Run 5 clients 1 comp

[Rakadazan]

(You can check my current system in my sig panel)

what should i upgrade first to run 5 clients:
4GB RAM and OS Vista64?
4 new hard drives 1 for each client not including the original?
2 new vcards in the 8k series?

[Knytestorme]

More ram first as each client requires ~400Mb to run so with 2Gb you'll be hitting swapping fairly quickly. No need to really upgrade to vista 64, yes you'll only see 3.5Gb of ram max under xp but it is still workable, only need vista if you really want to upgrade it.

Video cards next. With your current ones you'll likely be having to run at close to low res and still be getting dodgy framerates. If you are only going to be running 2 screens I'd suggest dropping SLI for the time being and just grabbing a 9800GTX and see how that goes, can always get a second in the future if you really want it. If you want to run SLI (and I like it personally but still satand by getting one card first would be best for you) then get 2 9600GT's instead (or hell, if you have the budget go 2 9800GTX but if that were the case I'd say you'd be changing to quad core at the same time). The 2 9600GT's will likley cost the same price as a single 9800GTX, provide roughly the same experience in WoW and be almost as fast as the 9800GTX in most games that take advantage of the SLI. (For reference, my 7800GTX and 9600GT get the same framerate at the same settings in WoW and the 9600 is slightly faster and uses less power under load for FSX)

After those 2 you can worry about the hard-drives. The main benefit I can see from multiple hd's is that loading is slightly faster but if you go to Vista you can symbolically link 5 instances from one main install and only have your addons and data in one spot to be updated rather than 5 which would then negate the need for multiple drives as well.

[Rakadazan]

I just bought 4GB:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820146673

next will be the vcard im looking at 2 9600gt cards

[OzPhoenix]

Unless I'm mistaken, but doesn't SLI disable multiple monitors?

That being the case, what point would there be to a second video card with SLI?

Since XP doesn't handle multi-view properly(only horizontal/vertical span and clone), I'm wondering why then if you're using XP would you want a second card at all, unless you can span a desktop using two monitors connected to two different physical cards (which I likewise think XP can't do).

Am I missing something here?

[Kissell13]

After those 2 you can worry about the hard-drives. The main benefit I can see from multiple hd's is that loading is slightly faster but if you go to Vista you can symbolically link 5 instances from one main install and only have your addons and data in one spot to be updated rather than 5 which would then negate the need for multiple drives as well.

Maybe im an idiot but why is this necessary. I have 2 500gb Sata drives. OS is on one and I have 2 Wow copies.

WOW1 = Main
WOW2 = 4 Shamans

Everything loads in about 15-20 seconds and there is no noticable lag in game. What is the benefit of Mlinking them
Thanks, Im real pc literate but the mlink thing is new to me

-Kissell13

[Knytestorme]

@Oz - Yep, enabling SLI disables the second card but since disabling it is just a checkbox in the nvidia toolkit it's easy enough to disable when playing WoW (since it doesn't need SLI power) and then re-enable when you need more power for something like FSX or Crysis for example

@Kissell - The main advantage to symlinking is to share every folder but your WTF from one location so when patch time comes you only need to run the patcher once, when you update add-ons you only need to update them in one spot etc. Just comes back to the basics of ensuring document validity....share something from one spot means an update gets propogated everywhere, have multiple copies of something in multiple spots means an update needs to be done many times and some may be missed leading to conflicts.

If you are asking why having multiple drives for multiple accounts may have some effect, it's essentially to do with read/write speeds and pulling data off drives sequentially vs in parallel. It's faster to pull 5 items off 5 drives at the same time than 5 items off 1 drive 5 times in a row (eg say it takes 1 second to load the file, with 5 drives it takes 1 second to load the file 5 times at once while with 1 drive it would take 5 seconds to complete the job).

With WoW it's typically done to minimize loading times into game, into/out of instances and reduce harddrive thrashing for texture loading for places like Shat where you will get a sudden need to load many, many textures and models that you may not have needed to have in ram/chache before. Take for example your group of 5 in an instance...here the game only needs to store the meshes and textures for your characters, the npc's and map for the instance you are in. When you then port out of that instance to Shat the game needs to load in meshes and textures for all the races and classes that don't currently make up your group, plus meshes for weapons and mounts you don't have (say t6 weapons/items) etc so you suddenly have to load a massive amount of data to see things (this is why you often might load into Shat and see nothing around for 15 seconds or more).

