Building a rig for WoW.

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DMystikaLD

Gawd
Joined
Apr 14, 2003
Messages
603
So...

I've been told that WoW is mostly CPU dependent, and less GPU dependent than other games. Is this really the case?

I play 90% WoW and 10% TF2/L4D/COD. I'm looking to get a rig that's best suited to WoW, and will run TF2/L4D/COD (MW2) at more than acceptable levels.

I'm leaning towards the Core i5 w/ 8 GB RAM and overclocking the crap out of it -- but I've been stuck on a few things.

1) Processor. Better to get the i5 and OC, or should I just go for the I7 EE? Cost is an issue, but if I can get away with less graphics power and more CPU power that will benefit me, it may be worth it.

2) If WoW isn't as GPU dependent as I originally thought, I may consider just going for the ATI 5870, as the price is right... instead of waiting for the G300.

3) This is running on 3 x 30" Dells (will have a secondary card for two of the screens).

Thoughts?
 
get a solid aftermarket heatsink (shouldn't be more than 50-60 bucks) and OC the stock i5 (2.66?) to 3.6-3.8, that will do just dandy.

for 3 30 inchers, even with wow, a single card might strain a bit. Keep shadows off and I think a single 5870 might be fine. If you get a second 5870, I think the 3.6 clock on the i5 will still be enough.

There is a point where processing power is no longer bottlenecking wow...I don't notice too much of a diff between my i7 at 4.0Ghz and my older Q6600 at 3.2Ghz.


Also, make sure you set the "affinitymask" in the config.wtf file of your wow folder to 15. Standard is 3 That will provide a a bigger fps boost (well, a much much higher and more consistent minimum fps) than anything else. This will let wow make use of more than 2 cores (but no more than 3.5 I think).
 
That should be a fine setup. Just make sure you get a good clock on the i5.

As for the card, if you are running 3x 30 inchers you might want to consider the 5 series for is multi monitor support instead of getting another card to drive the 3rd.
 
I would think a 5870 should handle a single 30" monitor for WoW pretty easily.

It is CPU dependent in some places and GPU dependent in other places. the GPU dependency will probably go up a bit more when the new expansion is released.

I play on a 22" at 1680x1050 with 4xAA and all detail exept shadows turned all the way up with the system in my sig. (edge detect is turned on in CCC and i use vsync and triple buffering in WoW)

Due to poor threading in the game, I am CPU limited in some places even though the CPU usage only ever gets up to about 40-50%. Hopefully they will fix this sometime soon.

In other places I am GPU limited... mostly places where there are lots of trnsparencies... the 5870 should handle those areas a whole lot better than my overclocked 4850.
 
lloose said:
That should be a fine setup. Just make sure you get a good clock on the i5.

As for the card, if you are running 3x 30 inchers you might want to consider the 5 series for is multi monitor support instead of getting another card to drive the 3rd.
Click to expand...

According to the post, the second AND third monitor will be driven by a seperate card. This will leave all of the 5870's power to drive the display that WoW is running on.
 
cyclone3d said:
I would think a 5870 should handle a single 30" monitor for WoW pretty easily.

It is CPU dependent in some places and GPU dependent in other places. the GPU dependency will probably go up a bit more when the new expansion is released.

I play on a 22" at 1680x1050 with 4xAA and all detail exept shadows turned all the way up with the system in my sig. (edge detect is turned on in CCC and i use vsync and triple buffering in WoW)

Due to poor threading in the game, I am CPU limited in some places even though the CPU usage only ever gets up to about 40-50%. Hopefully they will fix this sometime soon.

In other places I am GPU limited... mostly places where there are lots of trnsparencies... the 5870 should handle those areas a whole lot better than my overclocked 4850.
Click to expand...

Oof. Why do you have triple buffering on? Massive massive frame rate loss for me. What advantage does it actually bring?
 
Wazooty said:
get a solid aftermarket heatsink (shouldn't be more than 50-60 bucks) and OC the stock i5 (2.66?) to 3.6-3.8, that will do just dandy.

for 3 30 inchers, even with wow, a single card might strain a bit. Keep shadows off and I think a single 5870 might be fine. If you get a second 5870, I think the 3.6 clock on the i5 will still be enough.

