Questions about memory for boxing

[Ryn]

Hi all,

(Sorry in advance if my english is not perfect, I'll do my best)

First I'm new here, I plan to try multibox seriously and I read lot of things about it on this site and all around.
I tried it recently with some trial accounts and I was very enthusiast about it.

So I'm deciding to go through it and make a four or five boxing (on one machine).
Actually I'm looking on making a new PC which can multibox better than my old one and here is my questions :

First, I saw on different thread the amount of memory needed to multibox is important. I think I'll take 6 or 8Gb but if I good understood it's only possible on a 64bits system, so a Vista64 must be my OS, right ?

Second, I saw some people use 2 graphics card on SLI, does it really important and do I must thinking about that or not ? And if so, is that these 8Gb memory are compatible with 2 graphics cards ?

Thanks for your help and sharing your experience

[Muddy]

Thats correct it has to be a 64 bit system for more than 3.5 (or 4 gig not sure), As long as you get an motherboard that supports 8gb and sli, it should have no problem

[Ryn]

Some people told me that 8Gb and dual graphic cards with SLI don't work together, is that true ?

For multiboxing do I need to make better attention on the amount of memory or on the number of GPU, or both ?

[warbringer]

If you're gonna 5-box I recommend a bare minimum of 4Gb. I tried doing 5-boxing on 2 monitors with 2Gb and capital city's where a slideshow instead of smooth movement.
With 4Gb it's massively better, 8gb would be even better ofcourse. Also, to my knowledge there's no problem with using 8Gb and a SLI/Crossfire setup.

If you're going for 4Gb you can get away with a 32-Bit OS (you'll miss out on 896Mb leaving you with 3200Mb exactly). If you're going for 8Gb then you'd shoot yourself in the foot if you didn't use a 64-bit OS.

[Drizzit]

anything more then about 3.5g will only be seen by a 64 bit os (xp 64 and vista 64).

I would not get 2 or more graphic cards. WOW is not comparable with crossfire (ATI) and SLI. I heard many people say that speed went down when they put in the second graphic card. It is better to get 1 really good graphic cards.

[Ryn]

Thanks for all your answers.

So I'll certainly take 8GB and a GeForce 9800GTX with 512MB. I think that that will be correct for make a 4 or 5 multibox ?

[Sloefke]

euhm,
isn't it so that if you use a 64bit OS you can see 8 bit, agreed to that. Instead of being limited to 3.2gig when you use a 32bit OS


But isn't WOW a 32bit game?
So the 8gb doesn't matter?

If not, then I know what my next upgrade is :D

[Ryn]

euhm,
isn't it so that if you use a 64bit OS you can see 8 bit, agreed to that. Instead of being limited to 3.2gig when you use a 32bit OS


But isn't WOW a 32bit game?
So the 8gb doesn't matter?

If not, then I know what my next upgrade is :DThat's an important question, an answer would be greatly appreciated

[Bovidae]

64bit, Vista, 8gb ram and WoW: Don't bother, World of Warcraft is a 32 bit application and runs on a 32 bit emulator in Vist64 called Windows on Windows (Yes WoW-on-WoW) and is still limited to the same restrictions you are accustomed to. That said, DDR2 is cheap, other games are 64bit compatible, hopefully Warcraft will be one day, but don't expect much (if any) performance increases due to using more than 4gb ram.

[Ryn]

Bad news, but logic.

I hope so, one day ...


Thanks for your answers

[Bovidae]

No problem, this question is so popular, I saved my answer and just paste it where needed.

[Nitro]

Unless your running a ton of background stuff on your pc you will see no performance difference between 64bit and 8gb vs 32bit and 4gb with 5 wow clients.

[Prepared]

Unless your running a ton of background stuff on your pc you will see no performance difference between 64bit and 8gb vs 32bit and 4gb with 5 wow clients.

Memory is cheap right now. If you can go with 8gb, I would recommend you do. It's better to be safe than sorry and have to add or replace memory later. I have 8gb of ram and using 7 accounts on my 64bit system. If you're going to run 5 wow clients, I would still recommend an 8gb 64bit system because you never know how much their going to add in the Wrath of Lich King expansion when it becomes live.

[Awbee]

However, each instance of wow is able to access the amount of memory provided to the os. Even with wow being a 32bit app, the os allows it to use the amount of memory it needs. The more memory availabe to the os, the more it can allocate to the various applications. So Wow only uses what it needs, and with 5 instances of wow you would have access to a larger pool of memory and allow non-wow applications to that memory.

In my system with 5 wow clients running I am not using more than 3 gig of memory from my pool of 8 gig, thus allowing me to have other software(video capturing, browsers, itunes, etc) and the os to have access to the remaining. The less memory swapping the better overall performance.

[blast3r]

From what I understand Warcraft doesn't support SLI. I was running two 8600 GTS in SLI mode and my performance was very bad. I took them out of SLI mode and just used one to drive each of my monitors and noticed it actually ran better. Some people say only use one video card for better performance but I haven't tried it yet. Makes me cry to think I wasted money on an extra card.

[aboron]

The main problem i had when using SLI on my old setup was that you could not use dual monitors while in SLI mode.