PC Improvement for Shadowlands

[lilvenom]

Hey guys, my wife has been playing on this desktop for a while and it usually handles WoW pretty well, but with Shadowlands it started having low FPS. Is there anything she can improve with 300-500$ that would make the game playable again?

- Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz, 3801 Mhz, 4 Core, 4 Logical Processor
- 8GB RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti

Is this budget even enough to make it enjoyable when she plays? Or does she need more?

All help will be appreciated, we wanna buy the stuff on cybermonday. Thank you

[chazus]

While I feel like that hardware should still play shadowlands fine (I upgraded from pretty much that exact setup about a year ago, for non-WoW related gaming issues), it might be worthwhile to look into why its running like that. And also what she does. Does she do competitive raiding? If not, maybe some fine tuning could be done.

That said, unfortunately you're going tob e hard pressed to get a non-top tier CPU this week. Almost all 3100, 3300, and 3600 Ryzens are pretty much out of stock everywhere, so you may have to buy used/refurb.

In theory, you could pick up a 3300X for $150, or 3100 for $110, and a board for ~$90. 8gb DDR4 ram for like $30, and a AMD 570 GPU for $150. At about the $450 mark give or take taxes and shipping would be a very decent upgrade with an upgrade path to a Ryzen 5600 later, or a bigger video card and more ram.

[Temp name]

What resolution does she play at?

[Sinaa]

A used gtx 960 would be enough for decent performance at reasonable settings at 1080p, for a fraction of the budget.

[Daffan]

GPU is the weakest part here.

[Kagthul]

A used gtx 960 would be enough for decent performance at reasonable settings at 1080p, for a fraction of the budget.

A new GPU to be sure, but you can get a non-used RX 470/570 or 480/580 for near 100$ these days. And itll knock 1080p out the park on that rig.

[Itori]

You can get a gtx 1660 ti would do wonders, if you want to get an rtx then thats an option too

[Azortharion]

Everything could use an upgrade. At your budget with your needs, you should look into buying used if you can bear it.

But if I were you with $400 to upgrade my PC with to play WoW, I would buy something these parts: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/QzztW3

I basically went for single-thread performance on the CPU, cheapest reasonable motherboard and RAM I could find, then filled the rest of the budget with the GPU.

I'd say if you could go $500, then you can get a good chunk better. A few tens of dollars makes a big diff in the budget world.

But really you should buy used.

[Sinaa]

Everything could use an upgrade. At your budget with your needs, you should look into buying used if you can bear it.

But if I were you with $400 to upgrade my PC with to play WoW, I would buy something these parts: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/QzztW3

I basically went for single-thread performance on the CPU, cheapest reasonable motherboard and RAM I could find, then filled the rest of the budget with the GPU.

I'd say if you could go $500, then you can get a good chunk better. A few tens of dollars makes a big diff in the budget world.

But really you should buy used.

WoW runs very nicely on a 3570K since the dx12 patch..

[Azortharion]

WoW runs very nicely on a 3570K since the dx12 patch..

I'm glad your 3570k runs well for you! Still, the CPU is one of the most important aspects of WoW performance and is a wise thing to upgrade if that's your main game.

Personally I just recently upgraded from an 8700k (several generations newer than the 3570k and still a very decent CPU) to the new 5900X and the difference in terms of open world and in-city FPS was night and day. Now imagine 3570k to something more modern...

[Djuntas]

Hello, see my signature. I like my performance, and my 970 asus strix does well on medium settings, even with a lot of addons 100+ installed. Either you replace all parts (mobo ddr4 ram etc) or just GPU. A used 1070, 1660, og maybe just a 970 could be fun. Not sure if you can buy any of them new atm.

[acphydro]

I'm glad your 3570k runs well for you! Still, the CPU is one of the most important aspects of WoW performance and is a wise thing to upgrade if that's your main game.

Personally I just recently upgraded from an 8700k (several generations newer than the 3570k and still a very decent CPU) to the new 5900X and the difference in terms of open world and in-city FPS was night and day. Now imagine 3570k to something more modern...

I’m running an 8086k at 5.0ghz all core and have been trying to justify upgrading to a 10700k/10900k. Based on what I’ve read it appears that it’s not really much of an upgrade at all.

I’m pegging 141fps with it maxed open world and around 125fps with Ray Tracing on using a 3080. I find it hard to believe I’d tell a difference had I upgraded. This is at 1440p with a 141fps cap on my 144hz display.

I wish I could find concrete data that it would be worth it for WoW.

Anyhow back on topic - that old i5 could definitely use an upgrade along with a video card upgrade and possibly 16gb RAM.