Upgrade my gaming/development PC?

[GeordieLife]

Hi folks

I'm currently in a state of indecision.

I'm running a Q9550, Asus P5Q Deluxe, 8GB of some memory, 5870 1GB, 120GB SSD + 6 TB of other drives, 650W PSU (mod82 rings a bell), Dell 3008WFP + 22" LG. W7 Ultimate. Corsair H50-1 cooler.

I mainly play WoW, develop in VS2010, SQL Server Express...possibly run a virtual machine with "some" server software on (as yet undecided, VMWare probably).

I run WoW in a window 1900x1200ish (have recently gone back down to 1600ishx1050ish to see what performance is like). Basically it's struggling on "low" settings. Very frustrating. Clean install done when I got my SSD about a month ago.

Sooo...I have the money to fully rebuild, but I just think it may be overkill for my needs. If I were to upgrade part of my machine, what should it be?

Obviously the first thing is a new graphics card...GTX580 maybe? or wait for the AMD offering soon. If I change the CPU, I'm looking at a bill for a new mobo + new memory (probably 12GB of tri channel). Neither option is cheap.

I've never tried overclocking, always too scared.

What would you recommend? Thank you in advance.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Honestly? I'd recommend overclocking. It's not too hard, and it really provides performance benefits. WoW is mostly CPU-limited, and that's your problem.
Q9550 is 2.83Ghz, but easily overclocks to 3.4 and beyond. Try simply setting your FSB speed in your BIOS to 400, and setting your RAM ratio to 1:1 (or 2.0 for Gigabyte boards). The idea is to get the RAM Mhz set to 400 like the FSB, which is DDR2-800 speed.

From what I understand, most Q9550 chips should be able to do that on stock voltage, but if you encounter instability, try setting your CPU Vcore to 1.27v. I did that on one I built for someone, and it was totally stable at 3.5Ghz (412 FSB).

 

[GeordieLife]

OK. Will give it a go later when I get home.

I've always wanted to try, but bottled it!

Thanks

ETA - Do you think that a graphics card would help? I'm concerned that running 2560x1600 on my main monitor (even though it's not full of gaming windows) is pushing things. Also, I occasionally (often) multibox on the same PC which also causes lots of FPS loss.

 

[mfenn]

Can you test WoW running at 1680x1050 fullscreen? I would expect that to have much better performance, but it's still a good sanity check. Running games in windowed mode is always iffy when it comes to performance, but the issues are usually driver related.

I can tell you from personal experience that WoW in a 1680x1050 window ran fine (40+ FPS) on my old system which was much slower than yours (Q6600, GTX 260). That's why I'm suspecting a software issue.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

WoW is mostly CPU-limited, and that's your problem.

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