Hey there
I could use some feedback on your pc builds. I currently upgraded to a lovely 24" Dell G2422HS (1080p - 165hz) and it s been a dream. I have no intention of going 2k.
My build consists of an r5 2600, 16gb 3200 of ram, b450 MSI tomahawk, 650W Seasonic Platinum PSU and an rx 480.
The game (Classic SoD) runs on 165 frames pretty much all the time on the highest settings (10), but the issue is that my GPU gets stressed and goes up to 71 C with the fans sounding like a turbo engine, aka needs an upgrade.
So i need some feedback of people running the same resolution and fps. Should i aim for a 3060 or a 3070(used) , or what from the AMD side ? Noise is a major concern since i dont like using headphones, so a GPU that could handle that without much stress would be appreciated. Budget is 300-400€ , looking into the used market as well.
Just for reference, in Greece a new 4060 Gigabyte gaming OC costs 350-360, a Sapphire 7600 ~300€. Used, i think i could find a 3070 or a 6700xt at that price, but used is always a bit risky.
Thanks
I would just go for the 4060, thats plenty for WoW on 1080p, you should have no problem getting 165 frames in SoD, probably retail too.
You will have a minor bottleneck due to your CPU being a older gen, but nothing to worry about.
I recently upgraded to a 4070, and still run 1080p because i havent upgraded my monitor yet, and im easily in the 200-250fps range on WoW. 4060 will be plenty, if you plan to stay on 1080p.
Personally i wouldnt buy used, unless its from a trusted acquaintance. With strangers you never know how they used the card, or how worn down it is.
I just upgraded from an RX580 myself with a similar build.
I’d either go for a 6650XT if you can find one under 300€ (some XFX ones are selling for 250€ on italian amazon, but from a portuguese store) or a 7600. They’re roughly equivalent and great price to performance ratio.
Or, if you can stretch the budget a little bit, I’ve seen RX7700XTs barely over 400, even Sapphire Nitro+ models.
I’m not sure about the 165hz, since I play at 1440p 75hz, but I briefly tried the 6650XT on WoW and I don’t think I would need anything more than that. But I feel like if you get under 165fps with one card, like in raids or epic bgs, you’re getting under 165 with any other card.
I don’t want to dismiss nvidia completely, but they are overpriced, it’s not like they really pull ray tracing off comfortably in this price range, and unless you really need DLSS or the lower power consumption (650w shouldn’t be an issue either way), I feel like they’re not worth it.
The hardware is designed to do that. If it has to work more, it heats up, and then its fans speed up to deal with the heat. The problem is that some GPUs have loud fans, and unfortunately a new GPU will not necessarily solve that. I have a Gainward GeForce RTX 3070 and it’s also extremely noisy - so noisy that I’m also thinking of replacing it, actually. Maybe you could google some GPU benchmarks that include fan noise.
However, there are some things you can do:
Limit the game’s framerate, so that the GPU never has to work extremely hard.
In WoW Classic, you could set the max framerate to something like 120 and see if that helps.
In WoW Retail, you’ll probably have to set the max framerate based on what your GPU can render in a place like Valdrakken. E.g. if your GPU can do 90 there, you might want to set 80 as a limit. Unfortunately, that will affect older zones as well, which are much easier to render. WoW could really use a max-FPS-per-zone feature.
Tune your GPUs voltage and fan curve.
The best free tool for this is MSI Afterburner: https://www.msi.com/Landing/afterburner/graphics-cards.
It also includes a tool called Riva Tuner which can render metrics on an overlay, so that you can see GPU/GPU temps and fan speeds in-game, which helps a lot with tuning.
It’s a bit complicated and its UI is terrible, so watch some YouTube videos on how you can use it to under-voltage your GPU to make it run a bit cooler, and how to tune fan curves.
Some GPUs have non-linear fan curves which will make the fan speeds and the noise they make jump up a lot at certain temperature thresholds, which is really annoying. I use a linear fan curve from 40°C (20% fan speed) to 80°C (80% fan speed) and that seems to work alright for me. I don’t use more than 80% fan speed at the moment, because it gets way too loud after that.
