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Core 2 Quad holding me back from maxxing Wow?

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So for a while now I've been running on a older Geforce 9500GT with Core 2 Quad Q8300 @ 2.5 ghz.
With Mists of Pandaria my performance really suffered. Was seeing 9fps at best and it got quite choppy.
So I just threw in a new GTX 660ti and saw a nice improvement but not what I was hoping for.

Here's my current setup then
Core 2 Quad Q8300
Stock 350w PS (ordered a quality 650w ps today)
4 GB ram (3.2 GB usable)
GTX 660 ti

So after this I get FPS sometimes hitting 80fps but it can dip as low as 20 fps at times which doesn't make me to happy. This is with multsampling at 2x and everything else maxxed. So is my CPU holding me back?
Right now I plan on upgrading to Windows 7 64 bit and running 8 gigs of ram. Also will be putting in a power supply that can properly feed the video card. After all this will I still see dipping FPS on Wow? Is overclocking the GPU or CPU an option and if so any links to good software to do this with?
Any advice would be great. Thanks

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CPUs Master

qwiksilvertrav said:
So for a while now I've been running on a older Geforce 9500GT with Core 2 Quad Q8300 @ 2.5 ghz.
With Mists of Pandaria my performance really suffered. Was seeing 9fps at best and it got quite choppy.
So I just threw in a new GTX 660ti and saw a nice improvement but not what I was hoping for.

Here's my current setup then
Core 2 Quad Q8300
Stock 350w PS (ordered a quality 650w ps today)
4 GB ram (3.2 GB usable)
GTX 660 ti

So after this I get FPS sometimes hitting 80fps but it can dip as low as 20 fps at times which doesn't make me to happy. This is with multsampling at 2x and everything else maxxed. So is my CPU holding me back?
Right now I plan on upgrading to Windows 7 64 bit and running 8 gigs of ram. Also will be putting in a power supply that can properly feed the video card. After all this will I still see dipping FPS on Wow? Is overclocking the GPU or CPU an option and if so any links to good software to do this with?
Any advice would be great. Thanks


It does sound like you are getting a bottleneck and I would guess it's most likely the CPU is holding back the GPU.

rds1220 said:
It does sound like you are getting a bottleneck and I would guess it's most likely the CPU is holding back the GPU.



Agreed the cpu is getting dated. May want to look into ram as well if you change your cpu out. since you will need ram moving from ddr2 to ddr3 platform.
CPUs Master

I upgraded my Core2Duo E8400 from 4GB to 8GB when Cataclysm came out because I was hearing frequent disk access while moving around and was noticing stuttering almost every time I was hearing HDD access which strongly indicated HDD IO-induced lag. The extra RAM almost completely eliminated HDD access while in-game and stuttering.

If you currently have 2x2GB, you might want to look into getting another 2x2GB which should still not be too cost-prohibitive. If you have 4x1GB, upgrading your DDR2 RAM might cost almost half as much as rebuilding your new PC to use DDR3, which is not really worth it, better off upgrading the CPU and MoBo as well if you can spare the extra cash.
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CPUs Master

Since he only has 3.2GB usable, he's probably running a 32 bit OS. Adding more RAM isn't going to help unless he upgrades to a 64 bit Operating System as well since he is at his memory addressing limit with 32 bit Windows.

Odds are it's the CPU that's slowing you down. I don't think WoW is heavily threaded, so 2.5GHz is a slow clockspeed. You may want to consider trying to overclock your CPU. If not, you may want to look into a new CPU/Motherboard/RAM combo, and get a 64 bit OS while you're at it. The 4GB address limit is going to hamstring you pretty soon.

Yea I didn't see that yea I would suggest going to a 64 bit os windows 7 I tend to go more towards professional over premium just because the ram limit on premium is 16 gigabytes where as with pro is up to 192 I have 8 gigabytes now but I see people running around with 32 so maybe at some point it may be useful to have that ram right now I don't but options are important.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop...(v=vs.85).aspx

World of warcraft is very heavy on cpu/hard drive here is a video of when i installed my current ssd with world of warcraft.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2D7YbLljfc


Intel Core i5 2500k
Asrock Z68 EXTREME4 Gen 3
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 2GB OC
Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 8GB (2x4)
Samsung 830 256GB SATA III SSD
Seagate Barracuda 500 GB SATA II
LG 12x Super Multi Blue WH12LS38
CM Storm Sniper
Corsair AX850 PSU
Corsair Hydro H100




What I meant is that he should just wait to see how his system runs with the new power supply. There's no reason for a CPU upgrade if he just wants to run WoW. The sudden FPS drops were most likely caused by the PS being too weak to power the 660 ti.
CPUs Master

A PSU lacking in power to provide to the GPU would make the computer not turn on or experience numerous errors (from personal experience). I highly doubt this is the case as his CPU doesn't use much power (~95w MAX. Realistically around ~80w) and the 660 Ti is a very power efficient card (~130w). His other components should roughly use around ~20-30w give or take. If OP's PSU could actually provide ~350w of power, then he would still have around ~100w of headroom.

I would vote for a RAM upgrade (OS upgrade as well) as I think this is the bottleneck in OP's rig. The C2Q's are quite dated, however, they're still on-par with the Phenom II X4's which still have quite a bit of kick to them.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/89?vs=102

Thanks for all the information!

And right now the plan is to upgrade to Windows 7 64 bit and throw in two more 2gb sticks of ram. Luckily I have 2 2G sticks right now. I'm guessing that plus the bigger power supply will improve things. That option is free since my Dad has all of that on hand.

If it doesn't then I'm going to bite the bullet and order up a new CPU, motherboard, and ddr3 ram and rebuild it.
CPUs Master

Good luck! I'm sure you won't be disappointed since InvalidError had (almost) the same issue as you and was cured of the lag with a RAM upgrade.

If your motherboard supports overclocking, you could always try overclocking your CPU to squeeze a little more performance out of it :) 
CPUs Master

qwiksilvertrav said:
And right now the plan is to upgrade to Windows 7 64 bit and throw in two more 2gb sticks of ram. Luckily I have 2 2G sticks right now. I'm guessing that plus the bigger power supply will improve things. That option is free since my Dad has all of that on hand.

If the main problem you have with WoW at 4GB is stuttering/lag from the game having to reload data from HDD, the upgrade to 8GB should make most of it go away. In my case, it went from very annoying and on-going to almost none which was enough to keep me happy until I decided to quit the game due to loss of interest early this year.

Ok upgraded to 64 bit with 8GB ram. Not much improvement even with nothing else installed so there isn't much back ground processing going on taking up extra memory. No more studdering but not much of an improvement on FPS. Still dips down to high 20's in some cases. :( 
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