On the network card issue: if the Killer NIC is actually noticably good in the areas you'd think it was desirable for (raids, cities, large-scale PvP), is there a NON-$400 network card that would be worth getting for the same result? I don't have one at all and am currently in the "if it aint broke don't fix it" mode with that shit, I've seen and heard too many bad things happening with misc. cards for me to spend money on something that may not make any real difference.

Good point about the PSU... still one of the most overlooked components, but the only one that has the potential to take your entire comp with it in the event of a failure. Dell cuts some of their PSUs so close, that even the 30 to 40 or so watts that come from adding extra RAM is too much and causes the PSU to flake out and throw random errors in your system. If you can afford it, get something like a PC Power and Cooling unit, and then stop worrying about ever having to upgrade it in the next decade.

I almost posted a bit ago on the PSU, but I will anyway - as the immediate reply indicated the PSU is really a binary upgrade... it should work or it doesn't. If its not enough power you're flirting with critical disaster and wasted cash. Its not what I'd call a "performance" upgrade.

That being said, understanding PSU's is a recent inception with the 6k series of geforces - basically know your rails, and all it boils down to is stack the 12 volt rail and maybe double it up for stability; but at the end of the day, the PSU makers have adjusted and this component is pretty easy to not make a mistake on... so long as you don't get cheap.

pcp&c is great and all, but way overpriced. besides that, a lot of psu manufacturers are hitting the same or higher efficiency (plus you get the added bonus of not being stuck with the undersized fans and general ugliness of the pcp&c boxes)

Intel Macs benefit greatly from the multi-threaded OpenGL that Apple put into that build of OS X, and hopefully it will show up in Leopard for PPC users as well. The main performance killer for PPC Macs is their god awful slow memory bus, and I don't know how much more performance Blizzard can wring out of that architecture. But even on PPC machines the client now is 10x better than it was at release.

[Edit: Believe it or not the Mac Tech Support forum on the official WoW boards is a pretty good forum for info like this. Tigerclaw posts with some regularity about this particular topic.]

In response to the original post, the answer is that WoW is "bound" by the slowest commonent of your system. It's hard to say what the slowest bit of your system is.

You claim to have only 1gig of RAM. I would guess that this is your most limiting factor right now. You'll see a big boost in places like Ironforge going to 2gig of RAM. You are unlikely to need more RAM.

A quick way to test if you are GPU or CPU bound is lower the resolution to something like 640x480. If your framerate doesn't improve, it means you are CPU bound, otherwise, you are GPU bound. Generally, games aren't really "GPU bound" but "quality bound": if you really need higher framerates, just lower the quality settings. Likewise, getting a new video card means you can increase the visual quality for the same framerates.

Lastly, ignore things like the "KillerNIC" or "gaming routers" or faster RAM. They are snakeoil sold to people with more money than brains.

On the topic of PSU's, can anyone put numbers on "beefy"? CPU, GPU and RAM numbers are pretty easy to understand, but PSU numbers are a big mystery to me.

My personal 12V data is this:
Peak/Continuity Line 1: 18A / 12A
Peak/Continuity Line 2: 16A /10A
Max Power (combined I guess): 264W

This has been working for 2 years now, so I'm pretty sure it's enough ;) But any recommended values would be nice to know.

If you have a PSU with a single 12v rail, look for one that is rated at 34 amps. The other rails are really not stressed as heavily as the 12v line, since the CPU, graphics card, and every fan/hard drive/optical drive is run off of 12v. I'm not quite as certain about dual 12v rails, but odds are if they add up to 34 or greater, than you are OK.

With regard to PC Power and Cooling, more than the actual supply you are paying for the superb customer service and nice warranty. The power supply industry is somewhat like laptops: There are a small-ish number of manufacturers, and a large number of companies that buy and re-brand the supplies as their own. If I had to pick the best value/bang for the buck power supply, I would get a Tagan or a Fortron Source/FSP unit. These are the guys that actually make some of the models behind OCZ or the lower end PCP&C units (Zippy/Emacs makes the guts of the higher end bricks.)

Short Answer: It has two 12v rails; you're good :).

Longer Answer: Two separately regulated 12v rails should be on everyone's short list for new PSUs; it allows you to run most of your system's components on one rail and drop your brand new, power hungry video card on the second without having to worry about stability on the first (unless you overload one of the two of course). For a 2yr old power supply, that's a pretty nice, and relatively future-proof, setup; the only thing I'd worry about is the relatively skimpy 2nd 12v rail--the first would probably handle a new video card without trouble, the second might need to run above the 10A continuity 'rating' to provide it with enough power under load (contributing to more wear & tear on the hardware, resulting in a shorter lifespan). Of course, the rest of the system needs to get enough power from the other 12v rail as well so you may have to play around with it a little bit if things get tight.

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Yeah, 30-35A on a single 12v rail is what you want these days; however, I'd be willing to settle for 25-30 over two if one was at least 15A.

Faster RAM is certainly not "snake oil". AMD processors, with their on-die memory controllers, take full advantage of low latency RAM. You will see a noticable and consistent increase in performance with high-end RAM that boasts low latency (2-2-2-5 for DDR1 or 3-4-3-9 for DDR2).

It's not snake oil, but really optimizing your ram timings rarely gives more than a 2-5% performance boost. Maybe more in a completely memory bandwidth/latency bound application designed to test memory (like Sciencemark). It's much more the sum of very small individual tweaks that may individually add .5%-1% more performance than any one "magic" tweak/upgrade/change (excluding an upgrade from a pentium 3 to a Conroe, etc.) When faced with many individual tweaks that on their own offer very little benefit, it is easy to pass them off as doing nothing, but they do really help.

Whether or not they are worthwhile, and cost effective, is another matter. The premium for the ram that can actually run those timings, at overclocked speed, is certainly not worth it, especially not in a game like wow.

Here I thought everyone knew that the whole purpose behind lower latency/higher speed RAM was so that when you have to relax your timings for OC, you have a lot more freedom with how high you clock your FSB while keeping your timings not-horrendous. Oh well. :P

I'm on the verge of tears here. Or maybe I'm actually crying. I don't know.

This thread played a large part in convincing me to upgrade from my old machine (see the minimum requirements on the back of the WoW box for details - It matches my old machine almost perfectly - P3, 800Mhz, 256 Ram, Geforce 2... ect.).

I'm now running a dual core monster with 2 GIGS of ram. Video card, processor, EVERYTHING all has really big numbers associated with it.

The increase in performance is... It's all so beautiful. Thanks guys.

Fortunately memory dividers on AMD systems allowed for pushing HTT/FSB even higher while maintaining tight timings. (not that I'd recommend using some huge divider to do so; it's all about balance obviously)

How does increasing the resolution increase CPU? It's still the same number of polygons.

Of course, it can have a side effect on CPU: higher resolution screen means higher resolution textures, which in turn will increase bandwidth to main memory (unless you've got 512meg on the card to cache them). This will show up as virtually slowing down the CPU a little bit because takes longer to access main memory.

That's pretty much it, just imagine recalling back to Drek'thar/Vandar when he's being assaulted by the 40 man zerg, that's all CPU/RAM/HDD right there.