Ultra setting hardware requirements

[Nuitaria]

First off, I apologize if this has been posted before, i didn't find any other posts but i do tend to miss things from time to time. Anyway, anyone know about what i would need hardware wise to run the game on ultra settings in a 25 man raid setting without noticeably low framerates? (And if anyone has a list of specific economic hardware that can achieve it I'd be very interested in that as well. 21st birthday coming up and i intend to blow all the money i get on a new system instead of beer, im a really boring person aren't i? :P )

[Queepeg]

I built the following PC running Windows 7 64 bit for approx £400 ($593, but prices most likely cheaper in US than the UK) a few months ago. I used ebuyer.

This setup runs WoW on Ultra video settings, in 25 man, with all addons running (of which I have many) at between 50 and 60fps, though to be honest I never notice any deteoriation.

For the elite gamers out there I do not claim this is the "best" setup, just what I have experience of myself. I have missed out RAM as I purchased from a friend, I have 4GB but I can't recall the exact specs right now. I also had monitor, keyboard, mouse etc. so did not need to purchase them.

If you're a student check out Microsoft's offers on Windows 7 upgrades etc.

1 x ASUS P5QL PRO iP43 Socket 775 8 channel audio ATX Motherboard £51.68
1 x Sony AD-5240S 24x DVD±RW & DL SATA - OEM Black £13.06
1 x Sapphire HD 5770 1GB GDDR5 Dual DVI HDMI DisplayPort HDCP PCI-E Graphics Card £113.32
1 x Arctic Power 600W PSU - With PCI-E, 3x SATA, 20+4, ATX12V, 8pin +12V Connectors - Retail Boxed £30.42
1 x Piano Black Mid Tower Case 12cm Blue LED Front Fan and space for 22cm Side Fan - No PSU £12.50
1 x Seagate 750GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache - OEM £46.41
1 x Intel Core 2 Duo E7600 3.06GHz Socket 775 1066Mhz 3MB Cache Retail Box Processor £89.50

[Nuitaria]

Thanks for the reply, I cant seem to find the mobo for sale anywhere, but im sure i can find an alternative.

[Helgi]

As I have built several machines for my friends, I kind of more or less discovered the system requirements for Ultra:

Processor: 2-core processor 2.8ghz or more (such as the Core 2 Duo, or Phenom II X3. NOT a laptop processor.)
Memory: 4gb DDR2/DDR3
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 4770 and greater / Radeon HD 5670 and greater

Unfortunately, I haven't build a computer with a nVidia card in quite some time. And I don't know what the nvidia equivalent to the ATI cards are.

[Fetzie]

I ran ultra for a while with a core 2 duo E8400 3.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM and an NVIDIA Geforce 9800 GTX+ at about 30 FPS in dala/50 FPS in the wild/20 FPS in 25 mans, but the shadows annoyed me so I turned them off, and got 20 FPS more from the tradeoff.

[Queepeg]

I wouldn't be too fussy about matching the exact motherboard as above, just look for a reliable brand. I've had good experience with Asus in the past which is why I choose to stick with them.

A motherboard in the £50 price range should be adequate, be sure to check CPU and RAM compatibility. Check the connectivity options (USB 2.0, ample PCI slots) and most important of all, read the reviews!

[sardaukarz]

@Helgi, what is the size of the screen u are using, thus what resolution you are playing at?

I play at 1920x1200 and I can't play ultra settings in 25 man. I do consider my hardware to be somewhat superior to what u list :

Core I7 930
Gtx 285
12gb ram

[Cartz]

@Helgi, what is the size of the screen u are using, thus what resolution you are playing at?

I play at 1920x1200 and I can't play ultra settings in 25 man. I do consider my hardware to be somewhat superior to what u list :

Core I7 930
Gtx 285
12gb ram

Something wrong with your system then bro, because you should annihilate wow with that spec. I have an i5 w/ a 5870 and my rig eats 25M raids alive with everything maxed.

@OP: Don't get disappointed when your system starts crashing with out of memory errors, there is a substantial bug with 3.3.5 that is causing a lot of us ultra settings users to dial back our shadows and draw distance to avoid the newly exacerbated memory leak.

[Helgi]

Something wrong with your system then bro, because you should annihilate wow with that spec. I have an i5 w/ a 5870 and my rig eats 25M raids alive with everything maxed.

I'm gonna have to completely agree with Cartz here, something must be wrong. My specs:
AMD Athlon II X4 940
4gb DDR2
ATI Radeon HD 4870

I can EASILY pull ultra in 25-man raids, at a comfortable 36-42fps @ 1920x1080. Dalaran I usually sit around 26fps.

