Advice on a new rig

[Sp_i_ke]

Hey guys,

I've been multiboxing WoW (5 toons) for about two years now. I just startet setting up my first ISBoxer pro setup, still a work in progress but getting there.
With the recent WoW sales in December I got my self 5 extra accounts to 10-box, but my rig just isn't up for it. I've set all 10 instances to the lowest graphical settings, and as long as I walk around outside of the cities I get frame rates on my main of about 15 to a max of 20. But if I dare to enter the city my fps go down the drain to completely unplayable. I decided to OC my processor (i7 2600k) to 4500 MHz which makes to whole thing halfway playable but far from satisfactory. Also with Warlords of Dreanor, and it's UI and Char updates on the way I'm really in need of something new.

First a look at my current setup:

Asus P8Z68 Deluxe
Intel Core i7 2600K @ 3.40 GHz - be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 2
Corsair Vengeance PC3 16 GB DDR3 1600MHz
Asus AMD 6970 CCU
Corsair PSU AX850
All tugged nicely in my Silverstone Raven RV03 Case

This rig will go to my wife, she recently started five-boxing.

My Logitech G13 and G19 as well as my Madcatz MMO 7 will be joining up with the new toy.

The new rig should be capable of playing 10-15 sessions of WoW (planning on doing some 15 boxing with my wife 5 accounts as well). As soon as I get a better Internet connection streaming should be possible as well.
Atm I have 4 monitors attached to my rig (see picture below). A 30 inch center flanked by 2 20 inch in Portrait and a 3rd 20 inch on top of my center screen (all Dells). May want to ad two more monitors in the near future. So will need enough monitor outputs.
I see some multiboxers still playing with/having 2 or more computers to box with, is there still a use for this?

Reading the forum and watching some of MiRai's very informative videos I've already learned that nVidia is the way to go, since SLI also supports Windowed mode. One or better two 780 ti sound like a good basis to start with (red there will be a 6 Gb version available shortly, would it be useful to get those instead of the standard 3 Gb?).
That about where to knowledge ends. I red a lot about the X79 and Z87 chipsets but have not been able to find any conclusive info on which is the best to go with.
Here and there I red some little pieces about RAM-disks, sounds interesting.

Fund wise lets start with a budget of 2.000 to 2.500 Euro. Budget can be flexed if needed.

I'm planning to purchase in about 1-2 months. Having hopefully the last big exam of my life on the first of march, when I pass this will be my reward

Thanx in advance for all your advice,

sP`!´Ke

[JohnGabriel]

Nice, organized, current setup. I think you will have to go dual video cards if you want to continue using 4 monitors, since the 780 has 2xDVI and 1xHDMI out, but then you could go six monitors like many of the cool looking setups you find here.

Do you play with the keyboard/mouse sitting that far back, or just for the pic?

[RSM72]

WoW is very cpu-intensive and you can expect no more then 15% of an performance increase (ipc, instructions per clock) moving from your overclocked sandy bridge to a current generation haswell (1). More if you go six-core from the additional cores. The increase in performance will make your 10 clients feel playable but imho 15 clients is out of sight for a single box.

EDIT:
(1) and you wont be able to overclock a haswell that far so with your sandy bridge at 4.5 Ghz a haswell wont run at much higher clock speeds.

[heyaz]

15 boxing can get tricky on a single CPU box, depending on how you want your clients setup - resolution, background FPS requirement (reliable melee IWT needs 25fps+ background sustained, in my experience). I'm convinced at this point, without running your clients on what I call botter-mode (heavy dx9 config settings making the game look l ike minecraft) you just need dual xeons to make it "easy", otherwise you need to find a balance.

Now, My rig is just flawless with 10x:

3930k 6-core (between 4.2-4.6Ghz I've tried) // 2x Vertex 4 SSD Raid 0 // 64GB RAM // GTX 680 Classified 4GB

Somewhere around 12+ I noticed huge differences, and at 15x (and 16th client running bank alt, whatever) I really had to make compromises and do tweaking.

