Edit: I'll try to update this post at a later time with conclusions that help you decide what you should upgrade first in your PC considering your system specs and the resolution you're using.
I know a lot of people here aren't satisfied with their system performance, so it might be nice to have a reference thread since you can blow a lot of money by choosing the wrong upgrade path.


I couldn't find a thread on this but I guess this is relevant to many people here.

Is WoW more CPU or GPU bound in raid settings, where you have 20+ players on your screen? How much RAM does WoW actually use?
AddOns seem decrease my FPS quite a bit, which suggests that the CPU is thte issue, is this correct?

I' currently have an Athlon 64 2.0 GHz OC'ed to 2.4 GHZ, 1GB of RAM and a X800XL and am thinking about what to upgrade.

Maybe someone can shed some light on when what PC component is limiting WoW Performance, I couldn't find much on the hardware sites I know. Anandtech did some tests a while back but they did it in Darnasssus so thats not representative if you mostly have FPS issues during raids/PvP.

PS: I also play FSX, so if anyone can make recommendations that will most benefit both games you're welcome to do so ;)

Well, I can supply some anecdotal evidence:

I've upgraded two computer components since installing WoW: Ram and video card.

When I upgraded my ram from 512 to 1024, I was able to set all video settings to max, where I couldn't put them much above halfway with 512 without encountering terrible video lag.

Just recently, I upgraded my video card from a 5500FX to a X1650, my FPS rougly doubled, from 15 in IF to 30, 10 in BGs to 20. I haven't had a chance to raid yet, so I'm not sure what happens there - raiding on my old video card, some fights would take me as low as 5 FPS.

Yeah, when one of my brother's RAM sticks died and had only 512MB it was impossible to move in IF with his usual video settings. 1GB of RAM seems to be must, but will more increase performance further?

RAM is the cheapest and most performance enhancing, to a point. At what point you stop receiving the "best bang for the buck" in upgrading RAM in referance to WoW I can't say. I would imagine a maximum of 2GB of RAM being the most you can have before starting to see severe diminishing returns.

It will if you are like me and always have firefox/msn/ventrillo/skype open next to WoW (all active and with a decent amount of windows/tabs).

Dont forget that almost every CPU these days works with a dual channel principle, meaning that you need 2 sticks of ram with both an equal size to get the best performance out of your CPU.

I've done some pretty major GPU upgrades since I started with WoW and I would personally say that upgrading your RAM/CPU is more beneficial. With RAM being way ahead of CPU due to its price.
Not to mention the new Intel CPUs, which are just amazing.

The biggest improvement I've seen is memory, with WinXP (without too much garbage installed) WoW seems to do best with 1.5GB or more. The difference between 1GB and 1.5GB for me was very noticable, but I've found 2GB to be the sweat spot that allows me to keep a web browser open for referencing thottbot or dkp listings while raiding.

WoW isn't really CPU bound, but at times it can be GPU bound depending on resolution/settings. I have an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.0Ghz dual core) that I overclock to 2.5Ghz, and the difference in WoW between 2Ghz and 2.5Ghz is minimal. Of course lowering clock speed would find a point were WoW is CPU bound but at 2Ghz+ it's not an issue. GPU performance can be a factor, I use a 6800GS with most of the settings at max @ 1600x1200 and I get ~40fps in IF. Previously I used a 5900 and performance was a little lower ~30fps in IF. Given your current CPU and GPU I would try upgrading to 2GB of memory first.

This CPU is fine. I would upgrade GPU and/or increase RAM to 2GB.

I would get two gigs of ram for the best WoW experience, especially if you tend to keep other things open in the background (IM clients, forums, IRC, vent). I have played at both 2 and 4 gigs while keeping the same video card and CPU, and 2 gigs is the point of diminishing returns now. I can for sure tell a tangible difference between 1 and 2 gigs, however.

for video upgrades, it really depends on what you have now as to whether an upgrade would be cost effective. Same for CPUs. For the OP, with his system, I would for sure go to 2 gigs of ram first. Then I would look at a video card upgrade, since the X800 is now at least two generations of cards behind the times. Depending on your motherboard it is possible that you could also drop in a dual core athlon64 X2, but I am less certain about how much benefit wow in specific will derive from that upgrade.

WoW has some long-outstanding issues with multi-core machines, so it's very CPU bound in that you don't notice a big difference moving from a Pentium 4 chip to a Core 2 Duo like you normally would in other games. There's a lot of CPU-bound information that gets thrown at the client. If you're running less than 2 gigs of RAM you'll get a lot of loading, but WoW doesn't really push any of the top-end graphics cards at all on maximum settings anymore. Your best upgrade is probably for some RAM, after that hold out for a reasonably priced Geforce 8800 series or whatever ATi pushes as an equivalent.

I can't imagine WoW being particularly GPU bound unless you want to run it at like 8x multisample or something. More RAM is key, and a harddrive or array with a very fast seek time+transfer rate would also be good for zoning/loading models quickly. At 2GB ram WoW never has to use the Windows page file. Lastly, defragging your hard drive after patches will also make you load much faster, the patches, especially the big ones, absolutely demolish your drive.

Im not sure multi-core issues (aka bugs) can make an application cpu bound. As well, the current multi core issues, 3 of which I know of, solved in wow 2.03, are not the same performance issues you would see with a cpu bound app.

Memory is huge. With firefox running 100megs of mem, and winxp using 250+, Id say having 2 gigs dual channel mem is the best/easiest performance increase you will see. If your ui mem starts paging, you get 5+ second lockups on gc processes, its not pretty.

