Hey guys,
Currently, I’m running WoW on medium settings and getting decent fps. For the holidays, I’m considering upgrading some hardware on my PC with the intention of being able to run WoW smoothly on higher graphics settings! Given that I’m not very savvy when it comes to upgrading components, I was hoping to get some feedback from those more knowledgeable that me on what I should prioritize for upgrades. My current specs are below:
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3401 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960
Motherboard: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. G11CD Rev 1.xx
RAM: 16.0 GB
Thank you to anyone who can offer some guidance, happy holidays everyone 
WoW kinda runs like crap on all ultra settings no matter what PC you have, having said that, if i were to upgrade one piece on your PC (with budget in mind) i’d change out the GTX 960 and grab a GTX 1060 (or 2060), they’re pretty cheap now and a big step up from the 960’s. You’re good for RAM and upgrading the CPU is the kind of thing you do when you’re doing a bigger overhaul 
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Yeah ive got and i7 and i keep it on 9
I’d wait and upgrade the whole thing. You won’t get ultra settings from any particular upgrade on that system without some bad fps.
Awesome, thank you so much for the suggestion! I’ll look into a new GTX graphics card on New Egg. Appreciate the help
And thanks Durzavon, sounds like my processor isn’t likely to be my weakest component.
This is my current rig. I run wow on full Ultra and on a raid/AV I have solid 60 fps.
Intel Core i7 7700k 4.5ghz
Enermax CPU Cooler ETS-T40Fit
MSI Performance Gaming Intel Z270 DDR4 HDMI USB 3 SLI ATX Motherboard (Z270 GAMING PRO CARBON)
MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Ti 256-Bit 8GB GDDR5 VR Ready DirectX12 SLI (GTX 1070 TI DUKE 8G)
Samsung 960 EVO Series - 250GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD
Corsair Dominator Platinum Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4 DRAM 3200MHz
Corsair RM750x 750W Fully Modular PSU 80 PLUS Gold Certified
Corsair K70 RGB RAPIDFIRE Mechanical Gaming Keyboard Cherry MX Speed
Corsair M65 Pro RGB Elite Gaming Mouse 18,000 DPI Optical Sensor
Corsair MM200 - Cloth Mouse Pad XL
Thermaltake View 31 RGB Dual Tempered Glass SPCC ATX Mid Tower LCS Certified
TWO - Asus VE248H 24" Full HD 1920x1080 2ms HDMI DVI VGA Back-lit LED Monitor
Sorry it’s a copy/paste from a notepad I have.
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Also, get an SSD if you don’t have one yet. makes things load much faster.
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Solid State Drive.
SOLID STATE DRIVE.
The two things that made a huge performance difference in my system were doubling my RAM (I’m at 32gb now), and getting a SSD (or running off a large USB 3.0 flash drive). Way more than the marginal difference made by upgrading my graphics card to a GTX 1050 Ti.
WoW’s code is old, old. And over time, it’s been built up piece by piece like a Jenga tower but like if all the pieces were from different game sets of different sizes. As such, it is hugely reliant on reading off your hard drive and using RAM, much more so than spinning polygons through your graphics interface.
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Thanks to everyone who replied, I’m looking at everything and weighing my options! I have heard of SSDs but never looked into them personally – is there a difference in quality between internal and external SSDs? And would an SSD likely provide a more noticeable improvement in quality over a graphics card update?
Internal SSD is better of the two, albeit marginally. What the SSD affects the most is loading speed, because the read/write is so much faster and that’s really what’s churning the most in WoW’s engine.
And I’d stick more RAM in, personally, just because it really helped my system. I don’t see it recommended a lot? But for me, it made a big difference.
Overall, though, your graphics card isn’t that bad. You might see some performance increase with a better one, of course, but the first step I took to updating my system was to go from a GTX 950 to a GTX 1050 Ti before the extra RAM and the SSD and it did next to nothing 
SSD just gives you faster load times, i’d absolutely recommend getting one for that convenience but it isn’t really a performance upgrade, it won’t alter your FPS. 16 is enough RAM so long as you aren’t running two monitors with 20 tabs of Chrome open on the other one while you’re playing lol
If you aren’t confident with such things, you could buy a new GPU and an SSD and have someone local install them for you, hope it goes well
Thank you guys so much, you’ve given me a lot to think about! I’ll do some comparison shopping and pull the trigger on one of them, really appreciate all the feedback I’ve gotten!
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At least a 6 core cpu at 3.5Ghz, 16gb ram, 1060 gpu and a ssd or vme ssd hard drive.
This is the baseline you want to aim for if you plan on playing this game on ultra at 1440p resolution and at 60 fps constantly. I don’t mean peak performance. I’m saying that with specs like these the lowest you’ll dip is 60 fps. If someone does not have these specs, at a minimum, and says they are maintaining 60 fps in AV or raids then they are lying to you and themselves.
Im not sure what your upgrade budget is, but swapping over top a SSD always helps. Other than that upgrade your graphics card to a gtx1660 super for $230, or a 1660ti for $280. The jump to a rtx2060 is quite a bit more (about $400).
Your RAM is good (16 gigs is standard)
Please keep in mind that if you are running Windows 7, you cannot make an SSD your boot drive without a patch Microsoft no longer offers. If you are on Windows 10 or moving to it as you should by the end of January 2020 then you’ll be fine.
i7 isn’t automatically better than i5 or worse than i9. There’s a pretty decent range in there and it’s gonna depend on the specific processor.
Your processor is still really good, too bad its not a k so you could oc it though.
I’d suggest a new gpu, I’d go either a 1660ti or a 2060 super, the latter being the better (but more expensive) of the two.
Make sure you’re running wow in dx12 mode with the latest drivers to make sure wow is taking full advantage of your cpu.
all you really need is a better graphics card and you’re there. A 1060 6gig would get you there easy and that’s about the cheapest card around now.