Technical Help

[scalar]

Ok, so I have been trying to figure out how to improve my wow performance and to see whether my ati crossfire was working. I am trying to decide whether more ram would help or a better video card. My processor currently is an i7 920 OCed to 3.0 ghz . For video card I use two ati 4870 512mb in crossfire and my ram is 3 gb of 1066 ram. I can provide more specific info if needed.

Anyway, setting everything to ultra with max mulitsampling and texture filtering, I get a lot of stutters in my fps, mostly in crowded areas (to be expected), so I decided run a few monitoring tools while I played to see where my system was being stressed. The tools I used were PC Wizard, CPU-Z, and GPU-Z. The processor was only running at about 15% load during the times of stutter, where as almost 2.4 gbs of memory were being used (1.6 by wow) (85%).

As for the gpu, I saw that one card was running at 75% load, where are the other card was running at 0%. So I thought maybe crossfire was not working. But when I checked the CCC, crossfire was definately enabled, and GPU-Z also told me that it was enabled as well. Then I tried to change the clock settings for the vcards, increasing their core clock speeds to 770 mhz and memory clock to 935 mhz. The CCC told me after testing that both of these values were acceptable. But when I monitored my gpu clocks while playing wow, once again only 1 card was reaching this clock speed. I had also increased the fan speed for both cards and both cards were operating at the new fan speed. In the case both cards are on, and connected properly.

So, after all that, my question is 2 fold. Is my crossfire working properly? and if I had a few spare bucks would a new video card (was looking at a ati 6850) or more ram (was looking at 6 gbs of 1333 ram) have the larger impact on performance.

I apologize for the wall of text and if this the wrong place to post this. thanks for any help

[Pizbit]

Have you done the no-addons route yet? Some can be pretty screwy, especially after major patches.

/ed/

And no, you shouldn't be having any framerate issues at all.

[scalar]

I have updated all the addons, but I will try to see if there is stuttering while having them all turned off. The only addons I use are grid, dominos, dxe, and clique.

[allikat]

If it's lag in crowded areas, then you're better off upgrading the cooler on your CPU and winding it up a bit more. With top end cooling, your chip should easily hit 3.8-4GHz. Venemous-X, Megahelams, Noctua NH-D14, and many other high end air coolers will do the job nicely.
WoW visual lag is entirely down to your CPU in 99% of cases, especially with high view distances.
Second thing you need to remember, is that unless the 4.0x change has done something crazy, then WoW is not SLi or X-fire aware, and will not benefit from 2 GPUs.

Right: Swapping your GPUs out:
Recommmended ATi solutions: 5770 or 6870 are about the best in the lower midrange price area. Prices on the 5770 should have dropped some, and similar for prices on 5830/5850, which should also be good upgrades. The 6850 is the replacement for the 5750, not such a good upgrade for you, but still, not bad at all.
Recommended Nvidia card: GTX460 (any version).

I run an AMD PhenomIIx4 at 3.6GHz, with an Nvidia GTX460 (maxed graphics settings), and I still get stutter occasionally, but the stutter is definitely much less when my cpu is upclocked more. Sadly I managed to break my good board, which ran my chip at 4GHz, which was 100% stutter free.

Edit: TL;DR version: Best answer: Buy a new, major league CPU cooler, and wind your CPU up some more.

[scalar]

I currently use http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835181010&Tpk=Corsair%20Hydro%20Series%20H50 to cool the cpu, I will try to OC it further, just a little hesitant since I lost my last cpu to over heating, and the 2 4870's in the case do genereate quite a bit of heat atm. But, if you say that upping the cpu will give the best result, I will try that 1st (also since it wont cost me anything, unless I screw up ) If the stuttering remains the same, ill try to find a new card; maybe a 6870 once the 69xx hit and the prices drop. Thank you for the help.

Edit: I have ordered 6 gigs of 1600 mhz ram, so I will probably wait till it arrives to OC, as I think 4.0 ghz with 1000 mhz memory may not be as affective.