As mentioned above, WoW is extremely CPU intensive. One may think, with a better video card, one can run more clients at better settings - not usually the case. The more graphics settings you enable and the higher they are, the more CPU calculations WoW "must" do (they say), and some cause an exponential increase. As I recall in some technical posts, many graphics settings cause frames to need to be rendered (always with CPU involvement) many times over.

- Addons begin to get tricky as well as they engage the CPU quite a bit before a frame can be rendered. Things that parse the combat log and other real-time events can get especially bad (I had my main grinded to a halt recently due to a month old Skada log that hadn't been reset). Load/zone times out of an SSD or even RAM for that client were 10-30 seconds compared to the other clients not running it.

- Number of cores seem to be a big factor, maybe more so than clock rate. Once I exceeded logical cores (went over 12 clients) is when things got rough.

Now about tweaking:

- There is a lot of misinformation about RAM Drives and access speed, and block/file caching software (e.g. FancyCache, etc.). Most modern operating systems including Windows perform block level caching of recently used files automatically which I found differs very little over time (although I want to test more) than using a full RAM-disk or supplementary block/file level caching program, some of which appear to be complete snake oil (disabling Windows' os-level caching, then enabling its own to show their benchmarks).

- File access times, read/write speed, etc. is further misinterpreted by things like CrystalDiskMark (or whatever) that show you the speed of your disks - they disable the os-level caching entirely during this. Yes, their purpose is to show you how fast the disk actually is on its own, but it's synthetic - that SSD Raid 0 getting 1GB/sec compared to your mechanical drive at 200MB/sec, compared to your RAM drive at 9GB/sec - in the real world, you'll often see near RAM drive speeds in all cases (try moving/copying/reading a very large file twice and watch the difference on subsequent attempts once OS-level RAM caching kicks in.)... On the other hand, yes, SSD's are going to be better unless you've managed to get Windows to cache and hold all of WoW in RAM on its own prior to you using it. If you have the RAM you can put all of WoW into it and guarantee it's loaded out of there, but I suspect (although haven't fully tested) it may compete with the CPU's demands on RAM.

- There is a ton of misinformation about Windows tweaking out there. Say what you will, Linux/OSX/BSDish/whatever fanboys, but the Windows kernels especially around 7, 8, and 8.1 are very mature and exceedingly efficient, out of necessity (the amount of crap you're going to run on top of it, especially third party software MS doesn't control). Many tweaks hurt performance, do nothing (but disable useful features), or makes things unstable. Be that as it may, it is absolutely worth tweaking Windows at the os-level, but I'd start with Googling "bad windows tweaks" first, which led me to several articles explaining in depth what the tweaks (supposedly) do, why some are bad, useless, or outdated, and fortunately - information on what actually does work.

As far as better video cards, I don't know how they would help with pushing more clients than you have CPU to handle. My game looks decent (but doesn't have shadows or any shiny effects) and the GTX 680 maxes out at about 75% util... I can certainly get it to use 100% by increasing graphics settings only to have it crush my CPU.

I have a lot more notes over the past year, but that's the current state of 15 boxing as far as my setup. I'd afraid WoD may require me to use server-grade hardware to get multiple CPUs if I want to continue 15 boxing, or even 10.

[Sp_i_ke]

@JohnGabriel:
Thanks :-)
I play like that, my desk is curved in so I can sit very close to it and have my arms rest on the desk while playing. Very comfortable ;-)
Was already thinking of adding two extra monitors to complete my setup, but upgrading my PC has priority over extra monitors.


@RSM72:
15% is all they were able to squeeze out in two year of technological advancement? Disappointing. At least there is a 6 core option now which will give me some kind of performance increase I expect.
Think I'd be better of waiting for Broadwell?

sP`!´Ke

[Sp_i_ke]

@Heyaz:

Firstly thanks for your very long and insightful reply.

