WOW - New Graphics Card or more RAM?

[Roland]

Some random comments for you, Roland.  I have had your graphics card and an Abit motherboard since about the start of the year.

I'm curious what kind of in game performance levels you are getting with what you have now.  It seems like it should already be a pretty nice rig, but the CPU probably can't keep up.  If the card came with Farcry, what kind of settings and FPS are you getting?  Just curious.

I get fairly decent performance all around. Nothing worth truly complaining about. My biggest issues are the graphical lag I get in WoW, especially when I boost the effects (AA, mipmap, and aniso). Also, flying on a Gryphon / Hyppogriph leads to very choppy performance; most displeasing. I'm not positive that my video card is entirely powerful enough to do what I want, but it theoretically should be. I don't think I should be having the graphical problems I am currently, let me put it that way (bugger the fact that I have to run the damned game in Windowed mode, because it freezes at startup in fullscreen mode, and Blizzard STILL has not done ANYTHING about this problem).

Besides, my CPU is way outdated for some of the hardware I have in there (namely the video card). The processor runs at 1.6GHz, with a 400MHz FSB. It's sad, really. Doubling the FSB, nearly doubling the CPU power, and adding in HT should vastly boost my overall performance, in theory. I DO notice, IIRC, that when my games get choppy, my CPU light seems to go haywire, and the internal sound (fans, drive clicking, etc.) increase a fair bit, so it's my sneaking suspicion that my computer issues are due to bottlenecking in the CPU. Understandable, but undesirable, especially since I can fix it this easily for this cheap. :D

I haven't played Farcry much lately (though it did come with the vid card), and only played it for a couple weeks before abandoning it for other interests, but I was able to sustain fairly high-end video settings with acceptable performance rates. Again, I think the CPU is the major limiting factor, although the video card is certainly a bit low to handle the full-blow Farcry experience.

As a sidenote, I run all my games in 1024x768 resolution so that it matches my desktop. Aside from that, I'm not sure what more this monitor can handle (it's a ProView - just terrible), especially since anything above 70Hz is inaccessible.

6800OC attached to a 15" monitor sounds like a Yugo with nitros  :rolleyes:  I'm sure 15" monitor is plenty big enough for all practical purposes though.  If you really want overkill, try to unlock the pixel pipelines using RivaTuner.

Not quite. The extra horsepower under the hood helps deliver the visual content. The monitor just displays it. Not quite sure how to fit that into a car analogy, but your example is a little off. :)

I have an Abit motherboard, but it is the AV8 (Athlon64 rather than Pentium 4).  So far, so good.  If you like to mess around with overclocking, you will probably like the microGuru, which can allow you to make a specific group of voltage/fan/FSB settings, save it, and then flop it on at any time without needing to reboot.  You can even bind such a profile to specific programs, such that everytime you run "diablo.exe" you automatically get a more agressive overclocking to provide the necessary performance boost for such intensive software.  (Advanced memory settings and some other things can only be changed in BIOS).  The practical side of me, however, has never seen enough performance boost from overclocking to justify the added heat and potential stability problems.  And if your current memory is PC2100, it may be even less practical to overclock.

I tend to lean towards middle ground when it comes to overclocking - enough for a boost, but not so much that I'm worried about killing my hardware. That was also one of the defining points on why I chose the Abit board - the OC software. Soltek didn't offer it, and Gigabyte I'm still iffy with (their included software is only mediocre; BIOS options are good, though, and I'm very comfortable with working within a BIOS). MSI I have no experience, but generally they have very good OCing capabilities. Unfortunately, sometimes they are hit & miss with the quality, but generally good overall. ASUS, sadly, didn't have any boards available, or I probably would have chosen them.

The main problems I've heard about with Abit mobos in the past involved northbridge fans.  I don't know if those issues apply to the current models or not.  My model does not seem to have any fans at all, just the funky blue heatsinks, so problem solved.

Bridge fans can be replaced easily. Not a big issue. :)

There is at least a decent chance that your memory will be able to run in dual channel if you do go through with this motherboard/processor upgrade.  As gnollguy said, there is really no such thing as "dual channel RAM".  It is just a matched pair of DDR SDRAM.  You already have that, just older and slower, so it might work in dual channel configuration with very conservative memory settings.

Ah, but that's the thing: I don't have "matched pairs". There is still a slight chance it will work even without matched pairs, but the likelihood is very slim. I'm not at all concerned about it. In the future, I'll look into getting a set of matched pairs for a RAM upgrade, but for right now I've boosted just about everythihng I can without forcing myself into a mobo / cpu upgrade. The time has come to do this last bit, and now is right about the perfect time, since Intel is / will be soon phasing out the 478 socket CPUs, and the 865PE / 875P Northbridge chipsets. Thankfully, for the time being motherboard makers are combining 865PE / 875P with LGA775, providing for a very good CPU upgrade while still maintaining the heavy performance of the old Intel chipsets, as well as AGP support (which Intel dropped form their 9xx line of chipsets, sadly). :D

Since you already have the AGP 6800, and I'm betting you have a few things that demand a regular PCI slot, it is probably a good choice to avoid the PCI-Express motherboards for now.

Aye, indeed. I don't care about PCI-Express except for video, and even then the advantages of PCI-E are a LONG way off. Currently, there's virtually no reason to switch, save for SLI with nVIDIA cards, and that's way out of my price range ATM.

It's all speculation anyhow, at this point. I'm on unemployment temporarily, so once I get my first check and know how much I'll be getting, then I can budget whether or not I can "afford" to upgrade, or whether paying off more of my debts is the "best" / only solution. I know I SHOULD put ALL my money into removing debt, but sometimes you just have to treat yourself when you can. :) I'm good with money, so it's just a waiting game for now. In time, all things will get payed off. My biggest issues right now are my student loan payments and my car insurance payments (that JUST started up again this month, urgh), which make up the bulk of my "debt". :P

What kind of rig do you have? And if you play WoW, how well does it run for you?