[Exogen]

I didnt think that WoW was a supported Crossfire game? I may be wrong.

[scalar]

It isn't, allikat was right, my fault for not looking that up 1st. Also the reason why I was seeing the load only on 1 card while playing and thinking my crossfire wasn't working.

[rodos]

I've also come to believe that a lot of the poor performance in crowded areas is due to texture loading. Try a utility that monitors HDD usage and see if it spikes when your graphics skip. If it does, I'd imagine the best fixes would be a gfx card with more ram, switching to a solid-state drive, and/or defragging your WoW data files (either with a defragger or by copying them to a new disk).

I also have a suspicion that the new streaming downloader is partly to blame here. If they are not pre-allocated, the MPQ files could easily become very fragmented. I noticed this on my mac laptop, even though HFS+ is usually good with fragmentation, because the disk was nearly full. Even if the files are fully contiguous, you could still end up with internal fragmentation (e.g. not all of the Dalaran textures stored in the same part of the file). I believe this is what the huge /Data/Cache directory is for - storing on-the-fly-defragged resources.

[inthedrops]

As mentioned, a lot of lag is related to latency, especially in crowded environments. Has little to do with your computer itself.

Also, I believe it's correct that WoW doesn't utilize Crossfire, SLI, etc.

The BIGGEST culprit to FPS issues, running such a nice computer as yours, is addons. Especially addons that are monitor the combatlog or which are poorly coded. WoW is not very demanding.

BTW, I think more system RAM would be a good choice all around. 3GB is pretty small these days.

[Levantine]

Don't mean to hijack your thread, but I figured making an entire new one may be a little redundant. Anyway, I need a new CPU, I've been looking around but I'm somewhat out of my league these days after focusing on Uni. Anyway, I'm hoping for something with a mid-range pricing, I'm wary of overclocking because of where I'm living at the moment and the ambient heat influencing shit. Any tips as to what's decent these days? For reference I'm running an Intel Core2Duo E6300 @ 1.86GHz on a FOXCONN P43A01, so yeah, an upgrade is getting to the point of being necessary.

[Aergis]

Depends if your an AMD fan or not, but best bang for my buck a couple months ago was the Phenom II 6 core 1090T. About $200 and it seems to be as high as I can get without jumping to an i7-970 at $1000.

Not sure if anything newer has come out recently though.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819103849

[Aergis]

I've also come to believe that a lot of the poor performance in crowded areas is due to texture loading. Try a utility that monitors HDD usage and see if it spikes when your graphics skip. If it does, I'd imagine the best fixes would be a gfx card with more ram, switching to a solid-state drive, and/or defragging your WoW data files (either with a defragger or by copying them to a new disk).

I switched to an SSD a few months ago and I noticed an extreme difference. SOOOO much faster all around. Load screens, instances, and just getting in game was amazingly more convenient. For example, when I used to log in near the dal bank areas I would see my shadow loaded with no character, then things like NPCs and mailboxes, then me, then finally other people after like 30 seconds. And during the time I was getting glitches/stuttering.

After installing an SSD and putting wow on that instead of my old 7200 hdd I had like 3-4 second load screens and when I dalaran came up, everything was already there and read to go, no glitches. I couldn't believe how much that made a difference. And the real reason I bought it made less of a noticeable difference which was loading large image/video files for work! lol Though my whole system can reboot in 30 seconds or so now, and 15 sec or so of that is waiting for the mb to finish posting, so that's nice.

[Levantine]

Depends if your an AMD fan or not, but best bang for my buck a couple months ago was the Phenom II 6 core 1090T. About $200 and it seems to be as high as I can get without jumping to an i7-970 at $1000.

Not sure if anything newer has come out recently though.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819103849

I'm fairly brand blind. I've used Intel and AMD in the past and both have been pretty good for my uses, it really just comes down to value.