OK, my home built rig is a few years old, and I never upped the video card from the tweener I bought at the time. I'm running Pentium 2.5 GHz (FSB 512?), 512MB of corsair, and an MSI Geforce card (maybe the 5500?). This is all on an MSI motherboard (intell chipset) just before Hyperthreading was officially adopted. (I think I may have the ability to enable Hyperthreading, but the CPU was not officially HT ready).
I have a dual monitor setup, thanks to the MSI's DVI and VGA outputs. The DVI goes to my LCD flat panel widescreen w/ 1280x720 resolution (usually).
So I just started getting into World of Warcraft, and basically everything is just fine. Playing in Wide Screen is definitely the way to go. But in the busy areas (Ironforge and Ogrimar) the video gets seriously choppy. The keyboard is still being read, but the video lags... so I end up turning around completely instead of just vearing right. This only occurs in areas where there are LOTS of other online characters. While this happens, I hear the hard drives (two Maxtor 200GB, raid level 1 via the MSI mobo), starts thrashing like crazy. These drives are NOT my boot drive, but my boot drive didn't have enough room to install WoW, so I in selected the raid for installation.
OK, now the questions... hopefully from people who actually play this game.
So if I want to COMPLETELY eliminate this choppy video, what should I do? Will a memory upgrade do it? Do I need a new CPU? Is it time for a new video card? All of the above?
OR... is it time to start a new system from scratch?
Do I need SLI in order to COMPLETELY eliminate this problem? Will SLI even help?
I don't mind spending some money, or taking on the project of building a new rig... but as a matter of principle I don't want to spend more than I need to. I want to spend exactly what I need to spend in order to COMPLETELY elimiate the choppy video.
I have a dual monitor setup, thanks to the MSI's DVI and VGA outputs. The DVI goes to my LCD flat panel widescreen w/ 1280x720 resolution (usually).
So I just started getting into World of Warcraft, and basically everything is just fine. Playing in Wide Screen is definitely the way to go. But in the busy areas (Ironforge and Ogrimar) the video gets seriously choppy. The keyboard is still being read, but the video lags... so I end up turning around completely instead of just vearing right. This only occurs in areas where there are LOTS of other online characters. While this happens, I hear the hard drives (two Maxtor 200GB, raid level 1 via the MSI mobo), starts thrashing like crazy. These drives are NOT my boot drive, but my boot drive didn't have enough room to install WoW, so I in selected the raid for installation.
OK, now the questions... hopefully from people who actually play this game.
So if I want to COMPLETELY eliminate this choppy video, what should I do? Will a memory upgrade do it? Do I need a new CPU? Is it time for a new video card? All of the above?
OR... is it time to start a new system from scratch?
Do I need SLI in order to COMPLETELY eliminate this problem? Will SLI even help?
I don't mind spending some money, or taking on the project of building a new rig... but as a matter of principle I don't want to spend more than I need to. I want to spend exactly what I need to spend in order to COMPLETELY elimiate the choppy video.