Windzarko
Well-Known Member
As some of you might have become aware (and bored) of, I've been complaining more and more lately about my PC's performance during raids, and it occurs to me that its performance has been steadily decreasing over the last half year or so, for no reason I can really think of. I got a slight boost when I upgraded my graphics card (courtesy of Q-man), but that didn't stop the continued downhill trend.
I'm already almost incapable of doing 25-mans; I certainly cannot tank or heal in them, as I'd be a liability to the group, and my performance as a DPS goes down somewhat as well (bear in mind that I play a damned simple, face-roll-tastic DPS spec, and my FPS is dropping low enough to significantly impact that). My performance in 10-mans is also starting to drop far more than I care for, and I've got a feeling that we'd have had more rapid success with Rotface in ICC10 the other day if not for my FPS hovering between 2.0 and 5.0 (absolute best) during boss fights.
Long story short, if the downwards trend continues, I'll be stepping back from raiding until I can sort it, as I don't want to be a liability to our groups. To try and avoid this, I'm looking for a little technical help from some of our more knowledgeable peoples here.
First up, my PC specs (according to dxdiag and CPU-Z):
CPU: "Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.80Ghz" (Codename "Prescott", Socket 478 mPGA, Pentium 4 HT)
Mobo: ASUSTeK P4P800 (Chipset: i865P/PE/G/i848P). It's an AGP 3.0 board
Memory: 2048 MBytes DDR, ~200Mhz DRAM frequency
Graphics card: Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro (512Mb, AGP 0x71C2)
Sound card: C-Media Wave Device and a SoundMAX Digital Audio; I use both of them simultaneously, one for the microphone and one for sound out. Not ideal, I know, but this was the easiest setup I could use without -something- freaking out, and it didn't seem to affect performance for anything.
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2 (Version 2002). I refuse to upgrade to SP3 for various reasons.
All drivers are up to date (I've had a subscription to DriverHQ's Driver Detective since my first year of university, and I update them periodically to be sure. For the graphics card, I alternate between official drivers and Omega ones, and the Omega ones seem to do a very slightly better job (although the effect of the Omega ones is more pronounced in other games than in WoW).
I use TuneUp Utilities and Ccleaner on a reasonably regular basis to keep things clean, I'm active in my use of Spybot and TeaTimer (haven't had anything show up on scan in ages now), I use PerfectDisk 8.0 every two to three weeks to defrag (I let TuneUp defrag every few days as well).
In a raid, I'll have my graphics on lowest settings, and tend to run in a 1024*768 window (seems to run better windowed, plus I don't much fancy stretching a low resolution like that to fullscreen...). I shut off all processes but those for WoW, TS3, and sometimes Xfire (this'll go too if I'm desperate). I also have a fairly minimalistic number of WoW mods running (last raid I stripped it down to DBM, Omen, Pallypower, Clique, Quartz and AG Unit Frames; I consider these to be the essentials, everything else was turned off, AtlasLoot included).
WoW's the one that suffers the most, performance-wise, these days. My FPS on my Alliance alt in Vanilla areas with no other players nearby rarely rises above 25, my Dalaran FPS on any realm ranges from 1-6, and my 10-man raid FPS is pretty much the same as Dalaran, but a little smoother (if that makes any sense). Other games suffer as well, including EVE (which WOULD run better if I turned the resolution down, but I'd rather have a bit of lag and lowest graphics than reduce my screen space in that game), Fallout 3 (running it on less than minimum thanks to config file tweaks), and even stuff like Torchlight gets wonky.
Well... that's a lot of info and rambling... if anyone's made it this far, do you have any suggestions? I loathe having to not attend because of tragic FPS, I hate not being able to even consider 25-mans, I'm incredibly frustrated by my degrading performance when I have no idea what's causing it, and I simply cannot afford to upgrade my computer for at least a few months (since my motherboard is an AGP, if I want to upgrade, I have to upgrade pretty much everything in one go; this mobo can't take any dual-core or quad-core CPUs, can't handle more RAM, and can't take a better graphics card without costing loads, so I'd be upgrading CPU, Mobo and GPU all in one go, quite possibly with new RAM as well).
