November 23 Hotfixes, Setup of the Month, Atlasloot v6

[sleepyb]

So perhaps monitors and peripherals should have their own table next time.

Great idea, as others have said most people already have those parts, and/or will select them independent of the rest of the computer.

Using Left for Dead as a metric IS inventing numbers. Games are built using different compilers, some of which use command sets that give a decided advantage to Intel based architecture.

While that's gibberish (I think he means "built using different game engines" ) he's right. For a WOW site, it would be nice to have a blurb about common WOW performance bottlenecks, and which parts (eg. 72-core CPUs) aren't utilized at all by WOW's game engine. But as Chaud pointed out, most people do play more games than just WOW.

As evident by the fanboy arguments here, I think it'd be best to have 2 setups, one with AMD+ATI and one with Intel+Nvidia at each price range.

It could also stand to be narrowed down to 2 price ranges, "low end" and "midrange". Anyone spending the $ on real high-end isn't going to be using a guide like this to make their decisions.

The guide also lacks an Operating System entirely. You could at least pretend to not be recommending pirated copies of Windows. It would also make for more honest comparison to pre-built computers that come with a legit copy of Windows.

If you can find a referral program, I'd say include some pre-built barebones PCs in there. You can usually get a Dell or the like, with-OS, for the same or cheaper than building from parts. That also removes the need for PC building and troubleshooting (and pirating) skills, and is more reliable in general. The performance might take a small hit, but hardly worth mentioning. The CPU and GPU matter most, and you'll be getting the GPU (possibly RAM too) separate for those builds anyway.

Only catch I've found is making sure the barebones pre-built PCs come with a 6-pin or 2x molex power. The last $400 Dell I got had only Sata power, so I had to get Sata->molex converters to put into the molex->6-pin converter to power the GPU. But that "pathetic" 400w PSU it came with runs my ATI 5750+AMD 7850 without a hitch, and it's way quieter+cooler than any homebuilt computer for anywhere near the $400(+$200 GPU=$600 total) price range.

[Deleted]

Just tried to do the Uther's Blessing quest where I'm supposed to put an item in front of his tomb. Still bugged.

[frott]

Hi - hoping someone sees that the "lowest-end" computer doesn't cost anywhere near $778. Especially when you're paying $167 for a 22 inch monitor, and have some sort of weird preference with XFX graphics cards. $306/778 = 39% of your total cost in that lowest end portion are items that can be downgraded easily or different brands can be purchased at a discount.

Also, without reading the replies of the thread I'm sure chaud is going to get reamed for having pretty poor "high end" decisions in terms of price / performance. Buying overpriced items just to force price ranges isn't good advice. $556 for a 24" monitor, regardless of the panel, is unnecessary at the high end. I'd understand if you were going for a massively sized/priced build, etc.

$200 motherboard? Again, is this looking at performance or "frills" when you're looking at topend. This is another piece that you could gain equal if not more performance from a substantially cheaper purchase.

Also I'd be very careful about recommending solid state hard drives that are cheaper. They have very short lifespans and issues when full. The reason intels are far more expensive is due to technology that increases the lifespan and performance as the drive is full. There have been a plague of rave reviews for SSD drives that are literally revoked after a few months when the performance doesn't match up and you realize how/why you paid discount prices for being a relatively early adopter.


I'm not sure what the goal is with these lists... generate linking revenue via sponsors? Was this something generally in demand? I don't want to squabble about a few % gain for cost, but you've presented us with 4 price points that have arbitrarily different performances. You could compress the price points and lessen the performance differences a lot. You could also vastly increase the price differences and emphasize performance differences. The missing portion here is how each of these actually perform.

For the intended audience you don't really mention where the performance gains/losses are coming from, or how well each will run various games. Perhaps you should present a benchmark of 4 or 5 games at various resolutions for each of your systems, but I assume you haven't actually built any of these so the "high and low" ends refers to, again, arbitrary price points. Usually when real hardware sites refer to these builds, they have scientific proof to back it up.

