bluesaris

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Building a new gaming pc.

I mostly play Warcraft, and dabble with other games when i get bored.

I currently play it on my laptop which struggles at various times,..slowing down and giving me pathetic performance.

What is good card to play Wow with.

Do i need to get a 300$ card..., or is a 150$ range card sufficient...


Any advice would be appreciated.
 

Triton05

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Unless WoW altered something outragious in the last year, a GT250 would suffice fine. While allowing you to max settings.

The game was designed around an engine 5+ years ago. Anything newer then a 9800GT or GT250 would be over kill. Even at higher gaming resolutions.

Provided you aren't using a single core cpu or 1Gb of ram ;)
 

Triton05

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I was playing up until URU. Last summer.

My Dual Core & 8800GT allowed me to max all settings in game without a hiccup.

Thats all I was getting at.

8800GT < GT250

Anything larger then a 250 would be overkill for any res. below 1650x1050.
 


As mentioned before, the revamped the graphics engine, and if you want to max out shadow (or even close to max it out), you need more than a GT250 and it would not be overkill.

If you don't mind turning off shadows, you might be right, of course it's hard for me to justify turning them off.
 
I agree when it comes to getting any thing better than a single GTS250. By the way they in the last patch changed something to ware it uses more than two cores and is slightly more demanding. It takes a 3870 at max settings just to push 1024x768 (60fps single instance) till you take part in one of those few pvp events ware you have 300-600ppl running around in one spot x.x (11fps with and with out fraps recording). I also multy box with up to 4 accounts at once (manually) and even a little tri core that I got takes quite a beating. Going to either corossfire or just replace for a cheap pair of 4850s.
 


Back about 2 years ago, before I took a long break, there was a person in our battle group who played 5 people at a time, all shaman. The part that was scary, was all 5 people were controled by the same keyboard and mouse, and were all completely stacked on top of each other at all times. You could not even tell there were 5 people there most the time, it looked like 1 person that was a little blurry.

The scary part was, he killed everyone in 1 to 2 casts, and was far more effective than any 5 people playing in a traditional manner.

When he performed an action, every one of his characters did it at the same time.
 
The new Cataclysm expansion is going to add more graphic features that will stress GPUs a bit more then WotLK. Another thing to note is that server density, your latency and how many player characters are in your vicinity has a large impact. That's why areas like Dalaran, Wintergrasp and 25 man raids reduce performance. Here's a couple benchmarks that give a rough idea.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,689378/WoW-Wrath-of-the-Lich-King-Benchmarks-with-Ati-and-Nvidia-graphics-cards/Practice/

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2848/7

Personally i'd chose at least the GTS250 1GB for 1680X1050 or higher. The 5770 would also be a good choice. Keep the shadow effects to a minimum! Another thing to note in WoW is how important the CPU is in performance.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,693737/WoW-Wrath-of-the-Lich-King-CPU-benchmarks-with-Phenom-II-and-Core-i5/Practice/
 
G

Guest

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for the people talking about one person controlling more than one toon at a time, its known as multi-boxing, it is 100% legal, and more people than you would think do it, it is more challenging and a heck of a lot funner than playing a single toon (notto mention you dont usually have to spend hour looking for groups that arent total noobs). ad for the person who said he heard of the guy that was boxing 5 shamans, people have been known to box 32 accounts at a time, and shammys are the most common class that is used to box cause of its ranged abilities and able to use mail + a shield, so i doubt it was the same person. :eek:


anyways, that's my 2 cents. :hello:
 

helloshayan

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best is to get hd 5770(£110). better then gtx 260. same price as gtx 260. dx 11 ready. awsome card for its price, worth every pound. and will play your wow like a pacman game which dont depend on graphic card. if you also thinking of upgrading yo system a cheep good 1 will be:


amd 955 quadcore@ 3.2 £ 125
m4a78td-v-evo £69
4gb of rigjaw ram @ 1600 £100

thats a total of £294 for new pc assuming u will use ur previos hard drive,powersupply and dvd drive/screen extra.

+ 110 for a great gpu for its price.
 
for the people talking about one person controlling more than one toon at a time, its known as multi-boxing, it is 100% legal, and more people than you would think do it, it is more challenging and a heck of a lot funner than playing a single toon (notto mention you dont usually have to spend hour looking for groups that arent total noobs). ad for the person who said he heard of the guy that was boxing 5 shamans, people have been known to box 32 accounts at a time, and shammys are the most common class that is used to box cause of its ranged abilities and able to use mail + a shield, so i doubt it was the same person. :eek:


anyways, that's my 2 cents. :hello:


That is why I am going to upgrade my rig so I can do more than just 4 accounts. I am looking at a 16GB (4x4gb) ddr2 kit and going crossfire. I also might upgrade beyond my 8250e tri core that I got running at 2.575ghz. I hate the page file its the only real thing that ruins all the fun due to machine lag.
 


+1

I played WoW @ 1440x900 with an 8800GTS G92 (GTS250 / 9800GTX + anyone?) back before Wrath of the Lich King came out. This was combined with a Q6600 @ 3.2Ghz. Even with several mods installed things ran very smoothly. I haven't touched the game since, so I'm not familiar with the revamped engine. However, I totally agree with ct1615's assessment and recommendation.
 

Nikay

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I remember the 5 shaman boxer afew years back, I was boxing 3 priests at the time and we just steamroled any BG we entered. Was quite alot of fun, but it got tiring and expensive to multibox all the time so I have settled on just dual boxing now my priest and warrior..heh.