Computer Upgrade: Memory or Video CardFollow

Sure. You should think about what you're really trying to accomplish, then look at what will influence those factors. Once you have a better idea of your goals, think about your budget and give some thought to how long the change is going to last before you start thinking upgrade again.

1. Do maintenance. Defrag your hard drive, make sure you have adequate free space, and eliminate things that are just wasting your system resources. If you haven't cleaned your fans and such for a while, get a can of air and blow the dust out.

2. Look at your OS. Make sure that what you are running fits your needs. Older versions of Windows run into a limit on how much RAM they can use. If I recall, they also don't support the latest forms of DirectX and that means they don't support some of the improved graphics in WOW.

3. Once you start monkeying around with things like a new video card, you may find that you hit a cascade -- you need a new motherboard for the new card and then you'd might as well upgrade ... and boom, you've bought most of a new system. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but have it happen because you planned it that way and made the most of your resources.

4. All the hardware and software improvements in the world may do little to improve your experience if your internet connection can't keep up. One thing that might influence that would be if you're trying to play and someone else in the house is downloading a gazillion gigs of data.

Slightly irrelevant to the current topic, but 64 bit is coming tomorrow with patch 4.3.2.

More information about your computer's mainboard might help a little, but uh...

Most likely, upgrading your RAM isn't going to help you very much. You already have 4GB, and that is more than enough for most games, and certainly enough for WoW unless you're going for ultra hardcore settings. Your average WoW gamer should get 60+ FPS out of 4GB of RAM, easily.

Your CPU is most likely a waste of time to upgrade; you'd have to find a CPU that would fit your mainboard (which you don't likely know what socket type your mainboard even has) and replacing a CPU is something that only a person familiar with computer hardware should do: It is the easiest part by far to break on your computer. A CPU has dozens of tiny little pins and any force applied in just the wrong direction/way will permanently destroy the CPU and void any warranty it might have had, not to mention the CPU heatsink/fan can be difficult to attach and remove if you're not familiar with how to do it. Furthermore, you have a Dual-Core, and outside of upgrading to a Quad-Core, you wouldn't see much of a performance upgrade.

That leaves us to your video card. I highly doubt you're running AGP, unless your computer is 3+ years old. It is most likely a PCI-e, which means it should be able to take most video cards out there. Someone above mentioned your PSU, which is a valid concern. Most cards on the market in the <$100 range, though, should be decent upgrades but yet have low power consumption. Your main power hogs comes from running multiple cards on SLI or some-such, or the huge high-end behemoths.

There's something else you ought to try:

Ask a friend who's familiar with computers to check your system's startup registry. This is something I preach to my friends all the time: You want a clean start up: Only security software and things absolutely necessary to the OS should be loading on startup. You do not need Instant Messengers, Email software, and other things of this type loading on Windows startup. Things like these should be used on-demand (click the icon when you wish to sign into IM) and unless you seriously want AIM, or MSN, or what-not running while playing WoW, it is very strongly recommended you don't run them while playing WoW.

You'd think this would be common sense, that you shouldn't run unneeded software when you're not using it, but you'd be surprised how many my friends have whined that they can't get more than 30-40 FPS while they're running 50 idle programs in the background that they're not even using while in-game. Anything from Firefox, to AIM, MSN, Email, is running in the background and gobbling up CPU/RAM. You'd press Ctrl+Alt+Del and check Task Manager and get a huge long list of crap that's running that isn't needed.

The only thing you really need on start up are the following:

Anti-virus.
Firewall.
Device Software (video driver progs, like Catalyst, Razer's software, etc)
Things like Daemon Tools if you use that.
System services (anything Windows put there when you first installed it)

The problem is, many, many programs think that they should run upon Windows Startup, and most of them are enabled to behave like this by default. Rather than going through each program and putting a check in "load on windows startup" it is better to uncheck the boxes within Windows Startup instead, but this should only be done by someone who's familiar with how to do it, though you could find a guide on the net to do it, just google "msconfig" and find a guide for the OS you're using (XP, 7, etc).

The reason you should uncheck the boxes in startup rather than each program, is many times, a program's systray manager will still load (and still eat up resources) and/or during startup, the program will load and then immediately exit which still eats up system resources when starting the computer up. I know Winamp behaves like this, it runs a hidden process in the systray, unless you disable the whole thing altogether and only load winamp when you plan to listen to music.

Glad my post helped spread the word to at least one person.

Lots of crap loading on windows startup bogs down who knows how many computers a day, and I do my part to educate people.