Since this is a wow site, you should AT THE VERY LEAST be providing estimates on how well wow will run, which you'll quickly find, there is a plateau of gains from buying system. You literally will gain nothing in terms of performance increase from wow on an older system, for wow ALL FOUR OF THESE are high end systems, unless maybe you multitask while rendering graphics in the background.

If your intention is just to put up a bunch of $$$ generating links to amazon, I guess that's one way to do it. But as you've said, this isn't a hardware site so I don't think you can post these sorts of misinformed lists without receiving criticism.




It has been 100% stated on hardware sites across the board that the largest, most essential, upgrade you can make to your computer is investing in a solid state drive. If you take all 4 of those computers and run wow on it on a regular harddrive, you'll see roughly the same performance.

But if you put an SSD in your $700 computer it will outperform your $2100 build without an SSD, and we're not talking about a few % here, we're talking about instant load times no matter the zone or the place, versus waiting to load.


TLDR: people come to this site as an authority on WoW. I don't think it is appropriate to feature these clearly non-authoritative bits of advice. We've seen more in depth reviews over *UI MODS* for heaven's sake, rattling off computer parts costing $THOUSANDS should warrant more than that. When the atlas loot ui section underneath your recommendations has more detail, you should know something's wrong.

[Roflstompa]

Whoever this "chaud" is, he made some very bad choices on the top-end build. Granted, this is the only build I looked at, I'm sure the other three are equally as bad.

Allow me to elaborate for you, Boub:

Case: is fine.
PSU: is overkill, but is relatively fine.
CPU: The 930 is out-dated. The 950 can be had for the same (or lower) price, and is better,
Cooling: I will give chaud credit here. He single-handedly picked the worst air cooling solution you could possibly get at that price point. If you don't want water, you have many other (much, much better) choices. Noctua NH-D14, Thermalright Silver Arrow, etc. Or if you want a low profile closed-loop system for simple CPU cooling, something like a Corsair H50 or H70 would be perfect.
Mobo: This one is debatable, but I'd much rather have an ASUS Rampage III Formula or something, many more features targeted to the gamer population, better board overall.
Memory: That memory is absolute trash. 9 cas latency? Really? Those timings are horrendous. You can get kits for the same price or cheaper that have much, MUCH tighter timings-- like 6 or 7 CL.
Video: This "high-end" build and you pick a HD 5870? What is the point of that? Drop another $150 and get a MUCH better card, a GTX 580.
HDD: The Caviar Greens are alright but the Caviar Blacks are a couple dollars more and much better. This is a "high-end" rig afterall, isn't it?
SSD: Wow, two decent SSDs. Got something right.

I just hope someone with some money to blow doesn't see the system in the news post and goes out to Amazon and wastes their money on a sub-par system. If anyone here wants to actually get the best mileage out of their dollar and have much better performance, you can PM me here. Give me your budget and I'll walk you through a good build-- just please don't build anything you see on this news post.

Hi I have about $3000 and i've pretty much decided on everything i want but was wondering what would be the best choice for memory and a cooling system thanks.

[Deleted]

Cool idea giving us advices about desktops... I wanna see more of those.

[chaud]

Again, you aren't locked into buying that nice IPS panel, I just listed it as the highest end choice of monitor. Those SSDs are excellent choices and the Intel drives are just slow and behind now, hopefully G3 will be impressive. I am not sure what you want me to do in terms of performance, I clearly don't have all these setups to run benchmarks on and hardly any sites use WoW for benchmarking. Making up very rough performance numbers is something I am not comfortable with. XFX cards are the only ones that come with a lifetime warranty. You clearly don't have a SSD, as load times are not instant everywhere.

[The Troll Rogue]

I'm thinking about buying one of these setups but i was curious if I would have to buy windows in addition to the setup.