But to answer your question, sardaukarz, two of my friends run at 1680x1050, and the other runs at 1440x900.

[Goros]

I pull 60FPS in Dalaran and eat 25 mans (on ultra) alive with my system.

Intel Q9550@2.83ghz quad core
4GB DDR3 @ 2000Mhz
XFX 790i Ultra Mobo
XFX 9800 GTX+ Black Edition 512MB card (x3 in SLI but wow doesn't use them)
300GB 10k RPM Sata 3Gb HDD
16GB OCZ usb memory stick as Readyboost drive formatted to Exfat 32MB cluster size
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate
1920x1080 Samsung Syncmaster monitor

If you are running Vista (in any form) you are losing FPS and memory to the OS, upgrade to 7 with a clean install (windows 7 upgrade keeps the old registry and all it's fail unless you clean install).

[sardaukarz]

Then there is something really wrong with my system...

I am running Windows 7 Entreprise all updates and all drivers up to date.

I haven't raided 25 in a while but 2 or 3 months ago I was in middle of whelps in 25 Ony and it was down to 2 to 3 frames per second when everyone was AOE-ing them out...

Maybe I use too many add-ons.

Also, are u running in window mode or full screen? There should be a difference between the 2 of them but I don't remember why?

I guess because in window mode I am not in the full native resolution that my monitor can sustain.

One other thing I saw recently on one forum it's some people recommend to always use V-Sync if you are not taking benchmarks.

As I said I will Fraps my 25 man tnight to see what it looks like.

Cheers

[Goros]

Full screen, all options to full, 60fps in dalaran. Tons of addons running.

Sounds like something is bottlenecking somewhere. What speed is your memory and harddrive? What's your latency? Is your processor throttled down for some reason? Are all your cores running?

Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

[tlitp]

I cannot say I understand in which context is used that "ultra settings". As far as I'm aware, there are four settings which are truly taxing the GPU :
* resolution (particularly multi-monitor setups)
* SSAA (alternatively : MSAA, as set in-game, plus another MSAA/SSAA enforced via the graphics driver)
* SSAO (via driver, as WoW doesn't have a native implementation of it)
* extShadowQuality (speaking of which, this cvar should never be set to "5"; "4" isn't recommended, too)

The rest of the options, as set in-game, aren't really the culprit for poor performance.

[Helgi]

Also, are u running in window mode or full screen? There should be a difference between the 2 of them but I don't remember why?

Windowed mode. I ran windowed mode on my Mac laptop because for whatever reason windowed mode runs better on a Mac than full screen mode (something about OpenGL). When I finally stopped moving from place to place, I moved back to my PC and ended up using windowed mode there as well, just because I was used to it. However, full screen mode will run better on a Windows machine thanks to DirectX.

But anyway, the AOE in Ony was a little taxing on my system, and it dropped me down to 16 fps. A little jittery but still very much playable, and pretty good considering I was also recording at the same time. (I record all of my guild's boss fights just in case something amazing or hilarious happens.)

I personally have V-Sync turned off, so I can cap my FPS at 30, as my computer becomes a mini space heater if I let to run wild. I'm not sure why people to say to turn V-Sync on, as all it does is prevent screen tearing by synchronizing your video card's rate with your monitors (and thus caps your FPS at whatever your monitor's refresh rate is). However, in some games V-Sync is the only way to cap your FPS, so maybe they are unaware of the maxfps cvar.

I cannot say I understand in which context is used that "ultra settings". As far as I'm aware, there are four settings which are truly taxing the GPU :
* resolution (particularly multi-monitor setups)
* SSAA (alternatively : MSAA, as set in-game, plus another MSAA/SSAA enforced via the graphics driver)
* SSAO (via driver, as WoW doesn't have a native implementation of it)
* extShadowQuality (speaking of which, this cvar should never be set to "5"; "4" isn't recommended, too)

The rest of the options, as set in-game, aren't really the culprit for poor performance.

What your saying is true (you forgot view distance though), but only if you are comparing high-end graphics cards, which is what you should be looking at for ultra. Lower/mid graphics cards are affected by all of WoW's settings.

[happycupcake]

so i'm thinkin about customizing this gaming computer on ibuypower.com
my boyfriend got me into WoW. I enjoy playing and it would be neat to have it on ultra
here's what I picked out. of course I haven't bought it yet. I need some opinions because I don't really know what I'm doing.


