Computer choise problem

[Skaleth]

Well i am willing to buy a new pc to take away any lagg problems that I get when playing wow on my current pc.

The problem is that im not good at choosing and will end up buying one with even more problems.

Would anyone be able to tell me what the computer would need to have to run smoothly and with no problems?

And if possible to you find an example of an ideal pc advertised somewhere on the net (dell etc)

Thx :shocked:

[Gameliel]

Depends on how much you're willing to spend. There are many good computers out there and many good hardware configurations but some are quite expensive. I will tell you now, do NOT buy Alienware, whatever you do. Their computers are full of problems.

Here are some sites you may wanna check out:

NewEgg.com (http://www.newegg.com/)
WidowPC (http://www.widowpc.com/)
Falcon Northwest (http://www.falcon-nw.com/)
VoodooPC (http://www.voodoopc.com/)
Monarch Computers (http://www.monarchcomputer.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv)

There are others, but that's what comes to mind off the top of my head. WARNING: All of these sites have a big emphasis on trying to "wow" you with the designs and product advertisements. You may want to compare price tags for similar computers between them and also check out their customer satisfaction ratings on ResellerRatings.com (http://www.resellerratings.com) or another site.

[Skaleth]

Thanks.

How much would a computer cost that runs wow well? (roughly)

[Imrei]

You may want to compare price tags for similar computers between them and also check out their customer satisfaction ratings on ResellerRatings.com (http://www.resellerratings.com) or another site.

VERY good advice... don't just buy the first thing you see.. double check and look around...

BUT... here are my spec's for TWO of my computers.. and both play WoW with no lag...

1. (mine)
AMD 64 x2 4400 cpu
4gb RAM
Dual nvidia 7900GTX vid cards in SLI
Dual SATA-2 250gb HD/Raid 0

2. (my son's)
AMD 64 3200
2gb RAM
ATI Radeon X850
Ultra DMA-133 160gb HD

Both systems play the game very well... no lag and good framerates....

On a side note, I can honestly recommend DELL XPS systems from personal experiance... I built my comptuer and my son's, but I got a Dell XPS for my daughter, and my laptop is a Dell XPS.... I was pleased with my purchaces both times.

[Skaleth]

Looking around the dell site could you point out any that would be ideal?

Sorry, bt im really bad at all this computer stuff :ponder:

[One Swordsman]

1. (mine)
AMD 64 x2 4400 cpu
4gb RAM
Dual nvidia 7900GTX vid cards in SLI
Dual SATA-2 250gb HD/Raid 0


Highly, highly unnecessary if you're only going to play WoW.



I don't know about where to buy from, as I live in the UK, but if you just want to play WoW go for a setup similar to this:

Graphics card: Nvidia 7600GT
Processor: AMD 64 3800+ (single core)
RAM: 1 gig minimum, although I would stretch to 2gigs if possible.

If you want to future proof yourself a little, and play other more intensive games on high settings go for: a 7900GT with an AMD X2 4400+ and 2 gigs of RAM.

Whatever you do, dont go for any stupidly expensive SLI system like the one I quoted from that other guy, yes it is a very nice system, but the new Direct X 10 capable cards are being released soon, so I would save my Money for that if you want to buy cutting edge.

In short, if you just play WoW, go for the first option, if you play other games, and intend to play new releases, go for the 7900GT with a 4400+ X2


If you need anymore help, a great site to check out is http://www.tech-forums.net, I usually hang around there and the guys really know their stuff, they'll also be able to tell you where to get the best price on things because lots of them live in the US. If you really want to get the best value for money i'd reccommend building a PC, it's pretty simple and fun, I built my own and saved a bundle :afro:

EDIT: I just noticed this:
On a side note, I can honestly recommend DELL XPS systems from personal experiance... I built my comptuer and my son's, but I got a Dell XPS for my daughter, and my laptop is a Dell XPS.... I was pleased with my purchaces both times.

I'm sure they are very good computers my friend, and with the system you have it's clear you have very deep pockets =D, but Dell are very expensive in comparison to other companies or building your own, I wouldn't reccommend Dell as a first choice.

