16GB RAM?

[TeamGrizzly]

I 5-box on a single machine with 2 X 24" screen. Is there any performance benefit from upgrading to 16GB RAM? I currently have 8GB.

[Farleito]

The word "over-kill" comes to mind. However, it depends on how you use it.

Make 8GB of it a RAM drive and run the game from it.

Just simply adding another 8GB+ would probably not provide you with any WoW 5x performance benefits (aside from being able to have 50 more applications open while playing WoW, but then you run into a CPU starvation problem.)

[Sam DeathWalker]

Storeing the whole wow folder in system ram is the ultimate.

[warbringer]

Except for the fact that WoW + TBC + WotLK comes to about 11Gb or so.
I'm running with 12Gb of DDR3 RAM, coming from 4Gb of DDR2 RAM and I can run 5 accounts through Dalaran on 2x22Inch monitors.
I don't think 12->16 is worth it but 8->16Gb might. Depends on the specs of the rest of your system.

[Smoooth]

Memory cards over 2gb seem really expensive to me so I'm limited to 8gb total. Unless you have plenty of money to spare I don't think its worth it at the moment. Prices will probably drop though.

[Bovidae]

Just to give you a taste of HOW expensive this propositions (buying 4gb DIMMs) is:

http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configurator_new/partsinfo.asp?root=us&LinkBack=http://www.kingston.com&ktcpartno=KHX12800D3K3/12GX&id=8

[Catamer]

wow, with those RAM prices wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy a second PC. you wouldn't even need that great of a video card. ( 8800 or 9800 would be fine )
I tried 5 wows on a single PC and I thought it was a little lag-ish compare to having two PC running 2 & 3 copies of WoW each.
I never have lag with two PC.

if your PC is using more than 80% (or 90%) of it's physical RAM you might start seeing page file swaps increase adding to lag moments.
I have 8G myself and never get close with only 3 copies of wow running.
I seem to remember that at one time I had all of the video setting set to maximum and each copy of wow was using 1.4G, it started to lag out and crash.

[TeamGrizzly]

Just to give you a taste of HOW expensive this propositions (buying 4gb DIMMs) is:

http://www.ec.kingston.com/ecom/configurator_new/partsinfo.asp?root=us&LinkBack=http://www.kingston.com&ktcpartno=KHX12800D3K3/12GX&id=8




I am looking at something cheaper. The OCZ OCZ2VU80016GQ 16 GB (4 x 4 GB) DDR2 800MHz Vista Dual Channel Quad Kit, retailing at Amazon for $413.18. I am using a MSI P45 Platimium Mainboard so no DDR3.

Accordingly to the performance monitor on my G13 keyboard, the 5 X WoW instances only uses 47% of the current 8GB I have installed. Is there a way to increase memory usage and improve performance? Framerates drops below 20 in some areas like Dalaran yet the performance monitor says I am only using 40% to 60% of CPU. Is there something wrong? I am using a 4870x2 card.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Again I think we are seeing saturation

http://www.viperlair.com/index.php/reviews/msi-p45-platinum.html

Look at the diagram.

Data from drive is 2G/sec
Processor 10.6G/sec
Video 16G/sec
Ram 6.4G/sec X 2 for ddr2

Use of two video cards, reduces the video bandwidth 1/2.

I mean you have this 16G/sec video buss but nothing that feeds it that fast. Your ram is 12.8 and hard drive 2.0 ....

You just can't get the data to the video cards fast enough. More ram on the video cards I say. I would dump the two you have and get a single 1G card.

Of course you have low cpu usage as the 2g/sec is the bottleneck when you have to get textures to the video card.

Just look at your hard drive light when your framrate drops, if its blinking fast well there is yur problem.

Well here is the i7:

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=257&Itemid=69&limit=1&limitstart=2

The I7 goes at 3 X 8.5 on all 3 busses, cept the hard drive is still 2g/sec .....


You need to keep textures in system ram or add video ram, or both.

If system ram is not holding textures then its not doing any good ....