World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Hardware Guide

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Written by BuckGB on December 14th, 2008

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Video Cards

Modern GPUs won't have any problems running Wrath of the Lich King. We tested 20 cards from the past and present to help you decide how much is enough.

CPU

Newer CPUs improve performance for Wrath of the Lich King, but you can probably survive Northrend without a processor upgrade. We tested the game using our Core 2, Phenom, Athlon 64, and Pentium 4 processors.

Memory

We tested the game with 1GB, 2GB, and 3GB of RAM. Our minimum spec test machine with only 512MB of RAM ran World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King smoothly after we lowered the graphics settings, but we recommend going up to at least 1GB.

Systems

The required system specifications for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King are amazingly low: Pentium 4 1.3GHz CPU, a GeForce 6200 class GPU, and 512MB of RAM with Windows XP. We didn't even have hardware that old left in our offices. The closest we could get was a Pentium 4 1.6GHz CPU, a GeForce 6800, and Windows XP with 512MB of RAM. Surprisingly, the game ran well on the minimum spec system after we dropped the resolution and quality settings, but walking around Dalaran was still difficult, with frame rates regularly dipping into the single digits. Blizzard's recommended system specs are an ATI Radeon X1600 or GeForce 7600 GT GPU, paired with a Pentium D or Athlon X2-class CPU. We built our recommended system with an Athlon FX-60 and a GeForce 7600 GT. After seeing how well the minimum spec system held up, it's no real surprise that the game ran just fine on the recommended specification system. Our Intel QX9770 high-end system could probably run this game with a hammer put through three of its four CPU cores.

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