Does anyone run dual cards in Crossover/SLI mode? Does that even help with running WoW faster (considering WoW is cpu intensive, not gpu, and does not use many of the bleeding edge graphics features available on fancy cards).

I'm thinking about buying a PC with quad-core 64-bit Intel cpu, and it comes with an ATI 4650. Since the 4650 is relatively inexpensive, I was considering just getting a 2nd one and running it in crossover mode, rather than getting a more expensive card.

Make sure that the mobo is crossfire capable obviously, but quite frankly, you're almost certainly going to be better served by getting a single better card than another 4650, at least if you're worried about upgrading later, especially when the 5000 series cards are out, and the 4890 is only $200.

My advice though would honestly be to go with an nVidia card, but that's just personal preference.

Thanks. I'm looking at the GT210/220 card atm - not much more than the 4650, and quite a bit cheaper than the 4890.

I just want something that'll play WoW at near-ultra settings and still give a decent frame rate - anything above 45 fps while raiding will do me just fine. I don't need it to run any other games, so I don't want to go overboard spending money on a card WoW won't fully utilise.

Any recommendations?

Just recently I came across some nice benchmarks. And interestingly, the Nvidia cards are better for WoW than ATI's:

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,6893 ... ce/?page=2

And it's recommended, that your card has at least 896MB memory.

In general my opinion and advice is to go with Nvidia, and to just go ahead and drop $200 into a video card that'll last the moderate gamer for another year or probably more. The lowest quality Video card I'd consider buying now is the 9800 GT by nVidia, and the 4870 by ATI, just cause they're quality cards that are about to go down in price and they're going to be solid for quite some time still, if you don't run very fps/graphics heavy games. Hell, the 9800 will run Crysis fairly well, and as far as I'm concerned that's STILL the graphic quality benchmark for games.

@masi - thanks for that benchmark link. I've been looking for one, but my Google-fu let me down - too many hits when I include "WoW" in the search.

@Gil - Yeah, I'm fast coming to the same conclusion. Right now it's between ATI's 4890 and nVidia's 9800GT for me.

I'll probably just end up buying the parts and putting the damn thing together myself.

Thanks for the feedback.

In general you get significantly higher performance for your money by getting one expensive GPU vs two cheap ones. Also, SLI/CF rarely scales anywhere close to 2x speedup and more often doesn't work at all.

I built a new machine in November of 09.... figuring frame rates were directly tied to a video card <common thought>, I started with a 4650.

The card was loud, had a tiny fan, and would run at an audibly uncomfortable fan speeds the entire time my machine was on. I'd tough it out if I could max out the settings, but that wasn't the case.

I then moved into a 4850. Worlds different. The 4850 had no issues full-out rendering the game at 45fps...until I hit 25 man raids. Even with the settings turned down to "stick figures" settings.. I was having issues. Being a dopey-dumb consumer, I went out and picked up another new card..

The 5750. Faster clocks, fewer pipes, but faster data transfer. I was impressed that I didn't choke in 25's, but 25's still presented 12fps... and the machine I built wasn't that bad....

Desperate, and wanting to be able to play at a fluid 45fps... I read up a bit, found WoW to be more proc intensive...and spent another $170 on a new processor.

Phenom II 550 Black -> Phenom II 955 Black. Dual core at 3.2ghz to a Quad Core 3.2ghz.

The processor solved the problem.

Beyond that, I found that a Solid State Disk running WoW and your OS increases performance tenfold. Cheap ones are about $130USD and reduce load times to near-nill. Be sure, if you decide to take the plunge, that your disk is made by Intel and includes TRIM...or you'll see a steady decline over the course of a month.

I forgot to update this thread when I did upgrade. My final system is:

AMD X4 Phenom II 965 Black Edition (Quad core 64 bit)
6 GB DD3 RAM
ATi Radeon 4950 (893 MB video RAM)

I run at max *everything* settings.

When soloing, I get just about 60fps wherever I go. Dalaran dips down to 25-35 fps. I've given up raiding for the rest of this release, so I don't have any numbers in raid. 5-mans is near perfect (40-45 fps). I love it.