Video Card recommendations for WoW?

[Blackhat]

Get yourself an x1950pro or  2600xt from ATI, the x1950 pro is around twice the price but it's a faster card. 

If you go for an nVidia card you'll find that it'll be a little slower then the comparative ATI card in its price range and that you'll have major trouble with the drivers unless you remeove the ATI ones with something like driver cleaner.

I agree with the above.  For AGP, you really might have a hard time beating the x1950pro for it's price.  I suggest purchasing from Newegg.com.  They have them there for around $150.  You'll have at least a 40% increase in performance over your last card I would say.

[Silver Dragon]

My video card (Radeon X1300) is almost certainly overheating.  Can't tell for sure as this is one of them that doesn't have a temperature monitor.  But the symptoms are classic.  Random types of errors at random times, occurring more frequently over time.  Only in WoW (the only graphics intensive game I am playing right now), and if I turn my PC off for about an hour, it extends the time I can play before crashing again.  (and yes, latest drivers, latest Directx, tried numerous graphic settings, etc etc etc)

Anyway, what card(s) are you guys using, and do  you like it?  And what would you recommend?  Has to be AGP as I don't yet want to spend the bucks for a m/b with PCI Express (although that does seem to be the future, and the future is damn near now).

Hey, hold up a minute.  Is this pre-WoW 2.3 patch, or post-WoW 2.3 patch?  A lot of people have been having weird issues since the 2.3 patch (myself included), so it may be more patch related than video card related.  How long have you been playing WoW with your Radeon X1300 card?

I just built a new system recently and played WoW fine on my new Radeon HD 2600XT when I tested it a week or so ago to compare it with my old system, but after the 2.3 patch the thing went apeshit on me.   I only played for a short while and it would lock up the whole system, then after an uninstall/reinstall I could play for a while but when I logged out it would freeze up on me while still logged in, or would log out but freeze up when retrieving my character list.

To top that off, I had to reformat my old system and when I went to play WoW after reinstalling everything it told me it couldn't initialize 3D something something blah blah and wouldn't even load the game.  Told me to make sure everything was up to date (after a fresh reinstall?  Up to date?  Naaahhh, I used files from three years ago to reinstall Windows    )

Anyway, you might want to browse through the WoW tech support forum and see if anyone else if having similar symptoms as you're experiencing, as it might be patch related.  (From what I've read people are experiencing freezes, lockups, extreme latency, drops, kicks, murphies, all sorts of things!)

On a side note, anyone else having trouble with WoW after the 2.3 patch?  Anyone..?  Anyone...?  Bueller...? 


~SD

[Petrarch]

I just built a new system recently and played WoW fine on my new Radeon HD 2600XT

How are you finding the 2XT cards from ATI? I'm still about 4-6 months away from undertaking the next upgrade which will probably see me move back to Intel CPU's but I'm staying with ATI cards. Everything I've read so far seems to point to the ATI's having effectively the same performance but at a cheaper price, but it'd be nice to get an impression from someone that's got some hands on experience with it.

[BlueCross]

I have this sort of innate distrust of ATI cards; seems like I've always had more issues with those than others.

As to my current card (Radeon ATI 1300), I'm 99% sure it is overheating.  I can turn off my PC for a few hours, and the card will run fine for 20-30 minutes.  But if I leave my PC on, the game will lock after 3-5 minutes.

I've run 'dxdiag' and it will randomly tell me that my 3D bits of the card are working or not working.  As dxdiag has zippo to do with WoW, I'm pretty sure it's my card and not WoW.

I bought a Geforce but am returning it.  It's AGP and I'm planning to buy a new motherboard with PCI-express.  More (and better) cards to choose from.

Here's a thread I started on alt.games.warcraft.  Nvidia seems to be the big winner:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.games.warcraft/browse_frm/thread/26d8d1c7c6d14d51?hl=en#086a5979bb9511f6

[TK]

In that case get yourself an 8800GT, they're not all that expensive but in normal gaming you probably wouldn't see an appreciable peformance difference between the GT and the GTX/ultra until you get up to very high resolutions.  As a side note the manufacturer you said you wanted to avoid is probably XFX, thier overclocked cards are fre-fixed with XXX.

