MMORPG video / graphic card recommendations

[pakman86]

Alright i just got back from a deployment and my PC is fried, What is the best kick butt video card and graphics card to own when making a new pc?
I need them for EQ and WOW type games and I love to TRI-Box Characters (Three windows for gaming on multiple accounts)... also if this video card could support dual monitors that would be awesome too... please help!
-Martin

 

[obsidian86]

budget?

 

[pakman86]

1200 For the whole thing, case, and parts monitors excluded. So i guess you could figure 150-300 for video and 200-475 for graphics?

 

[obsidian86]

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/forum-13.html please use this format

 

[pakman86]

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/forum-13.html please use this format

I clicked on the link and it put me into a forum catagory with 1000's of titles to pick from what format are you speaking of?

 

[Onus]

The slowest video cards that you should consider is the 5770 or 4890.

If you want the best of the best you need the 5870/5850 or 4870 X2

/TILT/

MMORPGs, particularly WoW, are not that demanding. In fact, due to the large number of things moving around, a faster CPU may actually help more. For example, in Guild Wars a lowly X2 4850e bottlenecks a HD4670 at 1440x900, but with a 720BE, even in busy areas FPS stays within 1-3 frames of the monitor refresh rate (60).
I think you would be well-served by considering an AMD build for this, although you may be able to shoehorn an i7/860 into your $1200 budget. For the video card, a 5750 would be enough unless your resolution is 1920x1080, in which case a 5770 would probably be better. The HD5000-series cards can run three monitors; I think one needs to be Display Port?
For this build, a quality 550W PSU would be sufficient, such as an Antec Truepower New, or a Corsair VX.

 

[Onus]

...

AMD athlon X4s are cheap, work well too (price/performance is higher then intel). A athlon X2 is probs better for value, because a quad core is rarely used, but if its ojnly like £10/20 more, why not .

DDR3, to say the least, is useless, in high end games a fps different of 3% is rarely achieved. So i recommend DDR2 (800 will do). In addition to that, get 2GB of RAM, not 4, 8, Tomshardware did a topic on this, and there was no performance increase when using 6GB of Ram over 3GB.

Graphics, for £60 you can get a 4770, which will work nicely, but a 260GTX (£130) is probably the best choice. Because it offers some future-proofing (when u upgrade ur screen).

When you know which graphic card your getting, get a motherboard to suit it ( e.g SLI with Nvidia, and crossfire for ATI), that is if you want to buy a multi PCI Express motherboard.. which most people dont really need.

Hard drive, get a SATA hard drive, either a Wester-Digital or a Seagate (7200.11 or above ideally). Seagates are regarded as being more solid, and WDs are regarded as being faster..
...

I think you meant performance/price is higher with AMD. My apologies for being too lazy right now to do your research for you, but... Start by searching for the articles on "How Many Cores Do You Really Need?" (two parts, here on Tom's) for the benchmarks that show three cores are notably better than two, but four are only a little better than three. Bottom line, don't get just two.
Future-proofing is a myth; there is only weak future-resistance. The performance difference between DDR2 and DDR3 is still pretty low, but will only increase. Prices are shifting to favor DDR3 though, so get that. While 2GB of RAM is a minimum, 4GB does offer notably better performance, especially with a 64bit OS. Further performance differences exist but probably aren't yet worth the price to get more than 4GB.
A 4770 is not a bad choice, and more may not be needed. If it is, and you want some future-resistance, then a 5750 or 5770 is the way to go.
I'm not a fan of multi-GPU setups, although Tom's has done some impressive SBM builds with some. When all is said and done, a single more powerful card I believe makes more sense.
Western Digital drives are pretty solid. On performance, Black > Blue > Green. Seagate drives are NOT known to be more solid, especially the 7200.11 drives, which had a raft of problems. The 7200.12 models are "fixed," and also perform as well as the WD Blacks. I've never bought one, but have often read that the Samsung Spinpoint F3 are faster still.

 

[pakman86]

Great info guys ty for your imput. I am leaning more towards DDR3. I am still pretty new to actually exploring inside the case box instead of just being happy that it works with no actual knowledge of how it works... so to my understanding only certain video cards support dual monitors is that true , and are any of those good for gaming? Since I quad or tri box chars on EQEmu I would adore two screens so two chars per screen... so does dual monitoring limit my selection if so how much?

 

[Onus]

Most current video cards, and all of them at the high end (not counting some low-profile models) support at least two monitors; the newest ATI HD57xx cards can do three. They are perfectly good for gaming.