If you only have one drive with multiple installs on it then each instance of WoW is trying to load all those textures and meshes at the same time and leads to them having to so sequentially. If you have multiple drives then the instances can load them all in parallel and benebit from the speed increase this allows (ignoring any pageswapping/trashing from memory issues). With a single install symlinked, you have them all sharing the same files and so once one loads them in the rest can use them right away since they are cached and available to all instances at once due to the symlink.

[Negative1]

More ram first as each client requires ~400Mb to run so with 2Gb you'll be hitting swapping fairly quickly. No need to really upgrade to vista 64, yes you'll only see 3.5Gb of ram max under xp but it is still workable, only need vista if you really want to upgrade it.

Currently I'm running 2gb and with 5 copies of wow open I am only using ~750MB. However my clones are at very low res 4x on one 23inch LCD and main on another 23 inch. Thus my main uses 450 or so MB's and the rest only about ~80-90 a piece. Also I run xp and unless your wanting really good performance from your clone windows you shouldn't need >3.5 Gb

Since XP doesn't handle multi-view properly(only horizontal/vertical span and clone), I'm wondering why then if you're using XP would you want a second card at all, unless you can span a desktop using two monitors connected to two different physical cards (which I likewise think XP can't do).

I'm no pro with XP or computers in general but I am running dual 9800GTX's on two 23 inch LCD's each connected to a separate card on XP. Which took no special configuration on my part maybe 15 minutes setup with NVidia's video manager.

[OzPhoenix]

More ram first as each client requires ~400Mb to run so with 2Gb you'll be hitting swapping fairly quickly. No need to really upgrade to vista 64, yes you'll only see 3.5Gb of ram max under xp but it is still workable, only need vista if you really want to upgrade it.

Currently I'm running 2gb and with 5 copies of wow open I am only using ~750MB. However my clones are at very low res 4x on one 23inch LCD and main on another 23 inch. Thus my main uses 450 or so MB's and the rest only about ~80-90 a piece. Also I run xp and unless your wanting really good performance from your clone windows you shouldn't need >3.5 Gb

Since XP doesn't handle multi-view properly(only horizontal/vertical span and clone), I'm wondering why then if you're using XP would you want a second card at all, unless you can span a desktop using two monitors connected to two different physical cards (which I likewise think XP can't do).

I'm no pro with XP or computers in general but I am running dual 9800GTX's on two 23 inch LCD's each connected to a separate card on XP. Which took no special configuration on my part maybe 15 minutes setup with NVidia's video manager.

Heya Negative,

I was referring specifically though to XP's problems in handling dual-view multi-monitor mode, that is, two independent desktops, as opposed to horizontal span, which is just one desktop stretched across the two monitors.

From my research dual-view cripples the performance seen on the second monitor. Since I don't think you can horizontally span the desktop across multiple physical graphics cards (correct me if I'm wrong here), and SLI (and presumably Crossfire also) disables multi-monitor mode, then your only option in XP (32 anyway) is to horizontally span a single desktop across two monitors on a single graphics card. That is, there's no benefit from SLI / Crossfire for a single-PC multiboxer and hence no benefit to be gained from a second graphics card.

If anyone can find fault in my reasoning I'd be very interested to hear about it, because I'm currently respeccing my main gaming rig, and given my reasoning above, I intend on only a single graphics card for it.

[Rakadazan]

I am running 5 clients at once on 1 screen in SLi mode and i believe it is what allows me to run so smoothly. If i was to run on just 1 card 5 clients there is no way a 7300gt could handle all of them. i only had 2gb last night but now i have 4gb and i cant tell much difference except when it loads all 5 clients at same time. I have all the clones at 5fps background maxfps and my main at 70fps foreground max and i am getting 50-60fps on the main.

i do wish i could run a second monitor off the spare vcard but can only do that in vista with dx10 i hear. i am happy with running on 1 screen but do wish a large format LCD existed that had 1600x1200 res on a 40" widescreen but that is still on the drawing boards.