Hi.
My PC setup is this:
E8400 CPU: 3.0 GHz dual-core, 6 MB L2 Cache, 1333 FSB
4 GB DDR2 800 MHz RAM
GTX 285 2 GB video card
7200 RPM 500 GB HDD, WoW is on its own partition which I defrag+optimize every 2 weeks
700W Power Supply
I run on Windows XP 64-bit, SP2 (newest release) and the only thing running in the background is Ventrilo. I play fullscreen at 1920x1200 with Ultra settings, and in raids I get about 20-35 FPS (depending on the fight and where it is; it's higher on fights like Deathwhisper, which are inside, and lower on fights like Sindragosa, which are outside).
My suitemate also uses Ultra, on quad-core computer with a lower cache, lower FSB, and lower clock-speed, identical memory and hard drive, and a GT 9700 video card. He plays on Vista 64-bit at 1680x1050 and gets much higher framerates than I do in raids.
Is there something I should optimize...? I have my video card set to High Performance, 4x Anti-Aliasing, and everything else basically turned off to prevent it eating performance. I don't have V-sync or "Reduce Input Lag" turned on.
Is the resolution really the dealbreaker here? I just feel like with the specs I have I should be annihilating WoW, or really any game that's on the market right now.
Posts
Motherboard is an eVGA N-Force 780i, for reference. Does pretty well with overclocking, as does my fan system.
Umm. How big of a difference can dust make? There's a fair amount of dust in my case, now that I look through the window in the side of it.
you should clean out the dust. and also stop speaking like that...
Edit: also, dust is bad in that it acts as an insulator preventing your heatsinks from working properly. But if you're able to oc to 4ghz without crashing then I don't think you're having any heat related problems.
PSN: TheScrublet
This seems to point to your system being CPU bound so changing other things probably won't help you much. That's not exactly surprising given your GPU and the fact you are playing WoW but I guess the question is why your FPS is so low.
Don't really know much about WoW performance, maybe look up some WoW CPU benchmarks.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
Better ram won't help. I have the bottom of the barrel ram and a system that is much less than that and I can crush wow. Especially for wow, its just the amount of RAM, he has 4, he'll be fine.
When it comes to WoW, yes, resolution can make a difference, but I also suggest not having shadows at the absolute maximum setting if that's what it is set to, since that seems to be the biggest surprise for people getting their performance killed.
It's pretty clear that your framerate is CPU-limited in some way, though with a CPU that fast it probably shouldn't be. Then again, I have heard that raids are murder on framerates. (Having not actually played the game beyond the wanting to kill myself after an hour in the newbie area point, I have no perspective to offer.)
An addon might be the culprit.
I can't really imagine a scenario in which this would improve the framerate. Vsync always reduces the framerate, and the idea of triple-buffering is to maintain smoothness when the framerate cannot exactly match the monitor's refresh, and would only bring the framerate closer to what it would be without vsync.
Also, if you've overclocked your PC, there is a chance that it will perform horribly under load if you're undervolted. When I clocked to 4ghz, the PC ran super slow because it would make 50 non-lethal errors a second. You can easily check this by running prime95 for a while, but you've probably already done so during the overclock.
Maybe your motherboard is throttling itself a bit hard because you're running hot; most modern motherboards are capable of doing this. Try educating yourself on what some of the more esoteric bios options are, especially if you decide to flash it to the latest version.
and yeah get windows 7 man
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Shadows, Resolution, and Draw Distance are usually the 3 worst offenders. Draw Distance especially in my case. In Azeroth and to a lesser extent Outlands I can crank up the DD to max (in Outlands, near max) but in Northrend, with the extra textures and stuff it has to be at about 30% for mine not to really stutter. Saeris in the UI thread in the MMO subforum gave me a neat macro for quickly switching my draw distance between predetermined values, if you wanna give that a shot. I don't have it on hand however.