Shocked me too. That was the first thing I was gonna do was get a GeForce GTX 1660. Saw the cost and about fell out of my chair. Then I talked to my son who is a hard core gamer. Told me with limited coin to go with a Ryzen 5 which needed a AM4 socket board and DDR4 Ram. So I did that today. Cost me $436 bucks from Newegg. I already have a gaming case with 4 fans and will get a better GPU ASAP.
Reihon:
I’m now running 16megs of RAM and will run the same with my new setup.
Find either one of these at low price and use it first. GPU prices are insane right now.
GTX 980
GTX 1080 (or Ti)
GTX 1070
GTX 1060 6GB
RX 480 or 580
RX 470 or 570
GTX 1650
You will get performance boost with any current CPUs as well. See Tom’s Hardware Legacy GPU hierarchy to find out what you are getting for the price.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
unless this is 1998, thats not enough. unless you mean 16GB, then you should be ok.
Sorry, 16gigs is what I mean. LOL 16megs ain’t going to get me very far.
TL;DR: CPU upgrade first up to 8 cores. Then worry about GPU upgrades. This is true for either Intel or AMD users. If you game at 4k, you need both upgrades.
World of Warcraft is more CPU bound than GPU bound, with the exceptions being if you are interested in ray traced shadows (Windows client only). As of the 8.1.5 patch, WoW uses an enhanced multithreaded engine, which means that a CPU upgrade will do more for you than a GPU upgrade will, with the exception to that being if you have a bottom of the barrel GPU (1050 qualifies as that, especially the gimped versions with slower buses).
With AMD really putting Intel through the wringer with its superb multicore performance to cost ratio, there’s no reason not to go that route vs. Intel currently, especially since AMD has PCIe 4.0 now while Intel does not. That said, IPC is still king of the hill and as far as WoW is concerned, an 8 core Intel CPU will beat out a 16 core AMD CPU since even though WoW is multithreaded now, it can’t utilize that many cores and Intel’s higher IPC wins with the number of cores WoW can use currently. But when you’re on a budget, AMD ticks off all the right boxes and comes close enough on the IPC front to give you power that’s easily good enough for WoW.
For the GPU side, if you’re playing at 1080p, the GTX 1050 will be OK, though not fantastic. The 1060 wins there as the defacto 1080p card in the Pascal range for nVidia. Any 20xx or 30xx card will trounce it though even on the low end (the 30xx series will make the 10xx series cry uncle by comparison).
The biggest elephant in the room right now that’s driving CPU upgrades as being better than GPU upgrades is the crypto currency mining that’s making GPUs nearly impossible to find again. I want a 3390 so badly but I’m not paying $2k for one, and that’s assuming I can even find one (I can’t, really). Hell, it’s hard to find even the lower tier GPUs right now on either side. What is available, if you can find it, is so grossly overpriced that it makes no sense to buy. Neither AMD nor nVidia is doing enough to combat mining farms and scalpers. So for the foreseeable future, that GPU upgrade you were considering or just bought is the best bang for the buck you can get for WoW.
Note: If you play at 4k and/or want the absolute max draw distance at 1080p/1440p, you will need a better GPU. Draw distance and clutter are the two biggest GPU bottlenecks in WoW. Spell particles, though flashy, rely primarily on CPU horsepower, so beefing up the CPU is the primary priority if you do dungeons and/or raids constantly.
One hugely grand irony in all this is that by failing to shore up supplies or force vendors to sell to legitimate non-mining farm buyers, nVidia and AMD have left the door wide open for Apple to slip by them with their new ARM SoCs, and if Apple’s graphics capability makes a major leap in the near future, it may cost the others a lot of lost opportunity. And make no mistake, ARM is efficient. Very efficient. So much so that Microsoft is working on an ARM64 version of Windows, potentially with the same Rosetta transition layer technology Apple uses for early adopters of ARM64 CPUs. I’m not a fan of Apple’s tactics, but they’re damn good at throwing a monkey wrench into established markets’ engines.
If you’re running at 1080p I imagine that GPU is more than enough for now. In your shoes, I would reject the absolutely disgusting current GPU prices (almost irrelevant given how hard they are to get anyway).
WoW is notoriously more CPU bound anyway, so upgrade the CPU first?
In this case you ought to upgrade your cpu first.
I also use a 1050ti with a Intel i7-8700k.
Experience no issues running WoW though my graphics settings are at 7 I play on 1080p.
I think I struggled a lot more with a lower cpu, gpu holds up ok
On an RTX 3070 quality 10 3440x1440 I don’t see 100% GPU until I go to Ardenweald. Until I upgraded my intel Gen6 to an AMD Ryzen 5600 I was CPU capped in Oribos at around 70fps.
Run one of those perf overlays and it becomes very clear where you’re choking.
First I want to thank Tiapriestess for the comments on GPU’s mostly. You kinda went over my head by I get what you are explaining. Very good info and I appreciate your effort to explain all that. I’m glad I went with the Ryzen 5 I just ordered since you explained how much WOW uses a CPU.
And for those that haven’t read the whole thread I just yesterday ordered an AMD Ryzen5, MSI motherboard and 16 DDR4 gigs of Ram. Can’t afford a new GPU right now. I was looking at the GeForce GT 1660 and the cost is about $550. Ouch. The CPU, MB and Ram cost less than that. In a couple of months I’ll look to see if I can afford to upgrade my GPU with something better than my AMD FX-8350. But I believe getting a much better CPU will make me a happy camper when the day comes.
Two months ago I purchased a nice gaming case with 4 led fans. So slowly I’m getting there.
Thanks again to Tiapriestess for the effort to explain what she knows to help me out. Very greatful! 
Evga sells the 3060ti for 460-500 and would be great and last you longer as well. Of course to get it when it comes in stock would be the real challenge. Also gives you a better picture on how much they should actually be selling for around.
Going with the new cpu over a GPU was the best thing to do especially with that old 8350.
The FX-8350 is a very bad chip. Unstable, power hungry, inneficient, outdated.
Even a low end Ryzen will crush it and will have the benefit of having a more modern architecture. You need to get this out of your system. 1050 is fine in 1080p for now.
Yes, but it will be bottlenecked by your CPU. If you have a stellar GPU but your CPU is bad, your upgrade will be worthless.
it 100% is not, RAM is barely a factor in WoW performance
This is bad advice lol. There is no reason to have over 16 unless you’re rendering.
Side note - Are you using a SSD?
Wow is more bound to the cpu , first person shooters gpu . You’ll get bottlenecks with a cheap cpu . Wow is very CPU dependent.
your bulldozer is holding you back id argue more than the 1050 is. Source: I had an FX bulldozer before upgrading to an i5 in 2016.
Considering the current price on things, I’d upgrade the CPU for now, and wait for GPU prices to come back down.
What nonsense are you spewing? I was running 16gb ram and was getting close to capping out with just WoW, Discord, and Chrome open. 32gb is the new standard.
No such thing as not spending a lot of money in the current market. He is better off upgrading the CPU Mobo and Ram and holding out until GPU prices come down.
Actually, current gen Ryzen 5000 series hold the current single and multi core #1 position with the Ryzen 5 5600x actually having the best single core performance of the bunch if I’m not mistaken and the Ryzen 9 5900x bring considered the best overall gaming cpu the market as of now.