There is a point where processing power is no longer bottlenecking wow...I don't notice too much of a diff between my i7 at 4.0Ghz and my older Q6600 at 3.2Ghz.


Also, make sure you set the "affinitymask" in the config.wtf file of your wow folder to 15. Standard is 3 That will provide a a bigger fps boost (well, a much much higher and more consistent minimum fps) than anything else. This will let wow make use of more than 2 cores (but no more than 3.5 I think).
Click to expand...


Not much difference between a Q6600 at 3.2 and an i7 at 4.0 in WoW.... ummmm, something is seriously not right with your i7 system then. Your 9800GTX+ is a serious bottleneck for your current processor, but you should have seen a large jump in FPS in Dalaran unless you always run with shadows all the way off.
 
Quick question, is the allure of wow across 3 30" displays not enough to make you want to run all of them on the 5870? Or is that more of a performance issue as that much resolution might lag the card?
 
Wazooty said:
Oof. Why do you have triple buffering on? Massive massive frame rate loss for me. What advantage does it actually bring?
Click to expand...

Runnign triple buffering keep the FPS from having to 1/2 each time it can't handle a certain FPS with vsync on.

If you just have vsync on and your computer can't handle 60fps, it will drop to 30... and then to 15, then to 7.5, etc.

With vsync and triple buffering it will still limit the FPS to your screen refresh rate, but keep it from having to 1/2 the FPS if it can't handle FPS equal to the screen refresh rate.
 
cyclone3d said:
Not much difference between a Q6600 at 3.2 and an i7 at 4.0 in WoW.... ummmm, something is seriously not right with your i7 system then. Your 9800GTX+ is a serious bottleneck for your current processor, but you should have seen a large jump in FPS in Dalaran unless you always run with shadows all the way off.
Click to expand...

Before I got 30fps on average, now I get 35fps on average, on very busy nights in dal.

And yes, I'm aware my gpu is oldish.

Do the setaffinitymask thing I showed earlier. It changes everything. Before I got into the low 20s/high teens in dal, especially when turning. Now, turning barely lowers fps.

Try it. Once wow uses more cores on a quad core of any sort, then you start to come into the realm of "not cpu bottlenecked".

Change it to "15" for a quad core, "255" for an i7. If you set it above 15 and run a quad core, I don't think there's any difference than just setting it to 15.

the line looks like this:

SET processAffinityMask "3"
 
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Wazooty said:
Oof. Why do you have triple buffering on? Massive massive frame rate loss for me. What advantage does it actually bring?
Click to expand...

Look at it this way.. your monitor will only refresh a certain amount of times per second. If it refreshes 60 times per second, even though your fraps says its running 140fps, you are only seeing 60 of them. Because of that you may notice skipping or tearing on your screen from the difference between the 2.

With world of warcraft, you will usually reach a bottleneck in the software before you bottleneck your hardware. The engine is old and can only handle so much. Pair that with 1000s of people and textures trying to load, refresh and redraw live on your screen and you will always run into issues. You can't build a machine that will handle Dalaran at +60fps during peak hours of population on a high pop server.
 
lloose said:
Look at it this way.. your monitor will only refresh a certain amount of times per second. If it refreshes 60 times per second, even though your fraps says its running 140fps, you are only seeing 60 of them. Because of that you may notice skipping or tearing on your screen from the difference between the 2.

With world of warcraft, you will usually reach a bottleneck in the software before you bottleneck your hardware. The engine is old and can only handle so much. Pair that with 1000s of people and textures trying to load, refresh and redraw live on your screen and you will always run into issues. You can't build a machine that will handle Dalaran at +60fps during peak hours of population on a high pop server.
Click to expand...

I have vsync on, which caps it at 60fps and eliminates tearing. Triple buffering however.
 
Wazooty said:
Before I got 30fps on average, now I get 35fps on average, on very busy nights in dal.

And yes, I'm aware my gpu is oldish.

Do the setaffinitymask thing I showed earlier. It changes everything. Before I got into the low 20s/high teens in dal, especially when turning. Now, turning barely lowers fps.

