Which should I upgrade first?

[praze]

Come on guys, try to at least be constructive, you've got someone here who would love to change his opinion on AMD performance in WoW but you're taking the forum troll route and providing no proof. Please read a little before posting personal claims or claims based solely on community opinion.

Ever notice the Nvidia banners plastered all over Blizzcon? When I said WoW is optimized with Nvidia hardware, I wasn't speaking of some conspiracy based off a random Tom's Hardware article, it's a program called "The Way It’s Meant to Be Played" and it's common practice in the video game industry.

Here's the press release announcing Nvidia and Blizzard's partnership for WoW...
NVIDIA and Blizzard Entertainment Team Up for World of Warcraft

"Blizzard has optimized the game for NVIDIA hardware and is working with NVIDIA to ensure the game plays well across a broad lineup of GPUs" - Bill Rehbock, general manager of content development at NVIDIA

Also, nothing I've said up until this point has suggested that Nvidia is any better than AMD in general, this is not an Nvidia vs. AMD thread. Nvidia is 3-6 months behind AMD in every way and no matter which way you cut it, that puts them at a disadvantage. AMD is absolutely killing it right now in both price and performance, but when it comes to WoW, the fact is Nvidia has the upper hand.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, give me some hard numbers to work with if you still think I'm blowing smoke. What a welcoming forum community...

[BicycleMafioso]

Hi!
The problem with this and the reception of your revelations, is that we've had it before. Several times a week, for, well, since Cataclysm came.

The information portrayed in the Tom's Hardware article is flawed, in the way that it forces settings through drivers, something the AMD Graphics card does not appreciate as much as the nVidia equivalent, giving very skewed findings.

[praze]

You mean the point when they found out that forcing Anti-Aliasing on in the drivers wasn't actually sticking in-game for almost every card?

[wowizcool]

Can I use the HD7000 series with my motherboard, with the 7000 series being PCI Express 3.0 and my motherboard being PCI Express 2.0?

[BicycleMafioso]

Can I use the HD7000 series with my motherboard, with the 7000 series being PCI Express 3.0 and my motherboard being PCI Express 2.0?

Simply put: Yes.
You won't notice any degraded performance if you run less than three of the cards.

[OmegaV]

To give a bit more info on what exactly 3.0 does compared to 2.0...Essentially currently you can run a card in 2.0 x8 and see almost no performance drop compared x16

Now 3.0 essentially doubles the speed of the slot meaning you could technically run a card x4 on it and see no performance drop (I haven't actually seen numbers proving this so) So with current cards all 3.0 allows is the ability to run crossfire/sli set ups in subpar circumstances and see very little performance dropped.

So the 7000 series is 3.0.....but doesn't actually take advantage of it. And will work completely fine in a 2.0 slot

[praze]

Yep, they're completely backwards compatible technologies and there's absolutely no reason to upgrade to the PCI Express 3.0 motherboards right now as the benchmarks have shown there's no measurable performance gain.