I would agree with everyone else and say RAM first, but as to what will give the largest performance gains after that, video card or CPU, it is hard to say. If your GPU is CPU limited then a new GPU will not get you any performance gains while the performance gains from a new CPU might be dramatic just because it is allowing the GPU to do more work. You would have to do some benchmarking with a variety of different configurations to see where the largest gains would be.

[brag]My latest upgrade(C2Duo E6600, Radeon X1950XT 256MB, 2gb PC800 RAM) only lags when 60+ players are on the screen, it drops to 40 fps or so in those situations.[/brag] However TES:Oblivion can mess up my machine at max settings, I have to turn down some things to make it playable in outdoors areas.

Dont neglect a fast HDD either. The one thing that really ironed out the annoying IF hiccups was a 10k RPM HDD for me. The 5400 RPM HDD in my laptop is very noticeable.

Memory seems to be the easiest upgrade for a slower WoW system. Certainly, with a modern 2GHz+ CPU and 128MB+ video card, you can enjoy the benefits of smoother multitasking (assuming multi-core or HyperThreading, here) and sharper video settings, respectively.

I'm currently running WoW on a 600m with a 1.6GHz Pentium M (Banias), 512MB and a Mobility Radeon 64MB. I've just recently purchased 1GB more of RAM and a Pentium M 765 (2.1GHz Dothan). I anticipate a much smoother experience. I'll add another 1GB in a few weeks.

Of course, being a budget laptop originally, I also have a 4200RPM hard drive which also slows down my overall load times quite abit. I'll get a 7200RPM model eventually. Hopefully with the next RAM upgrade.

WoW is a lot more CPU bound than GPU dependant, at least if you have reached a certain level in my experience. Due an error in my motherboard my E6600 run on a throttled down speed (about the speed of a Pentium IV 2Ghz) and the performance suffered a lot - around 15 frames in raid, even with a ATI X1900XT. Changing the GPU (while trying to find the problem I switched a lot around) didn't do much, 2-3 frames changed. When I changed the motherboard and the CPU run at its normal speed it was back at 45-60 frames (in raid).

What were the issues with duel core processors? I run a duel core system at home, and I was at my friends place on his computer the other day and noticed his raiding experience was significantly smoother than mine, even though I had a more powerful system (A64 2.2Ghz dual core, 7900 GT 256, 2gb, versus his Athlon 3.0ghz (not dual core), 6800, 1.5gb).

In order of importance I would upgrade if my computer was less then...

1) CPU 2ghz+
2) RAM 1gig
3) GPU Anything GeForce 6600etc

It's worth mentioning that while i put cpu at #1, it's 'acceptable' threshhold is lower then what I would say is 'acceptable' for ram... Basically while cpu is most important it doesn't take as much for it to be 'good'. I dunno if that made sense.


If you are upgrading, I would seriously look at other games coming out to determine your upgrades, not WoW. If you're not into other FPS/RTS there are MMORPG's too that might be worth looking at.


I don't know the exact details - But (if i recall correctly) WoW Performance DROPS when running Dualcore vs single core at the same processor speeds. Just the Way WoW handles the dual cores that makes it harder to process?

I know i have a A64 3000+ and my friend is running a dual core system (not sure his specs but I'm reasonably cretain his cpu speeds are higher then mine) and even though most every component in his computer is superior (2gigs ram vs my 1gig ram, 7800 vs 6800, DualCore Processor) His wow experience is not significantly better then mine

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...10021047&sid=1 Post #5
The two things that they list are symptoms, but they're by no means the only problems that WoW has with multi-core systems. Given the vastly increased proliferation of multi-core systems available now I can't believe they won't focus on fixing them at some point.

The only issue I'm aware of for dual core is a problem relating to how windows XP (2000,2003,vista) handle multipule processors. Windows will not restrict a process/thread to a single processor by default so the process/thread will "bounce" from processor to processor with no logic or reason. If you open the task manager with a processor intensive program running you can watch as the two cores of your processor share the load. The problem with this is any data in the L1 or L2 cache for that program will have to be reloaded from main memory which is much slower. The quick work around is to set the processor affinity for that process/thread, which you can do by right clicking the process in task manager and select "set affinity" uncheck all but one of the processors and click ok. Unfortuanely this is temporary and the next time you start that program it will go back to the default. A program can be coded to avoid this but dual cores are still farely new so this is a recent problem and most programs are not multi-core/processor friendly.

My experience in beta is that the multi-core issues are fixed.

I am certainly seeing over 80 fps, admittedly staring at a wall to force rate up.

I would like to point out that the CPU bounding factor is substantially affected by the addons that you run. My system specs are quite similar to yours, and disabling my addons nets me ~15 FPS in raid settings. Of course, my UI Memory usage is >100MB and I've got >150 folders in my /Addons directory, so perhaps my example isn't quite typical. Something to think about, though.

As provided by others, upgrading from 512MB to 1024MB of RAM is a tremendous upgrade, moving to 1536 less so but it is still noticable. Adding a second 7800GT affected me almost none at all (while nearly doubling my FPS in EQ2 at the time ;) And yes, WoW does utilize both cards, there's just no stress on them). Performance difference between my SLI'd 64-3500+ with 1.5GB RAM and my laptop with a 64-3400+, 1GB, and a 9700 Pro isn't all that large.

Final point for CPU bounding, while playing at 1600x1200, turning up AA and AF a couple of notches barely affects my FPS in most circumstances. Underclocking my CPU by a couple hundred MHz (heat issues when my CPU fan was failing) was much more detrimental.

Wow is like every other game both CPU and GPU bound. If you want to know how much your cpu can handle, just set all video settings to lowest, and look at your frame rate in ironforge when there are 100 people around. If you see 15 fps, that's your CPU bound because of all the character animations around. If you see 40 fps, then start to increase video settings until you see a drop to 30 fps, there's your GPU bound.