Maximizing performance

[vikemosabe]

I have a laptop that I use for multiboxing and playing in general.
It is a this Gateway (http://www.gateway.com/systems/product/529668240.php).
Except mine has 1920x1200 resolution and Windows 7.
It basically has WIn 7, 4 GB RAM, 1GB 9800m GTS, 320 GB HDD 7200 RPM, and 2.3 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo.

I can hardly run 5 instances of WoW.

I can do moderately well with 4, but want to do 5.
I run 2 mb of addons on each slave and about 5 mb on master.
I have set all graphics to lowest possible and set resolution of each to 800x600.

I get about 10-12 fps on slaves and 20-30 on master.
I wouldn't expect it to be laggy at 20-30 but it's unplayable.

I'm always losing my followers cuz it lags out and they drop too far behind.

My ping is another factor.
It usually sits at 400~.
I don't think it's the issue because everything runs fine when I have 4 going and both my sisters each play one at a time.
But when I am doing 5 by myself it's just bad, so I don't think the ping is the issue.

Is there tips or tricks anyone can point me to that might help me eek out just enough more performance to pull off running 5?
Or am I simply crap out of luck?

[spannah]

With only 2 cores on your CPU you are likely crap out of luck.

[Smoooth]

I agree, that processor is probably your choke point. Maybe you have or can get a cheap desktop/laptop to run 2 or 3 of your accounts on.

[neopickaze]

Yeah it's gotta be your CPU, I have a Radeon 3870 and Q6600 at 2.8ghz and I can run 5 on the same settings as you with main at 60 fps and slaves at 15fps back no problem.

[vikemosabe]

Well, that's what I was afraid of hearing.
That's also what I expected to hear and figured was the problem.
Thanks for the responses

[Owltoid]

I agree that you're probably out of luck, but one thing you can do is limit your slaves background FPS. Maybe try as low as 3. Possibly set the affinity of three slaves to one proccessor, leaving one for your main and one slave.

You'll never be able to go near Dalaran, but you may be able to do 5-man instances in Northrend.

[vikemosabe]

Thanks, I'll give it a shot
what's out to limit fps like that?

[Owltoid]

Use the command "/console maxfpsbk 3" or something like that (google it in case I got the syntax wrong).

[MilaShizu]

Hi well i havbe the same lap that you do BUT i only want to run 2 account, Heres my problem: i dl mubox (was searching for octopus but alla the links were screwd) and try it but my keybord stuck and i wasnt able to configure it. Im a googleholic so i search the web for a nice tutorial i find a nice one and it work BUT my three wow opened in the exact same place and i coulnt move them so i was wondering if someone pls explain me how to set up the screen and the keys cuz i suck with that.....I tried serching in here but 4 of 5 times i tried to find anything here i couldnt see any posts.... so finally after 1 day and a few hours i can post in here for help

PD :my main consern is to configure mubox to start dualboxing and if mubox sux plz recomend a free one for now (im planning on getting the $20 buck one but im short in money now)

Thanks in advice

[vikemosabe]

Alright.
Thanks again

[HPAVC]

I would run resource monitor and see where you have your exact (as close as that will get at least) problems. Make sure that you have the symlinking working on your wow setup and the processor affinity worked out.

I would also try disabling sound entirely on the system, device level not just muting and see if that works. There are race conditions with software heavy drivers and each wow is going to make a new thread on a different processor if it can and all that noise.

[vikemosabe]

Ok, thanks a bunch for all these responses.
I have a question about the symilinking.
I simply have a copy of wow that I run specifically for multi boxing.
Would symlinking give me a performance improvement in that regard?
Or would that only be if I cared about separate settings for each client?

Finally, about the sound you suggest I turn it off at the device level?
What exactly do you mean by this and how does one go about doing so in windows 7?
What I take it to mean is go into device manager and disable the sound devices.
Is that what you mean by it?

