Question about gaming PC performance.

[Masterchief1752]

Hi all. I had a quick question about my computer specs and playing higher end games on it. I bought this ~a year ago. So it isn't old by any means. From what I'm seeing my computer should be able to handle alot of games at higher settings, but I'm having a few problems. The main games I play is World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, or Battlefield. Warcraft is where I have my main issues. In the actual world if there's alot of trees etc I get a bit of FPS lag, but nothing too serious. Just dropping from 60 FPS to 40-45. But when I get into a 25 man raid. So 25 people along with the graphics of spells, bosses etc it drops immensely to 15-30. When it gets really intense, like when the raid has to stack etc (I don't know if anyone plays it now, but think Ultraxion sub 30% Timeloop) I can get as low as 10. My specs are below and I was just wondering if there was anything specific I'd need to upgrade or if there was a problem. Thanks for any help.

There's two things that should be noted. Number one is I bought from Dell. I know people say this is not a good route to go but one of my buddies gets a 15% discount on everything because of where they work and as I said people told me the rig worked fine for gaming. The other is I was SUPPOSED to get an AMD Radeon 5770 1GB card, but for some reason it was shipped with the 6670. I talked to Dell, and they confirmed it because of the fact that the 5770 drivers would not work and only the 6770 would as well as Manage Computer coming up with "Dell 6700 series). Not sure if that has an impact but I have confirmed that trying to game with the 5770 driver causes it to crash hard. I also have not done anything in terms of modifying performance etc. I know a decent amount about computers, and I assume it's possibly the ram. I was looking to upgrade to 8 GB in the near future, but not before I find out if that's most likely the issue.

Studio XPS 7100 Minitower
Studio Phenom II X4 945 (3.0GHz)
1TB Serial ATA 2 Hard Drive 7200 RPM
4GB DDR3 SDRAM,1333MHz- 2X2GB
Windows 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English
AMD Radeon 6700 series (6770), Internal DAC 400MHz, 2806 MB (Through DxDiag).

Thanks again for any help.

 

[proton007]

Research if your games stress your CPU or GPU, upgrade whatever is the bottleneck.
Most games stress the GPU. Some also need CPU to be fast in order to run smoothly.

 

[Masterchief1752]

Well from what I'm seeing on many forums, including these, both my CPU and GPU are more than enough to run something like WoW at max settings. One of the reasons I'm confused.

I actually ran into a small problem just now. I reloaded my OS as it needed to be done anyway, and I downloaded AMD's auto-detect software to find which driver you needed. This program is telling me that I need the 5xxx series driver, whereas if I go to Device Manager or DxDiag it says 6700 series. Does anyone have any experience or know if this is normal for an AMD thing...because I'm really beginning to get flustered on what's going on with this machine.

 

[Masterchief1752]

I did a bit of research and I think I may have found one of the problems. From what I'm reading from this thread here.

I literally have the same Part Number and from the pictures the same card. Does anyone have any experience in "OEM" cards? I'm kind of annoyed that when I talked to Dell they told me that it was indeed a 6700 series card when it may in fact be a 5700 with whatever other OEM part was used. This may be the reason I'm having issues with my frame rate loss as I'm not using the wrong drivers if that is in fact the case. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[FinneousPJ]

Just download AMD Catalyst, you don't need to download any specific 5xxx or 6xxx drivers...

 

[Tamis]

I dont know about the driver issue your having, but in my experience if the CPU/GPU are stated to run the games at high settings and they are not, it means you gotta clean out your whole computer case. get the dust off the cooling units and you should get a bit of a boost in performance.

If that is not the problem then I would guess the RAM, always good to have a touch more then you need.