You'll probably find that your x1300 is passively cooled so that'll be the reason it's getting too hot.

[Brugdor]

In that case get yourself an 8800GT, they're not all that expensive but in normal gaming you probably wouldn't see an appreciable peformance difference between the GT and the GTX/ultra until you get up to very high resolutions.  As a side note the manufacturer you said you wanted to avoid is probably XFX, thier overclocked cards are fre-fixed with XXX.

You'll probably find that your x1300 is passively cooled so that'll be the reason it's getting too hot.

Something to consider if you do decide to go for a DX10 card like the 8800 series is that to get the full benefit you'll have to upgrade to Vista. So unless you plan on doing so you can get a nice card for cheaper. My 7950gt is running things like LOTRO, COD4, TF2 and Bioshock at full detail at 1280x1024 with no problems. That's on an E6400 dual core with 2 gigs of ram though.

[TK]

The 7800 and 7900 series would be a good choice, I've ran  7900GS cards and 7800GT both in single and SLI configs in my machine and currently have a 7900GTX so I can vouch for the 7xxx series.   

A 7900GS would probably perform to within 80-90% of the 7950GT at around 70% of the price; a 7950GT probably still costs the same as an 8800GT so if you can still get a 7900GS it would be a really good buy.  The only problem with a GF7 card is that they're end of line so getting hold of one could be an issue.

You may want to reconsider going for a PCI-express board just yet, the cost would be pretty high; you'd most likely need new memory and a new CPU to go along with it, and there are some rare AGP gems out there. 

You may still be able to get a 7900GS on the AGP bus; then you'd have a machine that'll probably perform at the same level as your intended pci-express one.  Gainward produced an AGP 7800GS+ that was about as good as the PCI-E 7950GT and a 7800gs bliss which was essentiall identical to the standard AGP 7900GS, they also released a standard 7800GS which barely outperformed a 6800 GT/Ultra so if you do choose this route be careful.

Also don't forget that you're almost certainly going to need to get a new PSU whatever you do, to be on the safe side make sure it's something along the lines of an Antec and not some high wattage no name psu that'll blow at the first sign of load.

[Silver Dragon]

I've run 'dxdiag' and it will randomly tell me that my 3D bits of the card are working or not working.  As dxdiag has zippo to do with WoW, I'm pretty sure it's my card and not WoW.

I bought a Geforce but am returning it.  It's AGP and I'm planning to buy a new motherboard with PCI-express.  More (and better) cards to choose from.

Actually, after a little more research trying to discover why my old AGP Radeon X850XT started acting up, I've discovered that apparently the last three releases of the Catalyst drivers from ATI have totally hosed Direct3D for AGP cards (and seeing as its been 5-6 months ATI's known about this issue and it hasn't been resolved, or from what I can tell, even acknowledged, that's probably a bad sign) which sort of explains why my X850XT went wonky after reinstalling windows the other day.  Not totally, mind you, because I could have sworn I had Catalyst 7.9 or 7.10 running on their just fine before I rebooted, but I didn't check before I wiped the drive...  Anyway, its now doing one of the things you mentioned, though not randomly:  When I run dxdiag's Direct3D test it reports three errors, all 'Failure at step 8...' for DIrect3D 7, 8, & 9.  (That's with both Catalyst 7.9 and 7.10)

So if you're running your X1300 with Catalyst 7.10, 7.9, and possibly 7.8, that might be causing or contributing to your troubles, or you might be right and your card is toast  *shrug*

I'm about to try the Omega Radeon drivers, which according to the website actually allow AGP cards to still work properly, so I'll update that a bit later.


And on a side note, this is actually the first major problem I've had with any ATI Radeon video cards.

~SD

[Brugdor]

Yeah I went ATI a few years back and I doubt I'll ever return do to driver issues. Another thing to consider is that the majority of games these days seem to advertise for Nvidia when you launch them. That's a pretty good indication of which cards were primarily tested with the games IMO.