Low FPS or normal?

[Warrax]

Forget video cards under 100$, real value is in 150-300$ video cards, otherwise don't bother upgrading, you'll regret it.

[OmegaV]

Just to note since a lot of people are trying to say otherwise, you need to replace both your gpu and cpu in this case. The gpu is underpowered, I ran with a gt240 before my 6870 and it ran at around 30 fps. This was with a phenom IIx4, I believe even when i upgraded I didn't see a huge performance boost. I probably ran around 40 fps in raids. Now to the cpu, the original phenom series was shit, or at least from anything I've ever heard about them, so chances are your cpu is a bit issue and I would recommend if you can afford it jump up to the I5 series and if not stick with the I3 series. If we had a budget we could give you a much better idea of what you should get.

[Faithh]

Just to note since a lot of people are trying to say otherwise, you need to replace both your gpu and cpu in this case. The gpu is underpowered, I ran with a gt240 before my 6870 and it ran at around 30 fps. This was with a phenom IIx4, I believe even when i upgraded I didn't see a huge performance boost. I probably ran around 40 fps in raids. Now to the cpu, the original phenom series was shit, or at least from anything I've ever heard about them, so chances are your cpu is a bit issue and I would recommend if you can afford it jump up to the I5 series and if not stick with the I3 series. If we had a budget we could give you a much better idea of what you should get.

Pfff no offense but start to realize the cpu doesn't take care of the frame rates per sec. His gpu is complety burning the fuck out of his maximum, upgrading the cpu only is barely going to give additional fps.

The only point having a better cpu is just to cut the bottleneck down on any 680/7970.

[OmegaV]

You don't know how WoW or most MMOs work do you? MMOs are very cpu dependent, I can't say I know off the top of my head why but I imagine it has something to do will all the information that is being transferred. Sure some of the options are more gpu dependent, such as shadows but when it comes to raiding you want not only a good gpu but a good cpu. Let me put this into a better perspective....My systems with in a 2-3 year period

Athlon II x2 240 2.8ghz gt240 20-30 fps raids with settings medium or so
Phenom II x4 965 3.8ghz gt 240 averaged 30fps or so maybe a bit more On higher settings
Phenom II x4 3.8ghz 6870 averaged 40 fps or so Still higher settings, I believe shadows were low though since I did record with fraps
I5-3570k 4.4ghz 6870 Well didn't play with this one much since I've quit wow but from what I can remember I probably averaged 50-60fps This would be everything maxed out...except for shadows but as stated before shadows are more gpu dependent.


And I think my Wow Account may still be active, friend wanted me to help him lvl...which I quickly gave up, so let me run my current set up and tell you how that goes. By the way I do run a fraps counter at all times. Edit: Yep forgot I uninstalled wow, was on my SSD and taking up space.

[n0cturnal]

Pfff no offense but start to realize the cpu doesn't take care of the frame rates per sec. His gpu is complety burning the fuck out of his maximum, upgrading the cpu only is barely going to give additional fps.

The only point having a better cpu is just to cut the bottleneck down on any 680/7970.

MMOs like WoW gets the CPU bombarded with information so a bad CPU can't handle feeding enough info to the GPU to let it perform at it fullest.
You know the info that the GPU has to make frames with has to come from somewhere, it doesn't just magically pop up inside the GPU.

The first generation Phenom has really low IPC and also pretty low Frequency for a modern CPU, that combined makes it very bad for MMOs.

[Faithh]

You don't know how WoW or most MMOs work do you? MMOs are very cpu dependent, I can't say I know off the top of my head why but I imagine it has something to do will all the information that is being transferred. Sure some of the options are more gpu dependent, such as shadows but when it comes to raiding you want not only a good gpu but a good cpu. Let me put this into a better perspective....My systems with in a 2-3 year period

Athlon II x2 240 2.8ghz gt240 20-30 fps raids with settings medium or so
Phenom II x4 965 3.8ghz gt 240 averaged 30fps or so maybe a bit more On higher settings
Phenom II x4 3.8ghz 6870 averaged 40 fps or so Still higher settings, I believe shadows were low though since I did record with fraps
I5-3570k 4.4ghz 6870 Well didn't play with this one much since I've quit wow but from what I can remember I probably averaged 50-60fps This would be everything maxed out...except for shadows but as stated before shadows are more gpu dependent.


And I think my Wow Account may still be active, friend wanted me to help him lvl...which I quickly gave up, so let me run my current set up and tell you how that goes. By the way I do run a fraps counter at all times. Edit: Yep forgot I uninstalled wow, was on my SSD and taking up space.

