Lag Issues In World Of Warcraft Could It Be My Hard Drive?

Boogdieb

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Hello I am running on a Dell Dimension E521 w/3.5 GB of ram, ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB graphics card, 700 w power supply and a AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0 Ghz. What seems to happen is I will get a frame rate drop with some lag along w/ a loading sound usually. My friend tested the hard disk and it passed all test but 1 and I guess he said it has to do w/data retrieval. So I am thinking that may be my problem, before I found that out I was thinking too slow of a CPU and the lack of a 2nd core. Please let me know what you all think from the review on newegg of my card it sounds like it should be running much smoother than it is and would like to know what the problem may be.

Thank You
 

vibe

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I would be supprised if your HD is the cause of WoW lag, far as I know, once a zone is loaded your HD does not really have much to do.

Try running your performance monitor ctrl+alt+del > Task manager > peformance.

Run the game unti you lag up, crash to desktop and see how your CPU was doing, if it was on 100% load its your CPU.

Do you run antivirus? does it have a game mode, are wows ports open on firewall and router? backround programs?
 

xnem3s1sx

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Yea, sounds like it might be your cpu, you should try the performance monitor, it will tell you whether your hardrives or your cpu are lagging.
 
It might just be the wow servers. Lag issues tend to occur before the release of a major content pack. (Wrath of the Lich King.) So unless this is happening every 10 secs then I wouldn't worry about it.
 

zenmaster

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It's likely your CPU.

It's a single core and not particulily fast.
That makes it quite prone to lags and delays.

A faster X2 would really help, but I'm guessing you are a 939 socket which is tough to find at a reasonable price.

other than the CPU, the rest looks really good.
 

mford66215

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Gotta agree with everyone else - twice.

#1 - performance monitor will tell you what's lacking.
#2 - lag is from servers, not you

Could be your ISP though, just to be sure we've covered all the bases. Try this next time you're lagging....

Start/Run - CMD (enter)
tracert www.worldofwarcraft.com (enter)


The requests will time out once they get to the wow firewalls, but you may see your lag drop. This will force the ISP routers to re-examine the best path between you and the wow servers.
 

zero3one

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I doubt it's your CPU considering I used to run WoW on an Athlon64 3000+ with 3gb of ram and a Nvidea 7300GS.

I think it's likely your ISP, the server or you have something else running in the background. I remember when I only had 1gb of ram and it lagged like crazy in busy zones but with 3gb it would run fine.
 

anarchy4sale

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this is it. Everyone is having the issue.
 

Boogdieb

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Ok my friend got me a new hard drive (he works at best buy and got one cheep + my old one was only 80 gb and I am now running an 320 gb). Well I checked my total CPU while running wow and it was up at 100%. But the thing I don't get is why Warcraft is taking that much of my CPU. My system setting says its taking 0% of my CPU. My friend also has a slower CPU than I do and runs the game fairly well at around 70% to 80% total CPU. Is there anything else I should look into? He ran a total system test and all my ram my CPU, and all other devices but hard drive passed and that has been replaced. Please let me know if there is anything else I should look into.

Thank you so much!
 

Boogdieb

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Oh and I forgot to add that I am running on windows XP pro (computer came w/Vista I guess and person I got it from went to XP pro) also I do think that my CPU slot is a AM2 slot.
 

dhvd79a

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WoW has been lagging since the Halloween Event started. It should improve about January after the expansion rush is over.

-dw
 

vibe

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unless you have a 2 or more monitor setup you wont see how much cpu wow is using - once the game is minimised the cpu load is very low.

what else is running in the backround? folding or SETI at home maybe?

go to some of the low population zones - this will tell you if its just server lag.

 


omg you so need a Killer network card :lol:

Heat throttling your video card or cpu?
PSU insufficent? (generic?)
Swap file too small?

get that baby back into vista x64 for god sake :pt1cable:
 

neiroatopelcc

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"I would be supprised if your HD is the cause of WoW lag, far as I know, once a zone is loaded your HD does not really have much to do. "

It actually does a lot of data seeking even when a zone is loaded. It hasn't loaded the textures for objects that aren't nessecarily tied to the zone. So for instance if a druid goes into cat form it'll load the texture on the fly, and the same goes for a lot of other things. Event stuff etc.

I know that since I tried playing wow on a system with an effective 12mb/sec drive. (because the raid controller was initializing the raid5 while playing).
 

antiacid

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RAID HDD for WoW! Zomg! That's like taking the jet fighter to work.
 

Lavacon

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Read the WoW forums... they have been working on latency issues since the 3.02 patch went live. It has been hotfixed for the most part, but some people are still having issues. Your hardware is definitely overkill for WoW...
 

Boogdieb

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I have nothing major running in the background that I can think of, mainly just system apps and so on. Does this system need to be taken back to Vista?? My friend also commented on that and said it could maybe be the problem. Halloween event and WOTLK im sure are not the greatest thing for FPS now but don't know if any of that would effect how much CPU WOW took to run. As for PSU and heat throttling CPU/Video card nothing has been changed w/them all at standard settings. So when I open the game and minimize the game that won't give me the right CPU usage w/o a second display? From what I could tell it seems as if WOW is taking my whole CPU just to run which just don't sound right. I am currently in the process of uninstalling and reinstalling the game now. Other than that I am not sure what else could cause it to take so much CPU.
 

Boogdieb

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Also could the network card fix this issue? My current network card is built on to my board, so its not a slot card. If so what kind of network cards are good that don't cost a lot of $$