1 x Processor ( [= Quad Core =] AMD Phenom™ II X4 965 Black Edition Quad-Core CPU )1 x Processor Cooling ( Liquid CPU Cooling System [AMD] - [Free Upgrade] Standard 120mm Fan )
1 x Memory ( 4 GB [2 GB X2] DDR3-1800 Memory Module - Corsair or Major Brand )
1 x Video Card ( ATI Radeon HD 5830 - 1GB - Single Card )
1 x Video Card Brand ( Major Brand Powered by ATI or NVIDIA )
1 x Motherboard ( Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 -- AMD 870 w/ 2x PCI-E 2.0 x16 )
1 x Motherboard USB / SATA Interface ( Motherboard default USB / SATA Interface )
1 x Power Supply ( 1000 Watt -- Extreme Gaming Series )
1 x Primary Hard Drive ( 750 GB HARD DRIVE -- 16M Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.0Gb/s - Single Drive )
1 x Data Hard Drive ( 750 GB HARD DRIVE -- 16M Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.0Gb/s - Single Drive )
1 x Network Card ( Intel Pro 10/100/1000 Network Card )
1 x Operating System ( Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium + Office Starter 2010 (Includes basic versions of Word and Excel) - 64-Bit )


** don't know the difference between a data hard drive and primary hard drive. don't know much about motherboards and graphics cards either.
** and i don't know if any of these really go together lol! just need some guidance on what i should tone down or what isn't powerful enough.

Thank You :]

[Destruyen]

primary hard drive is what stores your operating system, data hard drive stores music/photos/random junk. if you aren't going to get an ssd drive for your os, i suggest getting a 1tb wd caviar black over the one you have selected. also, pretty sure you don't need a 1k watt psu for that comp, a 750w corsair/coolermaster psu should be more than enough and still have some room for upgrades down the road.

[happycupcake]

okay so how does this setup look? I would need less room just to store the os right? like this?
i changed some things up to stay in a 1300 price range

1 x Processor ( [= Quad Core =] AMD Phenom™ II X4 965 Black Edition Quad-Core CPU )1 x Processor Cooling ( Liquid CPU Cooling System [AMD] - [Free Upgrade] Standard 120mm Fan )
1 x Memory ( 4 GB [2 GB X2] DDR3-1600 Memory Module - Corsair or Major Brand )
1 x Video Card ( ATI Radeon HD 5830 - 1GB - Single Card )
1 x Video Card Brand ( Major Brand Powered by ATI or NVIDIA )
1 x Motherboard ( Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 -- AMD 870 w/ 2x PCI-E 2.0 x16 )
1 x Motherboard USB / SATA Interface ( Motherboard default USB / SATA Interface )
1 x Power Supply ( 700 Watt -- Standard )
1 x Primary Hard Drive ( 40 GB Intel X25-V MLC SSD - Single Drive )
1 x Data Hard Drive ( 750 GB HARD DRIVE -- 16M Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.0Gb/s - Single Drive )
1 x Optical Drive ( 24X Sony Dual Format/Double Layer DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW Drive - Black )
1 x Flash Media Reader / Writer ( 12-In-1 Internal Flash Media Card Reader/Writer - Black )
1 x Network Card ( Intel Pro 10/100/1000 Network Card )
1 x Operating System ( Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate + Office Starter 2010 (Includes basic versions of Word and Excel) - 64-bit )

[Destruyen]

40 gig ssd isn't alot of room to work with for an operating system drive. gotta have windows loaded, all program files like games, internet browser, etc. the best way to see what size ssd you will need is see how much space your program files are using on your current computer. if you play alot of games or have alot of programs installed, you should get a 120gb minimum. ssd's need i think 10% or about that of free space so you can never use the entire capacity. i suggest a 120gb minimum for an ssd primary drive.

windows 7 home premium is enough for a gaming pc so you can save some money there. or you can take what you saved and put it into an upgraded mobo like the asus crossshair iv. i hear the asus board paired with a 965 is pretty slick and very easy to overclock.

[Tschus]

I would suggest get 2*4GB ram instead of 2*2GB. Even 1*4GB is a better choice now over 2*2GB. And I would pick a ATi6850 over 5830 on video card. As for the Power Supply, specify a model is better because a lot 700W power sucks. Corsair or Antec are both good choices but avoid their low-end series.

1300 seems a little bit expensive for such a setup. But I'm not familiar with how ibuypower.com works so can't comment much on it.

Have a look on "Setup of the Month" in this post from mmo-champion. The setups are pretty descent imo.

[Destruyen]

you don't need a 6850 to play wow on ultra settings...not even close to it. same with the 8gb or ram over 4gb. yeh there are better upgrades than what she listed, but since the only requirement is ultra settings on wow her items are about right.