Currently while ten boxing I have both tanks and both healers stacked on my center monitor at a resolution of 2560x1600 with two dxnothing windows on my side monitors so I can always see all four of them. The remaining six Dps chars are stacked on my top monitor at a resolution of 1680x900 with a small third dxnothing window below them so I can see what they're all doing, see screen-shot below. Like I said, all at the lowest setting and running them in DX9. Main char will do 15-20 fps depending on it's surrounding, the rest run a 10 fps.

So you're saying ten boxing will be possible with new hardware. 15, especially with WoD on the way, will be a no go on a single system.

I thought, after seeing MiRai's video where he walks his train through Stormwind with 60 chars on his new system, that 15 on a single machine should not be that much of a problem.

A second option might be to take my wife's old system, tweak that a little and use it as a second system. She currently has an Intel Core i5-2500K on a GigaByte GA-Z68AP-D3 mobo with 8 GB of ram and my old ATI Radeon HD 4870. What would be the best, not to costly upgrade, to get this system ready to play 5 chars?
Third option might be waiting for Broadwell to be released?

I will take an good look at all the addons I'm currently using, disabling, on a per toon basis, everything they don't really need.

Windows tweaking, running 8.1, haven't done any tweaking on yet. Will look into it.

So forget about a RAM-drive, just use two SSDs.

sP`!´Ke

[Sp_i_ke]

Forgot the screen shot ;-)

sP`!´Ke

[MiRai]

15% is all they were able to squeeze out in two year of technological advancement? Disappointing. At least there is a 6 core option now which will give me some kind of performance increase I expect.

When the competition doesn't offer any... competition, then what can you expect? AMD has been nowhere near Intel in terms of raw performance where it matters (for most people) for years now.

Think I'd be better of waiting for Broadwell?

If you're waiting for Broadwell with > 4 cores, you're probably going to be waiting until late 2015. The next 6/8-core CPUs are scheduled to hit later this year, but they'll be Haswell-E.

So you're saying ten boxing will be possible with new hardware. 15, especially with WoD on the way, will be a no go on a single system.

I thought, after seeing MiRai's video where he walks his train through Stormwind with 60 chars on his new system, that 15 on a single machine should not be that much of a problem.

The biggest difference is that I ran those clients at 1280x720 and you run your clients at 2560x1600. Not to mention that my 59 slave clients were running at a whopping 5 FPS. -_- It was only a test for fun and I would have needed much more available CPU to have gotten anymore FPS or resolution out of those game clients.

1280x720x60 = 55,296,000 pixels
2560x1600x15 = 61,440,000 pixels
1920x1080x15 = 31,104,000 pixels (for comparison)

With such a large resolution your hardware needs to work almost twice as hard (theoretically estimated) as someone who plays at 1080 -- Assuming both of you have identical video settings, framerate, etc.

A second option might be to take my wife's old system, tweak that a little and use it as a second system. She currently has an Intel Core i5-2500K on a GigaByte GA-Z68AP-D3 mobo with 8 GB of ram and my old ATI Radeon HD 4870. What would be the best, not to costly upgrade, to get this system ready to play 5 chars?

5 clients on a 2500K/4870 @ 2560x1600? I think that might be pushing it depending on the situation, but I could be wrong. It might be worth a shot, but I'd test it out before making the commitment and assuming it's going to perform well.

[rfarris]

...5 clients on a 2500K/4870 @ 2560x1600? I think that might be pushing it...

I'm running 5 clients on a 4930k @ 2560x1600 plus a second monitor at 1920x1200 using a EVGA 780 Ti Classified and I get stuttering when moving the camera around. It's bad enough that I reduced the resolution on the main monitor to 1920x1200, which makes the whole rig run solidly at 60fps on the master and 30fps on the slaves. So I'd agree, 5 clients at 2560x1600 on *any* current hardware (WoW) would be a problem.

(My best guess is that the 3GB vram is the bottleneck. If the 6GB 780 ti comes out it may change everything.)

[MiRai]

I also forgot to add that, since the 6xx series, nVidia GPUs (that are worth multiboxing on) can handle 4 displays.