dx11 mode with a dx11 card.

[Buetzel]

yeah, i read that, too.
but that is only a useful information if you already have a directx11 gpu and are running wow in directx9 mode.
obviously an older card cannot benefit from directx11 mode (i don't exactly know if directx11 commands are emulated via cpu then, i doubt a performance gain in that case).

so if you have a powerful dx10 card - well... then you have a powerful dx10 card, which runs wow in dx9 mode (there is no dx10 mode that i know of).

a dx11 capable card should be run in dx11 mode, though. always a gain, up to 20% if you have a lower end cpu - or perhaps if you are multiboxing. but i think there are far more knowledgable people about this specific topic on this board than me.

all in all wow stays cpu heavy, so everything a newer card would do, would be to enable you to run a bit higher graphics settings on your clients. i say "a bit higher" because the most limiting factor is and probably always will be the cpu, rather than the gpu. that's why a strong cpu is always a better upgrade as a strong gpu.

bad implementation on blizzard's side, i guess. only guesswork, though. i'm not that much into game programming in general and have absolutely no idea of the wow-sourcecode, so i couldn't decide if this could be solved better.

[Noids]

I just recently got a GTX580 to upgrade from my GTX295 and it did make a big difference for me running 5 x instances on a 2560x1600 screen. This would be a similar upgrade for you, and possibly more, so I would consider upgrading your video if you can afford it.

The specs for the system look good, the True cooler that is in the package is more than capable of having that CPU run at 4GHz. Personally I never found much added performance running my 920 overclocked to 4GHz for WoW, but it is something that is so easy and safe to do with these processors, you would almost be crazy not to.

The only word of caution is that sometimes having 12G of RAM in 6 modules makes the overclocking a little trickier If the system is going to come factory overclocked, Check this with them first. Given the improvements with the newer i7s over my C0 920 though, I am sure it would still be a piece of cake.