[Imrei]

Looking around the dell site could you point out any that would be ideal?

Sorry, bt im really bad at all this computer stuff :ponder:

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&oc=DXPS400G1&s=dhs

that one looks pretty good, but I would upgrade the RAM to 2gb....

[Imrei]

Highly, highly unnecessary if you're only going to play WoW

LOL, oh my yes :) SLi is not really needed for WoW :) Unfortunatly, I am an addict.. I play more than WoW... If I could find a way play games for a living and make money, It would be like i was in heaven :)

[Toper]

If you want to save money, but have a really good WoW machine, I'd say go for

CPU:
- Pentium 4 3.0GHz or or above
or
- Athlon 64 2800+ or above
or (cheaper, and is absolutely fine for WoW)
- Sempron 64 2800+ or above

Memory:
- 1GB RAM, definitely get at least this

Graphics card:
- Nvidia GeForce 6200 or better
or
- ATI Radeon X1600 or better

Things to avoid, in order of suckiness ffor WoW:

- less than 1GB RAM
- Intel or VIA integrated graphics chips
- Celeron CPUs
- Nvidia TurboCache or ATI HyperMemory graphics cards - these have very little onboard memory and use system RAM instead
- AGP graphics cards
- ATI X300, X600 or X1300 graphics cards

Things which are total overkill for this game, in order of silliness:

- SLI or Crossfire graphics (2 graphics cards in 1 PC)
- more than 2GB RAM
- dual-core processors (Athlon 64 X2 or Pentium D)

Dell PCs are pretty good, but the cheaper ones are not good for gaming- because they want you to pay extra for one of their hardcore gaming machines.

I've a friend who plays WoW on his Mac, and it runs really smoothly - so if you're feeling brave you could do a lot worse than one of the Intel iMacs...

HTH

[undercat]

Glaring noob question: What's wrong with AGP cards? Not any worse than PCI cards... right?

*shielding head with hands*

[Toper]

It's the bandwidth - the amount of data the CPU can send to the graphics card. Clearly, the more, the better.

PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) is the oldest of these buses. The first one I saw was (IIRC) in a P100. PCI replaced the VLB and EISA slots the 486s used...

Normal PCI is 33MHz and 32-bit (i.e. 4 byte), so has a bandwidth of 133MB/s - but all the devices on the bus share the bandwidth, so if you've got a sound card, network card, and a USB 2.0 expansion card in the same computer with a PCI graphics card, it'll chug.

Later versions of the standard gave us 66MHz, and there's PCI-X (PCI eXtended) which provides a 64-bit bus width and a signalling rate of 133 MHz, in a larger slot, while retaining backwards compatibility. This provided a bandwidth of 1.067GB/s, but still on a shared bus, and was mostly seen on server-class motherboards.

AGP was introduced in late '97 when the PCI bus became the bottleneck between fast graphics processors (like ATI's 3D Rage Pro, with 8MB of VRAM!!!) and the new 233MHz Pentium II and AMD K6 processors.

AGP is 32-bits wide and is clocked at 66MHz, for a bandwidth of 266MB/s - so (in normal 1x mode) it's twice that of PCI . You'll see cards labelled AGP 2x, AGP 4x and AGP 8x, which is the number of times per clock data can be sent, so the number of times that bandwidth that you can get. This works the same way as DDR memory (double data rate), where a "266 MHz" DDR module is actually running at 133MHz, but sending data twice per clock cycle. The front-side-bus of the Pentium 4 does the same thing, and is "quad-pumped" i.e. sends data 4 times per clock. AGP 8x has a maximum bandwidth of 2.133GB/s.

AGP is very strongly directional with the bandwidth for sending data to the card being much higher than that for reading from it - and most people don't know that this depends very much on the motherboard they have. IIRC, the maximum possible downstream bandwidth is 640MB/s, and that's only in high-end graphics workstations. Most consumer boards limit it at 128MB/s, and gaming/enthusiast boards peg you to 320MB/s. This makes video editing tricky on gaming boards, and horrible on consumer ones.