Of course, this might mean I'm not very popular with computer repair businesses (I'd be willing to bet that a decent chunk of their business comes from 'my computer runs too slow!' or some such), but meh. I also fix computers for people I know IRL too, so...

Without more information, a video card upgrade would give you the best bang for your buck. My old P4 plays this game very well, I do have a pretty kickass video card though.

I should have mentioned this: the game runs, from what I think, at 60 fps when I have everything on low settings. I just want to play it at high setting and still have the game run nice and smooth. One thing I do think I always miss calculate is that I am using a wireless connection, and I would think that might cause me some problems.

But for the other stuff, how do I find info about my motherboard?

@Lyrailis I will come back and read what you posted. You wrote a lot, and I thank you deeply for sharing your knowledge :D

2 things here. First, WoW is capped at 60 FPS unless you turn off Vertical Sync in its video options. Second, you only need 25(-30) FPS for things to appear smooth since unlike TV sets, your monitor doesn't do interlacing.

If you have difficulties obtaining your motherboard information, go and download CPU-Z at http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html. It tells you everything you need to know, and can also create a text file report that you can copy and paste here in case the information still doesn't make any sense to you. (Make sure that during setup you deactivate that annoying ASK bar by not accepting)


Edited, Feb 2nd 2012 2:46pm by Kanngarnix

I just did the msconfig thing turned off all the unnecessary stuff. As for my computer, I have an HP Pav a1355c. Also, I have a friend who is a hardcore game AND someone who is really savvy with computer too, especially in the gaming department, so I will have him check it out.

Anything else?

You guys are effing awesome for helping me out :D

{EDIT}

okay, so I did all those things you mentioned, and now my computer is running faster but... in game, even on the lowest possible setting, I am running at 30fps. Any advice to increase my fps?

here is the read out I am getting:

Latency: 70 (home) and 85 (world)
FPS: 30-31
Bandwidth: 0 mbps
Download: 92%

Edited, Feb 2nd 2012 11:49pm by ovshanevo

@Kanngarnix I turned off the sync and my FPS jumped to 40-41.

Edited, Feb 2nd 2012 11:51pm by ovshanevo

Okay, looking at this computer...

The HP Pavilion a1355c.

Ouch. The computer is just over 6 years old.

Given a computer this age, I'm not real sure if there's much if anything that can be done unfortunately.

The socket type is a Socket 939, you're not going to find a 939 CPU anywhere very easily unless you happen to get lucky with some comp shops locally to you, or find them on some used hardware site or something, and even then, fully tricked out, you're probably still not going to get much in the way of performance in WoW.

I'm kinda surprised this computer can even run wow, especially 60FPS at the lowest settings.

As far as video cards, you have a PCI-e slot, but it does not say PCI-e x16, so I'm not sure what sorts of cards would actually work in that.

My best suggestion to you, is to ask that friend you mentioned to build you one from parts, using a site like Newegg if he's willing to do that for you. I'm thinking about $700-900 would get you a tower that would easily do 100+ FPS out in the open, easily.

Other than doing that, I doubt there's not much else you can do for a computer that old, sadly.

Computers age terribly; one can expect to get about 2 years out of a "gaming" rig at most, sometimes 3 years if you spent a lot of money on it. The computer I type this on just celebrated its 3rd year, and there's a fairly good possibility I might be forced to upgrade it for Mass Effect 3 here in March.

I would recommend you stay away from factory-makes unless you are seriously in a money pinch; parts bought from somewhere like Newegg.com are bound to give you a lot better bang for your buck, though you could get away with spending $500 at Wal*mart on an HP. You get what you pay for, though.

The game runs good on my com (especially after doing all the stuff everyone on this thread mentioned), but I just want to have the game run smooooooth at high/ultra graphics.

@Lyrailis Thanks for all your help. I'll just wait till after I graduate to pick up a custom computer, and I will see if I can get my friend to help me build it. Thanks again. And btw, msconfig did wonders for how the game runs, thanks.

You may not need to run everything at max. Play with your settings. You may not even want somethings, like ground clutter and shadows, at max. Try turning off some of the effects like "full screen glow" -- some players used to report that was useful.

The graphics upgrade, to my knowledge, consisted of adding a new water effect and enabling Ultra settings, which people previously had to enable through commands (denser ground clutter, higher shadow quality etc. - I actually wrote a guide to this some years ago, I think).

The FPS drop was probably due to them adding more crap to the scenery during the redesign of the various zones, not any changes made to the graphics themselves.

Edited, Feb 4th 2012 3:46am by Mazra