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CPU for WoW

X

Xan

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 15, 2001
Messages
1,156
Here is a list of what I'm wanting to put togther to play WoW. I'm a WoW addict and it's all I play!

Antec TX1050B Enclosure (with SmartPower 2.0 500 Watt PS)
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe
Corsair XMS 2GB (TWINX2048-3200C2PT)
Western Digital Caviar 80GB (7200 RPM, 8MB cache, Serial ATA150)
Plextor PX-740A
BFG Tech 7800 GT OC 256MB PCIe
Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW

Which AMD processor would be the best bang for the buck? I'm only going to be using this computer as a WoW terminal, and of course if the wife needs to surf the net she can ;)

Here are the procs I've been looking at... I'd love to hear some thoughts, opinions, etc.

all prices are from http://www.newegg.com (02/09/2006)
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (2.2GHz, 2 x 1MB L2 cache) - $462.00
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.0GHz, 2 x 512k L2 cache) - $296.00
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (2.2GHz, 1MB L2 cache) - $233.00
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz, 512k L2 cache) - $169.00
 
If you're not planning on playing two accounts at the sam time, your best bang for the buck is one of the single-core cpus. But that severely limits the future usage of the machine. IMO, the X2 4200+ dual-core (not on your list) is the best deal out there atm.
 
wow sucks my life too. CPU isn't usually the bottle neck, I think the video card is. It also depends on your resolution and what settings you use. Good choice on 2gb of ram..my 1gb didn't cut it.
 
I don't know how WoW is in terms of CPU use vs GPU use, since I've only played it once; but it seems like one of the more simpler games, graphics wise. Perhaps money could be diverted from the GPU to CPU depending on its tendency to use CPU vs GPU.
 
I'll be running the 2405 in native res (1920 x 1200). The 7800 shouldn't have any problems pushing that display @ that res.

I'm really interested in performance of the 1MB L2 cache vs 512k L2 cache.... how much impact would that have on the gameplay?
 
Xan said:
I'm really interested in performance of the 1MB L2 cache vs 512k L2 cache.... how much impact would that have on the gameplay?
Click to expand...

Minimal
 
You can't go wrong with an Opteron. 170 on newegg is $407. Buy some G. Skill or Mushkin DDR500 and your at 2.5ghz without a divider. Not sure on the compatibility with that mobo though or if you want to overclock.
 
Any of those processors will be overkill for wow. I can run wow on a 3 year old barton 2500+ with an ati 9700 pro vid card at decent settings without problem. Heck, I can run it on my wife's Dell 700m with a 1.7 pentium M and onboard intel extreme graphics 2. So, if all you're looking for is a WoW station, go with the cheapest one.
 
actually to run WoW on a 1600x1050 (widescreen) you will need a pretty decent system.

if you try any of the other widescreen setting it won't look quite as crisp.
 
genodive said:
actually to run WoW on a 1600x1050 (widescreen) you will need a pretty decent system.

if you try any of the other widescreen setting it won't look quite as crisp.
Click to expand...
Ah, missed they next post when he said he was running it 1920x1200. Still, any of the processors will do fine coupled with the vid card he's chosen. I can run full screen with everything maxed on my laptop (6800go, p4 3.4, 2gb ram) so he'll be fine with even if he goes with the 3200+
 
genodive said:
actually to run WoW on a 1600x1050 (widescreen) you will need a pretty decent system.

if you try any of the other widescreen setting it won't look quite as crisp.
Click to expand...


My 9800 pro ran the 10 day trial like butter.
 
KidzMD said:
Any of those processors will be overkill for wow. I can run wow on a 3 year old barton 2500+ with an ati 9700 pro vid card at decent settings without problem. Heck, I can run it on my wife's Dell 700m with a 1.7 pentium M and onboard intel extreme graphics 2. So, if all you're looking for is a WoW station, go with the cheapest one.
Click to expand...

If you plan to do any end-game raiding, you can't run it on that.

Right now, I play WoW on a 3200+ Venice, 1GB of RAM, a BFG 6800GT OC and I dip below 25fps in some raids and I'm only running at 1280 x 1024 with everything turned up (native LCD res).

The proposed system in the first post is fine though; any of those choices. Once you meet the recommended system specs, importantance of parts generally goes:

RAM
Video card
Hard Drive
CPU.

Video card mostly because when you have 40-80 people running around in your field of vision, it's just simply a lot of polygons.

Looking at your specs though, I'd suggest getting a faster hard drive more than anything. Everything else you propose is excellent. Hard drive does make a very big difference in pretty much all MMOs, especially WoW since it loads textures of new objects and zones on the fly (making the world seamless). I personally noticed a very annoying difference in smoothness of play when going from my old 15k.2 RPM Seagate SCSI drive to my new 400GB WD2000YR (space constraints... dying SCSI card...).
 
Wow does not take full advantage of multiple cpu’s, but it does do some stuff in a separate thread. I believe the separate thread handles model loading. When I go into orgrimmar I’ll have one processor at 100% and the 2nd one will be at ~20-40% (just counting CPU usage from the WoW.exe process). So there would probably be some benefit to getting a dual core processor.

WoW itself isn’t really demanding. I run at 1680x1050 native res on my laptop which has a Pentium-M 1.4, 640mb single channel DDR2100, and a Mobility Radeon 9200; not exactly bleeding edge. I don’t run with any AA and all the other settings except for distance are turned down. Actually the biggest thing that sucks about playing on my laptop is the 4200rpm hard drive. Hard drive speed does indeed have a huge impact on the game. I love WoW so much that I went and got a new Fujitsu 15,000rpm SCSI drive. I saw that it smoked the Raptor 150 in the storage review benchmarks in WoW and that made the choice easy :)

Another thing to consider is that the game does use quite a lot of ram. On my main box before I got my 2nd gig, I had task manager up on my 2nd monitor and as I played wow I slowly watched the available memory count down to zero, at which time there would be a small “pause” in the game as something was paged to virtual memory. It still plays okay on my laptop with only 640 and on my brothers computer that still only has 512.

WoW should run fine on any half-decent system. Stuff like having a fast or dual core cpu, 1.5gb+ ram, and a fast hard drive just lets you kill alliance on the booty bay boat before their screen even loads, and stuff like that ;)
 
WoW seems to run fine full-screen and windowed with my Abit NF7-S, AXP2500+, GeForce 6600GT (128mb) and 1gb of PC3200 Kingston ValueRam. My Inpsiron 600m on the other hand (512mb DDR, 32mb Radeon 9000 mobile, 1.5ghz Pentium-M) will lag heavily when going into IronForge or a city of equal size. Normal gameplay on the 600m outside of the cities seems fine.
 
My roommate's Sempron 3100 and 6800GT play WoW flawlessly. Focus on VGA before CPU with this game.

Plays just as well as my Opteron 165 @ 2.5ghz and 6800GS.
 
"WoW is generally more GPU limited than CPU limited, but you still need a relatively fast CPU. On the AMD side, the Athlon 64 3500+ continues to be the sweet spot, while the Pentium 4 650/550 is the more balanced choice for Intel folks. And as always, we found that the Extreme Edition is a waste of money.

But if you happen to have a relatively new Athlon 64 or Pentium 4 system, you're pretty much good to go. The biggest need for a CPU upgrade will be lower clocked Northwood and Athlon XP based systems.

As far as GPUs go, the more you spend, the higher the resolution that you can run and the smoother that things will be at that resolution. The ATI vs. NVIDIA decision is really up to you for most GPUs except at the lower price points, where the 6600GT and the 6200 both outclass their ATI competitors."





Behold: Evidence..

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2381
 
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