ram or ssd for wow?

[jaydecay]

My computer has 4GB DDR2. if I could only upgrade one, should it be an additional 4GB of RAM or an SSD for WoW?

[prwraith]

eh 4gb of ram is more than enough to run wow, may as well go with an ssd get the load times and the fringe benefits

[grimsanta]

SSD will decrease load times of the actual game.

More RAM will increase frame rate stability while playing the game.

Whichever you have more problems with, there you go.

[jaydecay]

Thanks. I'm going to grab the SSD.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

The SSD will also be usable in a future build, DDR2 won't be.

[anon5123]

More RAM will increase frame rate stability while playing the game.

No it won't? RAM has no effect on frame rate unless you're running a metric fuckton of addons.

For the most part, the only things that will increase framerate are CPU/GPU upgrades.

Getting an SSD will increase the load times for WoW. Faster load screens, and once you get ingame, the models/textures will load so much faster.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

No it won't? RAM has no effect on frame rate unless you're running a metric fuckton of addons.

For the most part, the only things that will increase framerate are CPU/GPU upgrades.

Getting an SSD will increase the load times for WoW. Faster load screens, and once you get ingame, the models/textures will load so much faster.

More RAM only makes a difference if you have run out of RAM.

[anon5123]

More RAM only makes a difference if you have run out of RAM.

Yeah, this is true, but if you're not hitting 100% RAM usage, than a RAM upgrade will have little/no effect. Whereas an SSD will be a massively noticeable decrease in load times.

Most people nowadays run 4gb or 8 gb of RAM though, which is more than enough for WoW.

[Deleted]

Yeah, this is true, but if you're not hitting 100% RAM usage, than a RAM upgrade will have little/no effect. Whereas an SSD will be a massively noticeable decrease in load times.

Most people nowadays run 4gb or 8 gb of RAM though, which is more than enough for WoW.

You don't actually need to hit 100% usage before more RAM increases FPS. Windows will allocate more RAM if more is available, and it will be less aggressive with freeing up RAM if it can allocate more, leading to more FPS. Not a huge boost, but still.

[Djinni]

No it won't? RAM has no effect on frame rate unless you're running a metric fuckton of addons.

I wish people would stop saying this....

A "metric fuckton" as you put it is a totally variable amount.
To me running with 100 addons is actually keeping it very minimalist. However to a lot of other people running more than 10 is overkill and would certainly put anyone like me in the classification you just gave.

For the most part, the only things that will increase framerate are CPU/GPU upgrades.

Getting an SSD will increase the load times for WoW. Faster load screens, and once you get ingame, the models/textures will load so much faster.

While an SSD will do this it has very little performance gains outside of being used as a page file. Which is still going to be slower than DDR2 RAM.
- On a personal note, I have never seen these huge increases people keep talking about when I switch between my HDD (7200rpm WD Black) and my SSD (Samsung Evo Basic 250Gb / Crucial MX100)

On a totally separate note I wouldn't be surprised if DDR2 RAM cost more than an SSD right now because there is very little supply for it

RAM will give you better performance if as pointed out you are running at 70% or more RAM usage. This is because the OS tries to detect files you are likely to use next and pre-loads them in any unused RAM space.
Additionally if you are RAM starved then you will start to find that you suffer from input lag while your CPU is busy swapping out files between the RAM and page file instead of responding to input IRQ's in a timely manner.