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How much would a ram upgrade help my WoW?
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Post by
348805
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Incendium
Adding more RAM would most likely not help at all. What OS are you running (is it 32-bit or 64-bit)? What graphics card do you have? Is the CPU dual core or single code?
Post by
348805
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Sheridan
Additional ram is not going to affect your performance. What resolution are you running at and what are your graphic effects set to?
Can you elaborate a little more on the performance issues you're experiencing.
Post by
Domh
Since you're on a laptop you should also check the maximum amount of RAM it can handle. Many laptops cap out at ~4GB for various reasons, such as that being all the memory controller can handle, or only having two slots for RAM (with 2GB being the largest sticks commonly available).
In either cause you've already hit the point where RAM upgrades will produce a dramatically decreasing return for anything beyond complex math and media manipulations. :/
Your setup appears moderately powerful, and on a laptop screen the resolution generally isn't high enough to use the new high res textures, so if you're having FPS issues, I suggest turning those off and lowering shadow detail, as these are two of the biggest impacts on your video performance. If that doesn't work, I would suggest that you may have a problem, perhaps with malware or just general bloat, and should tune up your Windows installation and run some malware scans.
Another thing you could do is a format or system recovery, putting your laptop back to a blank slate. If the issue is software based this stands a very good chance of eliminating it. It will also prune out most of the registry and software bloat that accumulates over time.
These are of course only a few suggestions. It could be anything really, from a faulty addon (gatherer tends to cause issues when it's database gets too big for example) to power supply issues.
Post by
348805
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Post by
305323
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Domh
Also Make sure you have a good video card. The more memory the video card has for it self, the better. 128 is pretty decent and is sufficient. 256 is really nice. 512 is quite a monster. Anything over a 512 video card is just wasted power.
First, he's on a laptop so there's very little chance he can even change his video card. I'm assuming your response is just in general though, or that you missed that.
Secondly, the video card game hasn't been solely about memory in about a decade. Your GPU is just as important, if not more so these days. The largest piece of advice when looking at video cards to to look at the series number and performance number. The first digit in an ATI or Nvidia card is the series number, this number generally defines what generation of GPU is in the card. A 4870 would be a 4000 series (ATI's current best), a 260 would be a 200 series (Nvidia's current best, based of a new numbering scheme, the last series being their 9000 series), etc. The second digit is the performance class. So logically a 3870 would be performance class 8 and perform better than say a 3500. Generally you're looking to get both the most recent series and the highest performance class you can afford (Whenever possible stick to a performance class 5 or above for any type of gaming). There are exceptions to this though, as higher performance classes of a previous series can trump lower performance cards of the new series - For example my own laptop's ATI Radeon 2600 HD trumps my roommate's laptops Radeon 3100 HD, since it's a performance class of 6, and thus noticeably higher than the entry level performance class of 1 in the 3100. In a case of a 3600 vs a 4500 you'd probably want the 4500 (though you should read reviews if you can to verify that).
In terms of the actual memory of the card, I suggest at least 256MB or video RAM (which any decent card should have at minimum these days), but go to 512MB if you can afford it, as graphics requirements keep inching up there as the WoW expansions come out. 1 GB is overkill for WoW but some of the very high end games may be able to make use of it, depending on your setup.
For internet you can buy a fiber optic wire with glass inside. It makes your computer respond fast though the internet. IT IS EXPANSIVE it's like 300$ for a small foot of wire.
Also make sure your using DSL and not wifi or dial up.
Having been a network support specialist for some time, the first statement here makes me cringe. I assume what he actually means is if you can afford get get a fiber optic connection like Verizon's FIOS coming to your house. A good choice, but if you already have a good reliable DSL or Cable provider that does everything else you need, not worth the upgrade for most people. Fiber within your house is an absolute waste of money, provides negligible benefit, is ridiculously expensive, and requires specialized hardware and training to support. For the network segment between your computer and your modem a simple Cat5 or Cat6 Ethernet network is more than fast enough. Fiber within a building is normally used if you need to move massive amounts of data such as in high performance computing or a business environment with 20-100 computers on the same connection - inside a house it's just a waste of time, money and effort.
As for the rest of it, being cabled to your modem/router is indeed faster, more reliable and more secure than a wifi connection, but wifi shouldn't be a problem if it's setup correctly and not suffering from nearby interference. Don't worry about it if that's what you're using unless you start having latency issues such as disconnects or a red latency meter. If you already have a cable run though, you should use it, as it will be less prone to interference and depending on your setup could cut somewhere between 20-100 ms or more off your latency.
PS. For clarification, wifi would run off your DSL, Cable of Fiber connection, so don't be confused about being on either wifi or DSL, you can be on both. Also Blizzard no longer supports dial up as a manner of connecting to WoW, and if you try in Northrend you're liable to be disconnected rather quickly, so avoiding this is good advice.
Post by
305323
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
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