It's not how mmo's work or blabla works, it's just how directx works. MMO's are cpu dependent, you're complety right, but they'll just be feeding the GPU with information and still be able to calculate a lot of background processes in the game. WoW isn't that much cpu intensive tbh, Swtor which is heavily heavily multithreaded burns the cpu much better and I've never ever seen my gpu dipping lower than 99% (vsync disabled) while in WoW I barely reach it with my 680.

The gpu is still the guy which does the rendering and providing the frames, the cpu would only tell how everything has to be rendered and takes the background processes like positions/addons/crits/displaying chat/..

@ your bench results: I mean we're nothing with it unless you could provide us the gpu load. Again with a better cpu you're going to cut the bottleneck slightly/huge down or in other words overclocking the cpu would only give more fps if the cpu is bottlenecking the gpu. While gaming with a constant gpu load of 99% all the times and you have high fps, the cpu power doesn't mean anything. If you have still low fps at 99%, upgrade the card. Simple as that.

[OmegaV]

Except it is very CPU intensive and this has been proven and this is also why I said in my original statement that you need a good cpu and gpu. I also state that the original Phenom cpus were shit and they are. What your trying to argue at this point though is that with a bad cpu you'll still get good fps. I don't say you need to go out and buy the best cpu on the market but you can't just go out and buy say a 7870, 660ti, or such and expect to it be at top performance with a crappy cpu especially in an mmo.

So let me put it this way, the OP can go out and buy a high end gpu with that 300$ or he can buy a slightly lower gpu and a better cpu (this will become even more effective if his budget is higher) and get a better gain out of it, especially in a raiding enviroment. Which is what was originally remarked on by the way.

Also by bench results mean nothing? So the fact that I get better performance by changing out a single component means nothing, especially since everything worked at optimal condition since I do like to benchmark quite a bit, and doesn't that show that a mix of increasing both the gpu and cpu will net a much larger gain then just a gpu change. Also you seem to have this idea you want to keep your gpu running maxed out at all times, which is actually bad for it and can decrease the overall life time.

Anyways at this point I'm done with this argument since it's not really worth it anymore at this point, I've given my info on the subject and previous experiences and will let the OP read through and decide on his own what he wants to do.

[Faithh]

Except it is very CPU intensive and this has been proven and this is also why I said in my original statement that you need a good cpu and gpu. I also state that the original Phenom cpus were shit and they are. What your trying to argue at this point though is that with a bad cpu you'll still get good fps. I don't say you need to go out and buy the best cpu on the market but you can't just go out and buy say a 7870, 660ti, or such and expect to it be at top performance with a crappy cpu especially in an mmo.

So let me put it this way, the OP can go out and buy a high end gpu with that 300$ or he can buy a slightly lower gpu and a better cpu (this will become even more effective if his budget is higher) and get a better gain out of it, especially in a raiding enviroment. Which is what was originally remarked on by the way.

Also by bench results mean nothing? So the fact that I get better performance by changing out a single component means nothing, especially since everything worked at optimal condition since I do like to benchmark quite a bit, and doesn't that show that a mix of increasing both the gpu and cpu will net a much larger gain then just a gpu change. Also you seem to have this idea you want to keep your gpu running maxed out at all times, which is actually bad for it and can decrease the overall life time.

Anyways at this point I'm done with this argument since it's not really worth it anymore at this point, I've given my info on the subject and previous experiences and will let the OP read through and decide on his own what he wants to do.

I never said that you get good fps with a good card and a very bad cpu. But it depends on how big the bottleneck is. I had a Q9550 c1 which was scoring 2.3 in C11.5 because it had cache memory issues while a proper Q9550 was scoring 3.5 in C11.5 with both at stock settings. That c1 chip was still maintaining to let me play 25m raids with 50-60fps on ultra with shadows disabled with a 6950 (unlocked). What I'm trying to say is that my Q9550 c1 was preventing the 6950 to run at full power.

If I had a P4 2.0GHz with a 6950 the bottleneck would be just a lot bigger but really a lot.

To come to the point, his cpu would do fine with a card like the 7770 at low settings.

@Op I think you don't mind playing at low settings with 60 fps in raids @ 1080p? Well just look at ebay for a card like the 6950, they're going for like 80-90eur..

I would just go for a new graphics card for now and in the future for a i3 cpu.

[yack346]

Get a 660 ti. That should run at 1080p max setting for ya

[Animalhouse]

A 660ti in that set up is like putting a gold ring in a pigs snout.
Get a PNY GTX 460 1024mb. One of the best cards ever made and extremely reliable plus it runs very cool. You are also going to most likely upgrade you power supply. You probably have a stock 300w pos psu. Get a 600w corsair and that will run a gaming card with adequate power.

You should be able to pick one up on ebay for $80 bucks or less. This can run wow on high settings at 60 fps most the time.