Old system advice

[Maoli]

Hey, curious if someone could give me a little advice with my older computer. Its an XPS630 with Q6600 2.4 ghz, 4gb ram, vista32.
It's been hurting a lot in 25mans when fights get heavy. I decided to try for a cheap fixed and got a hd6770 to replace my two 3870 cards that I got with it. The card works great with my system for games that aren't very CPU heavy. Of course WoW still runs like shit in 25mans. I get 130fps chilling out on high settings in durotar but in org/25mans it's down to 17-20~fps. Changing to low settings seems to make little to no difference. I'm assuming the cpu or my ram must be a bottleneck? I watched my resource manager during a raid and it was only around 50-60% cpu usage at the time. Any advice for a possible way to pull out a bit better performance in that situation?

Would a switch to 64bit win7 improve much for CPU usage? My processor is 64bit and I have 32bit vista.

[Nellah]

50-60% CPU use sounds about right, as that's full load on two cores. Counting background apps, you're right about where you should be with that PC.

A 64-bit OS will do nothing for your performance unless you're running out of memory, but you'd experience a lot worse choppiness than you are if RAM amount was an issue. The system isn't easily upgradable to a point where you'll see major performance differences; you're likely better off saving for a new PC.

[Deleted]

You could try getting a new cooler and mess around with overclocking. Should assist you in raids.

Did you try killing shadows, and spell details to lower settings while in raid, also water quality?

[vesseblah]

Drop shadow quality to minimum. Problem is the four years old processor, which sadly can't be overclocked since it's a Dell.

If you want real speed-up for 25-man raids, you need to get new motherboard+cpu+ram. Something like i3-2100+h61+2x2GB would be minimum recommended, costs around $250 and will at least double your in-combat fps.

[Silhouette of Seraphim]

While browsing around the forum I noticed that some people were saying WoW relies more on the power of the CPU than the GPU.