Try it. Once wow uses more cores on a quad core of any sort, then you start to come into the realm of "not cpu bottlenecked".

Change it to "15" for a quad core, "255" for an i7. If you set it above 15 and run a quad core, I don't think there's any difference than just setting it to 15.
Click to expand...

I do have my affinity mask set to 15. My FPS in DAL when crowded doesn't drop below 35-40. When it is not crowded I get 55-60(limited by vsync). 4xAA, all detail on highest settings except for shadows which are two notches from the highest.

If you only got a 5fps gain in Dal going from the Q6600 at 3.2 to your i7 at 4.0, you are seriously GPU limited.

I know I am CPU limited as my GPU usage doesn't go over about 40% in Dal while the 1st core on my CPU is at 70-80% and the others are at about 10-20% when in Dal.

Like I said before.. the threading in WoW sucks... if it didn't, it wouldn't be so CPU bound.
 
Wow, Wazooty, thanks for the tip on setting Affinitymask to 15, MAJOR difference! Smooth as butter now.
 
Wazooty said:
I have vsync on, which caps it at 60fps and eliminates tearing. Triple buffering however.
Click to expand...

Triple buffering is a personal preference thing imo. I have it turned on because it feels like it smooths things out. People will say that it causes mouse lag, but its WoW... not COD4 or CS. I don't notice any lag anyways.
 
i7 1366 and 5870 for 3x30" setup. That would be rediculously emmersive!
 
Honestly if cost is an issues, I would go for the following..

-Core 2 duo 8400 and overclock. Having a cpu that starts off at 3ghz will help a lot. Wow will benefit clock for clock. Don't bother with an entry level quad.
-4gb of ddr2 800mhz. Get some that will support your overclock. 2 sticks of 2gb. Don't fill up the slots.
-Decent overclocking motherboard. Theres a lot of them, just pick one that fits your budget.
-Pick any card that fits your budget. I would not go below a 4850 or 9800gt in performance.

You wont be able to run on "Ultra" settings but you wont get much further with an overclocked i7 setup either due to engine issues.
 
Wazooty said:
Quick question, is the allure of wow across 3 30" displays not enough to make you want to run all of them on the 5870? Or is that more of a performance issue as that much resolution might lag the card?
Click to expand...

I haven't actually tested it. But there's no way my current system can handle it. As-is I have to leave max details off in order to make it playable on 1 screen.
 
You can only play it on one screen right now anyways. You need another piece of hardware like the Matrox Dual head2go or the Eyefininty feature on the new 5 series to get the game to span across 3 screens.
 
lloose said:
Honestly if cost is an issues, I would go for the following..

-Core 2 duo 8400 and overclock. Having a cpu that starts off at 3ghz will help a lot. Wow will benefit clock for clock. Don't bother with an entry level quad.
-4gb of ddr2 800mhz. Get some that will support your overclock. 2 sticks of 2gb. Don't fill up the slots.
-Decent overclocking motherboard. Theres a lot of them, just pick one that fits your budget.
-Pick any card that fits your budget. I would not go below a 4850 or 9800gt in performance.

You wont be able to run on "Ultra" settings but you wont get much further with an overclocked i7 setup either due to engine issues.
Click to expand...

Cost is an issue, but what you just described would be a down grade from what I currently have...sig is a bit wrong. I'm running 8 GB of RAM now. I realize the E8400 can clock higher, but I also have work to do on this rig, and the i5 is going to run circles around that E8400, and probably cost me relatively the same (+/- $200).
 
DMystikaLD said:
Cost is an issue, but what you just described would be a down grade for what I currently have...
Click to expand...

What kind of issues are you having playing wow? The rig in my sig can play it on "ultra" with one notch down on shadows.

SOLID 60fps in old Azeroth.
45-60fps in Outland
35-50ish fps in Northrend
25-35fps in Dalaran
35-60fps in 25 man raids.
 
lloose said:
What kind of issues are you having playing wow? The rig in my sig can play it on "ultra" with one notch down on shadows.

SOLID 60fps in old Azeroth.
45-60fps in Outland
35-50ish fps in Northrend
25-35fps in Dalaran
35-60fps in 25 man raids.
Click to expand...

