Performance Bottlenecks - How to Isolate?

[Executive]

Hello,

I play WoW and my FPS drops during 25 man raids down to the 5- 20ish range and I am trying to figure out what part of my computer I need to update to resolve this.

Current specs:
i3 530 2.93 GHz
GTX 285
Corsair XMS3 16 MB DDR3 1600MHz
Gigabyte P55A-UD3
Hitachi hds721050cla362 ATA device

I monitored performance during the raid by using Windows Resource Monitor (for CPU, Hard drive, and RAM) and GPU-Z (for GPU).

During the graphics intensive parts of the raids my fps drops to 5-20 range, but the monitor programs showed usage as follows:

CPU: ~35-40%
Ram: ~23%
GPU: ~20 - 40%
Disk: Spiked all over

I do not understand why the FPS is so low when the hardware does not appear to be near capacity.

Any suggestions on how to isolate and correct this performance issue so my FPS in game rises? Thanks!

 

[amuffin]

Overclock your i3 and 285.

 

[Maxor1]

With WoW and fairly large raids you may well not be having an issue with your computer so much as having an issue with data flow into and out of your computer. In large raids lots of times you can have a bottle necks with everything everyone is doing. In my experiences this happened alot more when the average internet connection was slower and you had 40 man raids but it could also still be happening with a connection today especially if other things were also going on on your internet connection.