PCIe (PCI Express) is new, and is designed to replace both PCI and AGP. Instead of a shared bus, it operates as a shared switch - each card can get the full bandwidth it needs, and the swicth decides which gets to talk to the CPU and memory if there's ever more demand than capacity. With PCI, the cards effectively argued amongst themselves for priority, and only 1 could talk at a time.

PCIe is based on "lanes" - a normal slot on a motherboard is 1 lane, and is very small for a add-in card slot, historically speaking. A lane has a bandwidth of 2.5Gb/s in each direction, but only 80% of that is available for data, so the effective bandwidth of a PCIe lane is 250MB/s in each direction.

The specification allows for slots up to x32 but, unlike AGP, the physical size of the slot increases as you add more lanes, because the lanes are actual physical electric connections, so the card need to fit the slot. PCIe graphics cards are designed for x16 slots, which is a 4GB/s unidirectional and 8GB/s full duplex bandwidth, and plenty enough for video editing in the HDTV era.

Most modern motherboards have 1 or 2 of these x16 slots, but I don't know of any that actually allow both x16 slots to run at x16 at the same time; instead, they drop down to x8 when both are in use.

Nvidia's SLI technology and ATI's equivalent Crossfire allow gamers to install 2 PCIe x16 cards in these slots and share the workload. There are even some graphics cards with 2 GPUs on a single card, which can be installed in pairs for 4-way SMP graphics processing, but of course that's insane.

Phew. That turned out to be a long post, but hope it was useful. I bolded the bandwidth figures for the lazy :wink:

[undercat]

Wow, what a post!

So is the PCIe route still meaningful with a cheap graphics card? How do I know if my computer has PCIe capable slottage?

At any rate, my graphics area probably isn't the hold up in my 3 year old HP - I'm still running 512 RAM, so that's clearly the first thing to bump up. :afro:

[Imrei]

The first one I saw was (IIRC) in a P100. PCI replaced the VLB and EISA slots the 486s used...:wink:

Just one small correction.... PCI was around on 486's to :) It came around right as the Pentium's were introduced, and was available on the 'better' '486 boards

[dreadpiratemace]

thanks to everyone for the informative posts. i too am looking to join WoW in the near future and have been trying to do some research about what i need in terms of a computer and monitor. most posts on sites have turned into ads for one product over another and usually in terms of the "latest and greatest".

here's my plan for a set-up based on what i have read. i "think" this will work...

HP Pavilion a1450n
AMD Athlon 64 x 2 4200+ 2.2 GHz
2 GB DDR2
250 GB HD
Upgrade the graphics with a geForce 6600 GT or better card

next is the monitor... what tech specs should i get to compliment WoW?

[Imrei]

The 6600GT is a good card, but try to get a 6800GT series if you can... they have a bit better performance, and are not really that much more.

I myself prefer the LCD monitors. Dell has some VERY nice ones, as do most manufactuers. I would recommend just going into like a Best Buy/CompUSA and taking a look at some, and seeing which picture you feel looks best.

[rgirty]

I bought a machine with an
amd x64 3400+
1gb of ram
128 meg ATI video card.

I don't have any problems, might have to get a better video card for it when i start raiding and or more ram. I bought it very cheaply so i can't complain.

[dreadpiratemace]

the computer comes with a nVIDIA GeForce 6150LE - would that run WoW okay or would i have to upgrade the graphics card right away?

btw - i am hoping to go with the nVIDIA 7600 GT if i can wait on the upgrade a few months.

[coolxboxgamer]

im on this machine

x2 4200+
2gigs of ram
xfx xxx 7600gt

this originially was a gateway pc that came with a 6100

upgraded psu and video card

the 6100 (which is about a 6150le) ran at medium settings at 1024x768.... pretty respectable

my new card runs at 1600x1200 with max settings and aa and af on (maxed)

full pegged at 64.1fps (dual core glitch)

both will run fine, but it depends if u wanna run at max or lower settings