22" and 19" Syncmaster Monitors

That's why ;) I'm running a 30" Dell @ a really higher resolution. I can turn everything on ULTRA on my 20" Dell @ 1600
 
I'm running 8 GB of RAM now. I realize the E8400 can clock higher, but I also have work to do on this rig, and the i5 is going to run circles around that E8400, and probably cost me relatively the same (+/- $200).
Click to expand...

Im not saying that the 8400 is better than the i5.. but you won't see a big increase in wow on an i5 over an 8400. You said that you wanted to build a rig and that cost was an issue, so I posted up a good "budget" build.

fyi Dan here on [H] had an 8400 for $90. If I had the money, I would have snatched that up in a heartbeat.
 
DMystikaLD said:
22" and 19" Syncmaster Monitors

That's why ;) I'm running a 30" Dell @ a really higher resolution. I can turn everything on ULTRA on my 20" Dell @ 1600
Click to expand...


Thats a good point. I didn't take resolution into factor. i5 is pretty nice for the price right now. If you can afford it go for it. I wouldn't bother with duel gpu cards, go for that 5 series to get some more bang from your single gpu buck.
 
I like your original idea... i5 and overclock it as much as possible; 8GB of RAM; and an ATI 5870. Oh and if you really want a nice performance boost in WoW... and I mean day/night noticable... get yourself an SSD (better yet 2 or 3 and run them in RAID0) and install WoW to it. It makes a HUGE difference in how fast you can load textures/zones/chacter models. And I do mean a MASSIVE difference. It'll literally take your 2 VelociRaptors you have in RAID0 and run circles around them. You might even cry with joy. :p
 
lloose said:
Im not saying that the 8400 is better than the i5.. but you won't see a big increase in wow on an i5 over an 8400. You said that you wanted to build a rig and that cost was an issue, so I posted up a good "budget" build.

fyi Dan here on [H] had an 8400 for $90. If I had the money, I would have snatched that up in a heartbeat.
Click to expand...

Yeah, $90 is a solid deal. I guess what I said was subjective. Sorry if I wasn't clearer.
 
Astral Abyss said:
I like your original idea... i5 and overclock it as much as possible; 8GB of RAM; and an ATI 5870. Oh and if you really want a nice performance boost in WoW... and I mean day/night noticable... get yourself an SSD (better yet 2 or 3 and run them in RAID0) and install WoW to it. It makes a HUGE difference in how fast you can load textures/zones/chacter models. And I do mean a MASSIVE difference. It'll literally take your 2 VelociRaptors you have in RAID0 and run circles around them. You might even cry with joy. :p
Click to expand...

Check and check.. did that six months ago, hah. Running 2 x GSKILL 64GB SSD's. I don't have them in RAID-0... couldn't get that to work.
 
jerryrigged said:
I play WoW on 1 Dell 3007 WFP... I can't imagine on 3!!!
Click to expand...

I don't actually play on 3 monitors :) I do a lot of stuff with web development, and I'm constantly talking to like ~30 people on AIM ... thus, more screen space is vital for me.
 
Also, just called Fry's here in Chicago and they said they weren't going to have any in for a long time. Guess Newegg CTRL+Refresh?

Can't believe these are only $375. Going to pick up 2 and throw them into CF. May wait until the XFX card comes back into stock though... that way I might still be covered under a step-up program if the G300 comes out and really cleans the slate.
 
if you grab the 5870, you will at least try out WoW on 3 30"er's
 
Your best bet on heatsinks is to use the intel provided one until the thermalright mounting brackets appear... at least that is what I'm reduced to doing (I'll be using my lapped true-black)
 
DMystikaLD said:
Stop buying 5870's so I can buy some too :(
Click to expand...

LOL. I kinda felt this way yesterday when I couldn't get any. Check the web periodically because the etailers get them back in stock now and again but they go like hotcakes so you have to act fast once you see that order/in stock button! Try again tomorrow. Yesterday I couldn't find any, and today I found an XFX 5870 for $20 less than the other 5870s were going for, $379 from the egg instead of $399. Lucky!
 
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