WoW has always been traditionally single-thread CPU bound. A phat GPU couldn’t hurt but it won’t get you as big a performance jump as a better CPU.
Although with the world-wide shenanigans going (bitcoin miners, everything wanting chips and of course the silicon shortage) on you’ll be lucky to find a recent GPU that isn’t marked up to extortion-level pricing. CPUs aren’t far behind either.
For years I have been told “WoW is more CPU intensive than GPU” yet my 1080ti struggles at 100% utilization and my i9 sittin cool and comfy at 30% tops, if I am just playing WoW.
I think its more GPU heavy these days.
There is so much bad info in this thread it’s not even funny, or helpful to OP.
A couple things:
So bottom line is…both parts you reference are very old and not great for WoW. If I were you, I would get an 11600k, overclock it. Try to find a 2060 or a 1080 and you’ll be flying.
Also people please get more RAM. The days of 16 gb being enough are over. I reguarly use around 24 gb and if you play a more modern game, like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, even 32gb gets maxed out if I am flying somewhere like L.A. or NYC.
LOL you do not need 32 gigs of RAM.
I did a test on my previous build. I opened WoW and put my character in a place that stresses GPU and CPU, Ardenweald. Then I opened like 55 chrome tabs, put on a movie in full screen on my second monitor, while a 10gb file was being decoded in 7zip. My RAM was at like 14GB.
Considering that’s a crazy amount of things going on at once, I’m pretty sure 16gb is still fine for 95% of people who game on PC.
You’re not completely wrong. But more games coming out will use more than 16gb at times if you have it. Flightsim and Cyberpunk come to mind.
They ended up with a 3600X which fits this perfectly… 
Yea I didn’t see how old this was until your post lol…woops. At least seems like I was somewhat on target >.>
Windows 10
11th gen I7-11700KF
Radeon RX 6800 XT
16GB
It’s like a nice walk in the park.
That’s all true, but saying 16g is not enough because some games require more is only relevant if the person actually plans to play any of the games that need more.
edit: My laptop has 16g and based on my normal usage I probably could have gotten away with 8, but I don’t think I saw any with that little.
Hey, they got the biggest bang for the buck they could in the current market at least! If they get their memory tuned as per the last GN video I linked they should be rocking just fine.
despite what you might think china does not produce the advanced chips that make gpus Taiwan does though
Im not saying 16gb is going to cause games not to work or something. But if a game can and will use more than 16, then obviously you will get better performance if you have more than 16…
I suppose my metric for “need” is different than some others? If I am using more than 16 then to me I obviously need more than 16…
With Flight Sim 2020 regularly meeting 32 gb, I would technically say then that I need more than 32. Will it work with 32 or even 16? Of course.
eh, alll things computer. you spec for your needs/wants. saying that you NEED 32, is based on your workload
if you were building a gaming compuer today, i’d start at 16, but if you’re only playing DOTA, WoW or similar MOBA’s? You can probably live with 8. Heck, you COULD get away with 6 if you’re being smart with system utilization (don’t do 6, just get 8, you’ll thank me)
At the end of the day, know what you’re playing and doing and buildaccordingly. THere’s no one size fits all (unnless you just get the biggest/best).
A game like Cities:Skylines for example will use my full 32gb. WoW? I can have it open with my regular other stuff and still stay under 8gb of RAM utilization.
The age old addage for home computers hasn’t really changed. Buy the highest you can afford. More is always better 
Also it doesn’t hurt to future proof a little. We are on the brink of 32 being the new 16, im tellin ya…
I have a GTX1050ti and used to have the FX-8350
Small upgrade but still an upgrade I went to the Ryzen 3 3200g (and DDR4 RAM which I have a lot of) and the issues you describe completely disappeared and I get a steady 60-70fps at all times even world bosses with multiple raid groups there.
For the RAM discussion I went overboard : 64GB
I run 4 screens and typically have 8-10 different programs running including multiple instances of Skype, teams etc. running for work.
Well that was my point. Obviously if you use more you need more. But your initial statement was
It’s not over if people are only playing things where 16g is plenty.
haha fair enough.
I suppose if WoW is all you ever do 16 is fine.
All I meant was that we are starting to see games come out that will take advantage of more than 16.
Well that’s a statement I agree with. 
If people are going to be interested in newer gen games then they are going to need something with better specs than what they have for WoW.
we’re really not.
16 is going to be sufficient for a bit. ESPECIALLY as we start to see more and more gaming leverage the RAM on your GPU itself.
what we need to see more of is bandwidth between RAM/CPU and vRAM. So that isntead of having to load all textures ahead of time, they can be loaded directly on demand. Thus speed and bandwitdth more important than raw size.
As a sys-admin and IT Manager and a PC hobby builder for 30 years, aside from some rare games, 32gb is REALLY far away from a regular gamer perspective. 16 is more than enough. the biggest culprit eating RAM is not usually the game, but everything else we leave running while we game. all those launchers and TSR’s and windows services that nobody thinks of disabling that eaty up ram and cycles behind the scenes.
We need to stop being so lazy with how well our systems run instead of just throwing more hardware at it