Time to upgrade

[Paul1337noob]

Ive been with my system now for a good few years, and its done me well.
But i need to upgrade, Badly!

ive got a budget of upto about £900

All i need is the tower and said components.

I want it to be able to run all modern games in full with a decent fps
and future releases, definatly be able to multibox up to 5 WoW's

i see most people talking about i7's and stuff
but is it really worth going so far for what i want
or can i stick to something allong the lines of a overclocked dual core

if need be i can go all the way upto the 900£ but any savings are always great.


i was thinking of something like

*OVERCLOCKED* Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5300 @ 3.20GHz / Gigabyte GA-P43-ES3G Intel P43 Motherboard / Corsair XMS2 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-8500C5 DDR2 Bundle [] Overclocked Bundles
with
Club 3D GeForce GTS 250 Green Edition 1024MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Card [CGNX-TS2524GCI] Graphics and Video NVIDIA Graphics Plus GTS 250 Series
which comes up to like
£300

or is it worth me going all out and going i7 and top graphics card etc

i havent really used i7's and my current system is only single core
so i cant realy see what difference they are and cant justify going so far without reason, enlighten me/?

[burningforce]

that is a decent system, but not great. I think what saves that system is the fact that it is overclocked to 3.2GHz. But what if you get that system and you can not boot into windows because the overclock failed and was not stable enough? Do you know how to fix it in the bios? that would be a concern for me if i was buying a pc that was overclocked.

i7 is great, "if" you do a lot of 3d modeling and video encoding, etc. the extra cores help out a lot with that. But if you game only and do some light encoding, nothing major, you can opt for a socket 775 dual core or a quad core depending on prices. or you can get an i3 (a newer dual core version) for fairly cheap or just get a i5 system, but be warned that the socket for that cpu may not see anymore updates from intel.

I would check into getting an i3 or i5 system if you do not plan to upgrade any components in the near future (2-3 years). Are you able to build the computer yourself if you buy the parts? there are plenty of options if you do the build yourself, but if you buy a premade computer you might be limited to what you can find

[Ualaa]

I would personally look at an i7 920 chip, a motherboard like say an Asus P6T, and in the neighborhood of 6GB of DDR3 (or 9/12, if you can afford it; can upgrade to 9/12 down the road).

Processor is probably the single biggest thing for wow.
Unless you don't have enough ram, in which case that is a bigger upgrade.
6GB is plenty for 5-boxing.
After processor, a low-end SSD for just your gaming folder is the next largest improvement.

Unless your video card is very sub-par.
Chances are, its one of the components which will benefit you the least.
A good video card improves the performance of Shadows... which is generally turned way down as a boxer.
Just about every other effect, is more processor dependent then video dependent for warcraft.
If your current video card is junk/old, look into something better.

Chance are, you can use your existing video card, onboard sound, tower, power supply (maybe), and upgrade only the motherboard, processor and ram for a substantial boost in gaming performance. After these three, unless your video is horrible, a $100 low-end SSD will be the next largest bang for buck.

[Briarknit]

Originally Posted by burningforce

that is a decent system, but not great. I think what saves that system is the fact that it is overclocked to 3.2GHz. But what if you get that system and you can not boot into windows because the overclock failed and was not stable enough? Do you know how to fix it in the bios? that would be a concern for me if i was buying a pc that was overclocked.

i7 is great, "if" you do a lot of 3d modeling and video encoding, etc. the extra cores help out a lot with that. But if you game only and do some light encoding, nothing major, you can opt for a socket 775 dual core or a quad core depending on prices. or you can get an i3 (a newer dual core version) for fairly cheap or just get a i5 system, but be warned that the socket for that cpu may not see anymore updates from intel.

I would check into getting an i3 or i5 system if you do not plan to upgrade any components in the near future (2-3 years). Are you able to build the computer yourself if you buy the parts? there are plenty of options if you do the build yourself, but if you buy a premade computer you might be limited to what you can find

The only reason I want an i7 is because it has "8" cores, therefor I can place up to 8 instances of wow in each core, reducing the load that having 2 on each one would have, ya know?

[TheMuffinMan]

/hijack

Love your sig motto Paul!

[Ualaa]

I would think, having all four physical cores (or 8, if you include the logical cores) on every application of warcraft, and letting windows manage the load would be beneficial.

Some aspects of wow were optimized for two cores. And recently, they have mentioned wow will no longer limit itself to a maximum of two cores for those aspects of the game (there is a patch note in 3.3, to force wow to limit itself to 2 cores via a config command). Basically, if you have 1 core per 1 client, that works. But for many aspects of play, more then 1 core per client will be faster play.

Do you plan on 8 boxing specifically, or just want the capability of running 8?

I'm running 5, and have every physical core on all clients. From experimentation, my five clients run faster/smoother with only physical cores assigned to them and the logical cores unassigned. That seems wrong, but I consistently better with only 4 physical cores, as opposed to 4 physical and 4 logical cores.

[Briarknit]

Originally Posted by Ualaa

I would think, having all four physical cores (or 8, if you include the logical cores) on every application of warcraft, and letting windows manage the load would be beneficial.

Some aspects of wow were optimized for two cores. And recently, they have mentioned wow will no longer limit itself to a maximum of two cores for those aspects of the game (there is a patch note in 3.3, to force wow to limit itself to 2 cores via a config command). Basically, if you have 1 core per 1 client, that works. But for many aspects of play, more then 1 core per client will be faster play.

Do you plan on 8 boxing specifically, or just want the capability of running 8?

I'm running 5, and have every physical core on all clients. From experimentation, my five clients run faster/smoother with only physical cores assigned to them and the logical cores unassigned. That seems wrong, but I consistently better with only 4 physical cores, as opposed to 4 physical and 4 logical cores.

Wait so are you saying that if you assign all 8 cores to 5 wows, it performs worse than if you just assigned 4 physical ones? That makes NO sense.

[Ualaa]

Basically yes.

The processor doesn't actually have 8 cores.
It has four physical cores.
And via hyper threading, can have each of the four physical cores act like two cores.

In my case, assigning all four physical cores to each of my five clients (windows manages which core does what at any given time) is superior performance to having the same four physical cores, but also the four logical cores as well, on each client.

There was a post on the other site, of why hyper threading wasn't the best option for warcraft. I did a bunch of experimentation, and only using cores 0, 2, 4, 6 (1, 3, 5, 7 in IS Boxer which starts at 1, not 0) was consistently better performance, although the gain is slight.

[Briarknit]

Originally Posted by Ualaa

Basically yes.

The processor doesn't actually have 8 cores.
It has four physical cores.
And via hyper threading, can have each of the four physical cores act like two cores.

In my case, assigning all four physical cores to each of my five clients (windows manages which core does what at any given time) is superior performance to having the same four physical cores, but also the four logical cores as well, on each client.

There was a post on the other site, of why hyper threading wasn't the best option for warcraft. I did a bunch of experimentation, and only using cores 0, 2, 4, 6 (1, 3, 5, 7 in IS Boxer which starts at 1, not 0) was consistently better performance, although the gain is slight.

So would you recommend buying an intel quad core over an i7 quad core at the moment?

[burningforce]

Originally Posted by Briarknit

So would you recommend buying an intel quad core over an i7 quad core at the moment?

if between those two then I would recommend getting the i7. mainly because the price for a "good" quad core processor and a i7 processor is about the same. also DDR2 memory is about the same price as DDR3 memory, the only thing that seems cheap is the quad core motherboard. I recently seen a gigabyte i7 motherboard for only $200 at newegg, so that is pretty good motherboard for that much money.