How many cores will I need to run World of Warcraft smoothly?

Charlise · May 23, 2015

Indeed, this is the only game that I am really hooked up in playing. For now I am playing in Mists of Pandaria and the cpu here on the pc of my sister is an Intel Pentium G630, an old one, and it has no GPU! Yes! It has no GPU at all and I am still able to play World of Warcraft. But, as you would expect, the performance isnt great at all, the settings are down to low and whenever I hit a mob or attain a new level, it stops for a while, but at least I can play.

But enough of that for now, I want to ask those who play World of Warcraft if 2 cores will just be enough for it, no other tasks while playing WoW. Of course I am planning to build this specs if the experts on this game here answered so:

INTEL PENTIUM G3220
ASUS B85M-G
8GB RAM
SAPPHIRE DUAL-X R7 265 2GB DDR5 256BIT
WESTERN 1TB BLUE
KINGSTON 120GB SSD
SEASONIC S12II-520 520W 80+ BRONZE

Will this build be just fine even when raiding? I play on 1600x900 max resolution monitor and maybe Medium settings will be fine for me. I will really appreciate your help. I really hate stutters while doing raid or battlegrounds.

delaro · May 23, 2015

Grab a "I5 4460 3.2ghz quad core $165" it handles WoW very well. Your overall experience in WoW will be better with a I5 but a I3 "I3 4160 Dual Core with Hyper Threading 3.6ghz $99" will handle the game better than a Pentium. If you plan on raiding the I5 would be a better choice that is when things get taxing. For Raiding 25 man I would suggest a Overclocked I5 4690K 4.5ghz and a decent midrange GPU that is where the game gets taxing.

FreshRestart · May 23, 2015

An i3 would be ideal for this game. i5 is an overkill and you won't notice any performance advantage:

Charlise · May 23, 2015

delaro :

I am on a tight budget that's why I am squeezing so much. Gotta upgrade to an i5 later, surely but for now, what I want to know is, will this Pentium G3220 and R7 265 do just fine. Are you playing WoW btw?

Charlise · May 23, 2015

FreshRestart :

I can see that G3258 can handle it, but wait, is that benchmark done when raiding or just walking around? Raiding and doing battleground seems to be a lot of task in WoW.

FreshRestart · May 23, 2015

The pentiumG will get you very good frame rate as well, probably between 45-80 fps. If you can't afford the i3 it is still a nice choice. That Seasonic PSU is an overkill btw.

FreshRestart · May 23, 2015

I do not know, it was not mentioned.

Edit: It was probably during a raid in order to stress test the CPUs.

Charlise · May 23, 2015

FreshRestart :

Do you play World of Warcraft by any chance? Battlegrounds and Raids are the most crucial part in this game.

delaro · May 23, 2015

FreshRestart :

For one that is pretty old and I can tell you from experience that a I3 in World PvP and 25mans will not pull FPS like that chart suggests. If he plans on just leveling and doing instances then the I3 is fine but if he wants the End game events the I3 is not as nice of a option. WoW with Ultra settings with 25+ people to load gets very taxing and still leans on the CPU pretty heavily.

Read this it explains things fairly decent although it to is a little old but much better than just putting up a chart that is older.

Building the best PC for WoW
http://www.logicalincrements.com/games/wow/

http://www.logicalincrements.com/

FreshRestart · May 23, 2015

It is not that old; the PentiumG was released last year,but you sound like the expert here. Did you play the game on an i3 before though or are you just guessing it is going to perform worse than the i5?

FreshRestart · May 23, 2015

"Going beyond a dual core on Intel makes little to no difference." That is from the link you posted. Also the fair tier is recommended for his resolution which has a Athlon that is even slower than the i3. IMO an i5 is an overkill for this game but it is up to the OP to decide.

delaro · May 23, 2015

FreshRestart :

I bias what I recommend off prior mistakes and what made it better, not off charts. We have 3 PC's and 3 avid gamers.

"1600x900 max resolution monitor and maybe Medium settings"... I3 is great for that but if you upsize the monitor to 1080p or larger and want good Endgame large events you will notice studdering and FPS drops.

FreshRestart · May 23, 2015

So you played the game before on an i3 or seen someone playing it on an i3? What does higher resolution has to do with the CPU though? Higher resolutions stress the GPU not the CPU. From the comments on that optimization article you referred to, it seems like the game is EXTREMELY unoptimized. A game using a more than 11 years old engine that looks that way and requires an i5 for a 60 fps performance is a joke, no disrespect, but considering the game's immense popularity they should have updated its core engine a long time ago.

ingtar33 · May 23, 2015

WoW is a 2 core game. the difference between the different intel chips is mostly just cache size. a fast i3 or an overclocked G will be MORE then enough for WoW

FreshRestart · May 23, 2015

That would explain why both the i3 and i5 perform about the same, but why a dual core Pentium needs to be overclocked 1 GHz to match them? Does 1 MB difference in cache size makes that big of a difference. The i5 also has larger cache than the i3 but it seems like anything above 4 MBs of cache for this game is diminishing returns.

jediTT · May 23, 2015

WoW is actually pretty crappy as far as graphics/requirements. Any dual core and up with a crap video card will get you decent fps unless you're trying to max out.

ingtar33 · May 23, 2015

FreshRestart :

yep. 1mb of cache is pretty small, and it hurts the G a bit.

How many cores will I need to run World of Warcraft smoothly?

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