BFA performance on i7-6700HQ/960M, possibly eGPU?

[Nightsham-ravencrest (Nightsham)]

Hello world of warcraft community,

I’m having FPS issues, particularly in raids, since the Battle for Azeroth launch. Here are my system requirements.

Laptop: DELL XPS 15
CPU: i7-6700HQ
GPU: GTX 960M
RAM: 16 GB 2133 Mhz
Memory storage: 512 GB SSD

I’m playing on an external monitor (24’ 1080p) attached to my laptop through HDMI, with the laptop monitor being completely off.

I’ll start this topic by saying I didn’t have any issues in Legion (raid FPS>35). I’m well aware that system requirements have changed since the Battle for Azeroth launch. My system was beyond system requirements in Legion, and is now slightly below the latter, but still above minimum requirements. I’m playing with pretty low settings in raids, having shadow quality and liquid details set to minimum, view distance on 2, environment details and ground clutter set to 1, low textures, low particle density. The rest is set to the lowest or close to the lowest settings.

This been said, I’m having around 15-30 FPS in raid combat (with the settings mentioned above) and decent FPS in the outer world (~50 in the new horde city, and over 90 in world quest territories with settings around 4-5).

I realize this is sort of normal for the kind of hardware I’m carrying, considering reccomended requirements ect.

I tried removing all addons and cleanly reinstalling the game to check if any addon was slowing my game in raid combat, if anyone was wondering if that could have been my issue for raid combat FPS.

Also, if anyone was wondering, I am playing though the dedicated rather than the integrated graphics card, and my system power settings are set to high performance. I’ve read most of the forums on similar topics and tried tons of different things, but my hardware seems to be the bottleneck in my WoW experience.

Right now, my biggest concern is reaching those constant 30+ (preferably 30-60) FPS in raid combat, without having spikes at around 15 FPS.

My processor is overall constantly around 3.1-3.15 GHz, and I’m not experiencing thermal throttling or anything close to it while playing WoW.

I was wondering what was bottlenecking my system in raid combat. This because I’d like to understand if an external GPU with any graphics card above a 1060 could benefit my raid performance.

The recommended requirements for BFA list a i7-4770 desktop processor which has 4 cores (just like mine) and a base speed of 3.4 Ghz (close to mine which sits around 3.15 Ghz).

This leads me to thinking that my 960m might the issue in my system, even though I’m well aware that WoW is much more CPU based than it is GPU based.

Feel free to correct anything I said, and let me know if anyone of you thinks an eGPU might benefit my system (without worrying about the price tag and latency problems, which wouldn’t be that rough considering I’m playing on an external monitor).

Last, but not least, I’m well aware that laptops aren’t recommended for gaming and that my laptop in particular wouldn’t be the recommended one for gaming either, but my lifestyle requires me to have a similar laptop, so please abstain from commenting anything like “buy a desktop” or “buy a gaming laptop”.