Any help or advice would be very much appreciated. I'm off to resume grinding through the WoW tech support forums in hope of something useful...
I'm already almost incapable of doing 25-mans; I certainly cannot tank or heal in them, as I'd be a liability to the group, and my performance as a DPS goes down somewhat as well (bear in mind that I play a damned simple, face-roll-tastic DPS spec, and my FPS is dropping low enough to significantly impact that). My performance in 10-mans is also starting to drop far more than I care for, and I've got a feeling that we'd have had more rapid success with Rotface in ICC10 the other day if not for my FPS hovering between 2.0 and 5.0 (absolute best) during boss fights.
Long story short, if the downwards trend continues, I'll be stepping back from raiding until I can sort it, as I don't want to be a liability to our groups. To try and avoid this, I'm looking for a little technical help from some of our more knowledgeable peoples here.
First up, my PC specs (according to dxdiag and CPU-Z):
CPU: "Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.80Ghz" (Codename "Prescott", Socket 478 mPGA, Pentium 4 HT)
Mobo: ASUSTeK P4P800 (Chipset: i865P/PE/G/i848P). It's an AGP 3.0 board
Memory: 2048 MBytes DDR, ~200Mhz DRAM frequency
Graphics card: Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro (512Mb, AGP 0x71C2)
Sound card: C-Media Wave Device and a SoundMAX Digital Audio; I use both of them simultaneously, one for the microphone and one for sound out. Not ideal, I know, but this was the easiest setup I could use without -something- freaking out, and it didn't seem to affect performance for anything.
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2 (Version 2002). I refuse to upgrade to SP3 for various reasons.
All drivers are up to date (I've had a subscription to DriverHQ's Driver Detective since my first year of university, and I update them periodically to be sure. For the graphics card, I alternate between official drivers and Omega ones, and the Omega ones seem to do a very slightly better job (although the effect of the Omega ones is more pronounced in other games than in WoW).
I use TuneUp Utilities and Ccleaner on a reasonably regular basis to keep things clean, I'm active in my use of Spybot and TeaTimer (haven't had anything show up on scan in ages now), I use PerfectDisk 8.0 every two to three weeks to defrag (I let TuneUp defrag every few days as well).
In a raid, I'll have my graphics on lowest settings, and tend to run in a 1024*768 window (seems to run better windowed, plus I don't much fancy stretching a low resolution like that to fullscreen...). I shut off all processes but those for WoW, TS3, and sometimes Xfire (this'll go too if I'm desperate). I also have a fairly minimalistic number of WoW mods running (last raid I stripped it down to DBM, Omen, Pallypower, Clique, Quartz and AG Unit Frames; I consider these to be the essentials, everything else was turned off, AtlasLoot included).
WoW's the one that suffers the most, performance-wise, these days. My FPS on my Alliance alt in Vanilla areas with no other players nearby rarely rises above 25, my Dalaran FPS on any realm ranges from 1-6, and my 10-man raid FPS is pretty much the same as Dalaran, but a little smoother (if that makes any sense). Other games suffer as well, including EVE (which WOULD run better if I turned the resolution down, but I'd rather have a bit of lag and lowest graphics than reduce my screen space in that game), Fallout 3 (running it on less than minimum thanks to config file tweaks), and even stuff like Torchlight gets wonky.
Well... that's a lot of info and rambling... if anyone's made it this far, do you have any suggestions? I loathe having to not attend because of tragic FPS, I hate not being able to even consider 25-mans, I'm incredibly frustrated by my degrading performance when I have no idea what's causing it, and I simply cannot afford to upgrade my computer for at least a few months (since my motherboard is an AGP, if I want to upgrade, I have to upgrade pretty much everything in one go; this mobo can't take any dual-core or quad-core CPUs, can't handle more RAM, and can't take a better graphics card without costing loads, so I'd be upgrading CPU, Mobo and GPU all in one go, quite possibly with new RAM as well).
Any help or advice would be very much appreciated. I'm off to resume grinding through the WoW tech support forums in hope of something useful...
