double check plugins. they tend to be a big drain on resources as well.
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Is funny, I too have been building computers for about 30 years but I still learn something all the time. Still struggle to understand ram when it comes to channels, timings, latency etc.
I remember setting clock speeds with jumpers on my 25 mhz 486DX computer. Good times.
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25mhz? dang, should have turned the turbo button on 
if Iām not learning something every day I feel like Iām missing something. Computers and tech changes daily. we are never done learning.
Though, My job does depend on me understanding tech so.
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I remember upgrading from a 25mhz CPU to 75mhz in that machine. Doom 2 never looked so smooth, especially when I learned I could save so much memory by launching doom2.exe from DOS rather than inside Windows 3.11 didnāt even need to load
But were you able to get a Voodoo2 and run quake in glide mode?
wait
you got Doom to run on your 486?
me and my 2mb RAM 
Actually my first discrete graphics card was a Voodoo1, for quake. It didnāt do so hot if I remember. During those days I was more about Duke Nukem 3D anyway for the modem to modem multiplayer.
Before I ever had Internet me and my buddies from school would dialup from our computers to each others and do co-ops.
I did have a Voodoo5 though when it was big stuff for Quake 3 arena.
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It will run excellent on a 486, faster than a pentium in fact (it was super optimized for the 486s architecture). But it was highly dependent on having a good cache on the moboā¦
Sorry, ya missed my joke
Doom (2) required 4MB ram to run. I only had 2. so no matter what, I wasnāt running it on my 486.
I was immensely sad when i came home with those floppy disks only to find out I couldnāt even play.
Yes I had doom 2 running decently on: (still remember it)
486 dx 25 mhz
4 mb of ram
30 mb hard drive
Like I said though the upgrade to that 75mhz was huge. The modern equivalent of like 60 fps today is what it felt like Lol.
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Well then, the GPU prices must be falling like a rock. The last gtx 1650 I saw when looking around (about 3 or so weeks ago) the web was well over $500. The gtx 1660 was more. I read up on the 1050ti and it showed a noticeable increase in performance over the 1050. By the time GPU prices come down to a reasonable price Iāll have the money (I hope) to get what I really want. Until then Iām happy with the increased performance of the 1050ti over the 1050.
Edit: Purchaed the 1050ti about 3 or so weeks ago.
Wow is cpu heavy. It requires the cpu power to process all the things going on in game.
I have an old gtx 980 classified gpu, and a new Ryzen 3 3700x and running wow on all ultra, while having discord, YouTube, iTunes and OBS all up at the same time, I get 100fps on wow and it never goes lower than 90. My gpu usage is 30% and CPU 20%.
You can get a banger gpu yes but it will not carry wow if youāre CPU is bad.
Also you might simply have the wrong in game settings if youāre getting shakey ground
The only thing that DX12 helps with is multithreading the draw calls to be sent to the GPU. That stage of a frame comes AFTER the CPU has done itās work for the gameās frame. Once the frameās DCs are prepared and loaded into the GPU, then it renders the frame, which takes time based on the GPU.
As for the actual speed up of DX12 being able to parallelize the draw calls, yeah, itās a an increase in performance, sure. However, depending on the game, youāll see that that phase of a frame usually isnāt a large portion of it. Look up some benchmarks that compare DX11 to 12 and youāll see, itās not that big of a deal usually. Usually within +/- 5% depending on how well the devs handled the APIs.
But anyways, Iām not going to turn this into a TedTalk on how game engines work. Simply put, you need a fast CPU for games like WoW.
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But I was enjoying it! Mind you itās like a foreign language to me, but interesting nonetheless.
for WoW Iād say that RAM speed also makes a big difference with the pure amount of math itās doing client side.
almost all those particles, circles, and math is done in RAM. slwoer RAM and it will hurt your performance too. in WOW, this is really noticable by āhiccupsā in FPS. youāll get 90fps than for a split second 10, than back up. this is your vRAM starved for data from your RAM.
for WoW: Iād definitely recommend AMD platform for now (Intel has some issues with their offerings in this space) and go for RAM speed that is as close to AMDās infinity fabrice speed. so 3200mhz to 3466mhz is ideal for best performance in WoW
paried with a 3600 or 5600 midrange CPU and youāll be good.
Yeah ram speed helps a good amount too, but anything in the DDR4 2400+ range should be more than enough. Helps a ton with streaming assets in and out as well. Personally, Iām running 16gb of DDR4 2666. Would be 3000 but I accidentally put in a second stick that wasnāt XMP. Oh well, good enough lol
Oh and super high end ram CAS timings would likely make a negligible difference in frame rates, so donāt bother forking out tons more money on snake oil.
I think WoW makes some use of GPU particles now, so that lightens the load a bit. Not 100% positive, but Iād hope they use them on static zone effects. You can usually push out 1000x more GPU particles vs CPU particles for the same frame time cost, but GPU particles are ādumbā and donāt play well with dynamics. Basically, you wouldnāt want to use them on spell effects and such.
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AMD is good but the 10x00 series Intel chips arenāt bad for the price at the moment. The 11400 is also in a good place price to performance wise and availability wise.
Honestly right now the biggest struggle is just getting hardwareā¦ much less the best. Moreover if someone is building a new system worst case (and it is a worst case) they could use the intel iGPU until new GPUs come on the market. AMD sadly doesnāt ship any sort of GPU in their mainline desktop SKUs. Another thing to consider is that the intel platform is more mature. AMD currently has USB dropout issues that will require BIOS updates, for a less technical user it may be better to set them up on a decent intel box even if itās not technically top of the charts because it will just work and reduce their friendās tech support load.
Yaāall should watch the performance monitor while you play.
This game isnāt cpu intensive.
my concern is the consumer boardās handicapped RAM speed. As long as a builder is aware of this and gets the right chipset to take advantage of increased RAM performance, than yes, Intel is still absolutely viable. (I am angry at their business process) here, NOT their technology for now
but yesā¦ finding hardware right now is absolutely hilarious.
Read what I said earlier, the performance monitor is misleading. The single core load with WoW is very high. Divide 100 by your thread count to find out what percent usage represents how many threads are loaded. On an 8 thread cpu, 12.5% usage would mean you are fully using one whole thread, which would back my claims. Youāll still use a bit more than that even, with graphics set to 8 and some addons. My WoW sits around 20-40% CPU usage on an 8 thread CPU depending on where Iām at.
Hereās me in org with a bunch of people around:
https://i.imgur.com/sRyy3Rz.jpg
As you can see, with an 8 thread CPU, this means Iām fully capping out an average of two threads(25% would be two threads). I have next to no addons running and nothing going on in the background. The max cpu/thread usage isnāt a good thing to go by because the windows scheduler juggles execution all over the cores.
Point is, the main thread speed is still the most vital. Yes, youāll get some benefit out of extra cores for offloading async tasks like particles/animations and such, but if the main game loop hitches on the CPU, the GPU canāt render and youāll be CPU bound.
EDIT: Thatās with me capping fps to 60 with nvidia control panel. If I remove the cap, those numbers will be higher because the game can actually run higher than that. When I remove the cap, my FPS in that exact same spot/angle is in the 90s range and my total CPU usage climbs up to around 40%, which means itās using roughly three whole cores. If I were to go into my bios and disable hyper threading, so that Iām down to 4 physical cores, my usage would then be around 75%. Virtual cores do not equal anywhere near a real core. I want to say they are worth around 15% of a real core depending on what youāre doing? Iād have to check.
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