PC performance issues - system review

[katsurahama]

I recently upgraded my video card and CPU but did not get the performance gain I was expecting. With my current setup I cannot take all 5 toons into stormwind because the FPS on all of them (even the master) drops to 0-3. I can take three in, but no more than that. Even then its choppy. I have the graphics slider in wow set to minimum. The only change I made was upping the view distance to Good. I have the master's FPS limited to 30 and the slaves to 15 through isboxer. I run all copies of WoW from the same folder (one installation). My connection is not the issue; my latency is fine even in SW. When I switched from an older athlon dual core cpu and an 8800gt video card I was expecting more of a performance boost. The game at least runs fine now when not in stormwind but I have the graphics turned all the way down. I was hoping to do more than just be able to run the master at 30fps. I cannot remove the fps throttle in isboxer or I get highly erratic framerates (15-60) for no apparent reason. I have no viruses or rootkits. I have pretty much nothing installed except xp and wow. This computer is not bloated with a bunch of crap installed. Thanks for any help you can offer.

What should I do to increase performance without building another computer?

OS: Windows XP Pro 32-bit, DX9

CPU AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition

MoBo ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe AM2 (flashed to support my new AM3 chip)

Video Card XFX HD-577A-ZNFC Radeon HD 5770

PS CORSAIR Enthusiast Series CMPSU-650TX 650W

RAM 4GB SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)

HDD 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s

[icecore]

I think ram is you're limiting factor, I had 8 gigs and it was just slighly more than i needed, but at moments I would run out of memory. I upgraded to 16 and its great now. Everything else should be fine, also setting view distance to fair or low may help, (requires a fair bit of cpu power) Have you considered upgrading to a 1055t sixcore?

[katsurahama]

I built this pc in 2008. Id have to buy another mobo for that cpu.

And 32 bit windows doesnt even use the entire 4gb of ram i have.

[Sajuuk]

I built this pc in 2008. Id have to buy another mobo for that cpu.

And 32 bit windows doesnt even use the entire 4gb of ram i have.

That's your problem.

Go with 64 bit and 8gb of ram.

Consider switching to windows 7 as well. JUST BECAUSE

[mikekim]

I built this pc in 2008. Id have to buy another mobo for that cpu.

And 32 bit windows doesnt even use the entire 4gb of ram i have.

it won't as 32bit versions of windows include your video ram total in the 4gb limit. (i.e. if you have a 768mb card windows will show around 3.25gb available) which is why most system builders at the time configured systems with 3gb ram and a 1gb video card

[myrsnipe]

When I went from 3 chars to 5 chars, my laptop could no longer keep up with rendering all the clients on 2 screens. Going back to one screen increased main window fps from 10-15 to 30-40 which made it playable, ofc this is on a huge 50 inch tv so I can tolerate having multiple small follower clients on the same screen.

Keep in mind that my laptop is a dual core 2 duo with 4 gig ram, it should be doable to 5 box for pve on most systems.
pvp is another matter however, have to wait for two more paychecks before I'll buy a new rig :S

[icecore]

do you have 4, 1 gig sticks or 2, 2gig? definitely should upgrade your ram and possibly get win7 64bit. You can find 8gig of ddr2 fairly cheap around 100$.

[Aragent]

Upgarding ram, with XP-Pro 32bit beyound the 4gigs he has now is not a wise use of his money
a small SSD would be bigger perormance gane with xp-pro 32bit,

However Like the others I would recomend upgrading to a 64 bit program and going to 8 or more gigs if your Motherboard will handle it.

[Bollwerk]

The only change I made was upping the view distance to Good.

One one toon or all of them?
Are you using one monitor or more?
What size monitor(s)?

As a comparison, I 5-box on one PC as well:
Intel Core 2 Q6600
8GB RAM (Win 7x64)
64GB Crucial Real SSD C300 (on 6.0 GB/s SATA)
Nvidia GTX 280
30" LCD

I still have to have everything set to the lowest graphics settings and only ONE toon can have "good" view distance when in populated areas. Even so, I STILL end up having around 10FPS in places like Stormwind. Keep in mind too that WoW runs MUCH better on Intel procs than AMD. See my other thread for more info.

[katsurahama]

I ordered 4 more gigs of identical ram. Eight is the max my mobo supports. I also ordered a 60 gb ssd. Thanks for the advice everyone offered. I will change the os to either xp 64 bit or windows 7.

I remember seeing a post on here about installing wow twice and isboxer twice, each on different drives, to speed up performance but i cant find it again. Am i imagining things?