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WoW: A New Computer
Nik Huze
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
My brother wants to get a computer for the main purpose of playing WoW. Neither of us know anything about computrons being solely console gamers. What is the cheapest desktop or laptop he can get away with and still run WoW smoothly?
Nik Huze on
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Seriously though, any computer with a mid-range graphics card, and a bucket of ram, will be fine. And by a bucket of ram, I'm talking minimum 2GB, preferably 4GB. but Ram is cheap now, so it almost doesn't factor into the cost.
that's it.
as blackwind put it "a ham sandwich could run WoW"
it's not demanding at all. you can get a comp screen and all from like walmart for ~500 that will play it fine
Yes, you can run WoW fairly well on a $500 computer, but I wouldnt say flawlessly. It'll never run like a slideshow or anything at that pricepoint, but a couple hundred more and it would be perfect for WoW and most anything else on the market and be good for Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 whenever they eventually land for a casual.
you'd be surprised what 500 dollars will get you nowadays
edit for 600
to be fair, you could have a fucking 4000 super workstation and it would stutter loading dalaran
I guess I could have been more specific. I run it flawlessly but I also play mostly during off hours when there aren't a metric ton of players online. Also I couldn't play at full res because the monitor I had at the time couldn't handle it. (stupid small lcd's)
Athlon 64 3000+ - the old socket 754 version
1.5GB RAM
plain old 7200 rpm IDE hard drive
512MB nVidia 7300GT AGP video card
I run WoW at 1440x900 with several settings on high and all at least in the middle other than shadows, because shadows will fucking kill your computer, and a few small mods. The framerate is not spectacular by any means, but is perfectly fine for WoW's gameplay - in outlands and the original areas I tend to run anywhere from 40-60fps. In Northrend (the newest expansion) I max out at about 30fps. Dalaran is the only place that is absolutely miserable and even Dalaran is still navigable and fairly smooth except at the busiest of times.
A modern computer with a multi-core cpu and more, faster ram even with an equivalent video card would be pretty nice. A bit nicer video card and you'd be very happy, I think.
Drops in FPS in high traffic areas is more a lag issue than an actual performance issue on your end.
My System destroys WoW:
Intel Core2Duo E6750
XFX Nvidia 680i LT
4GB PC6400 DDR2 Ram
XFX GeForce 9800 GTX + (single card - SLI is more trouble than it's worth.)
This computer is a little over a year old, and I just updgraded my GPU right when the 9800 GTX + came out. This summer when I get some cash I am looking to upgrade my motherboard and processor.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
Most bang for the buck is probably still an 8800gt, but a 9600gt or ati's 4870 are all roughly equivalent.
A salesperson might try to tell you the onboard graphics card will run WoW, or that it has up to 512 mb ram (just as much as the cards I mentioned) maybe even a big number like 9300 in the name, these are not technically lies but you will end up with is shitty performance. You can still buy a computer that has an onboard video card, you just have to disable said card and buy a decent video card.
The best deals to be had are generally online at newegg or tigerdirect, but you might need to do a little research. I think there is a thread in G&T about computers
Edit:http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=70070
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