Also, as a follow-up to the maxfpsbk post:
You have to set the maxfps as well as bk for it to work, I found out.
And the command to do it is:
/console set maxfpsbk 3
You had it right except for the set in there.

[Mubox]

I have a laptop that I use for multiboxing and playing in general.
It is a this Gateway (http://www.gateway.com/systems/product/529668240.php).
Except mine has 1920x1200 resolution and Windows 7.
It basically has WIn 7, 4 GB RAM, 1GB 9800m GTS, 320 GB HDD 7200 RPM, and 2.3 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo.


This is very similar to my rig, I have an 8700m 512, 2ghz core2, (alienware m9750)

I found that, yes, by default it borders "unplayable" especially in content-heavy areas (so far ZF, STV, Dal).

My workaround was to open the NV Control Panel and edit the 3d graphics performance settings.

I disable AA, Aniso, force pre-render frames to 3, conformant texture to Clamp, and allows multi-core rendering.

The critical change, i found, was the texture performance. It defaults to "quality", I set this to "High performance".

I also found that, under W7, doing the game-specific settings didn't seem to properly apply to the game (probably the way I launch wow), so I had to set my graphics settings as the default settings and then make sure my wow profile inherited all settings from the global/default settings.

After doing this I can 5-box on my --laptop--, primary gets 30-60 fps depending on the zone. Where I would normally lag out like sh*t I get 25-45 variable, background clients always seem to do about 50% the FPS of the fore client.

Be sure to nerf the NV settings in addition to the wow settings and see how far it gets you, yoru system should be capable of handling 5 clients at 1024x768, 32bpp 1x multisample, all effects set to Lowest. It won't be the prettiest thing, but it should be running milky-smooth most of the time.

[Mubox]

Ok, thanks a bunch for all these responses.
I have a question about the symilinking.
I simply have a copy of wow that I run specifically for multi boxing.
Would symlinking give me a performance improvement in that regard?
Or would that only be if I cared about separate settings for each client?

Finally, about the sound you suggest I turn it off at the device level?
What exactly do you mean by this and how does one go about doing so in windows 7?
What I take it to mean is go into device manager and disable the sound devices.
Is that what you mean by it?

Also, as a follow-up to the maxfpsbk post:
You have to set the maxfps as well as bk for it to work, I found out.
And the command to do it is:
/console set maxfpsbk 3
You had it right except for the set in there.

SymLinking gains are negligible, you would get more benefit out of a "good" raid+1 controller and high-rpm drives, or just go with a dedicated solid-state drive. The primary benefit in symlinking is isolation of game files (cache, logs, etc) so that you don't have wow contending for the same files on disk, or in the case of some sloppy add-ons, overwriting global savedvars between clients. On a personal note, I like the "remember login" feature so I only need to punch in a password when I launch 5 clients at once. Without symlinking or manually creating copies, I would have to visit each client to select my account before continuing with login.

It would be nice to see someone do a controlled test and post their tests and results. No such thing exists that I can find.

Under Vista and W7, disable sound within WoW should provide a small boost. Muting the device should have the equivalent effect as removing the device in terms of processing, the filter shouldn't process any audio when muted. Also, if you have a "Stereo Mix" device, disable it. Under Vista the device is disabled by default, in W7 it's not present. however, if you installed RealTek drives, it shoudl be present (though, again, disabled by default).

As with SymLinking, it would be nice to see someone do a controlled test and post their test steps and results.

[Mubox]

Hi well i havbe the same lap that you do BUT i only want to run 2 account, Heres my problem: i dl mubox (was searching for octopus but alla the links were screwd) and try it but my keybord stuck and i wasnt able to configure it. Im a googleholic so i search the web for a nice tutorial i find a nice one and it work BUT my three wow opened in the exact same place and i coulnt move them so i was wondering if someone pls explain me how to set up the screen and the keys cuz i suck with that.....I tried serching in here but 4 of 5 times i tried to find anything here i couldnt see any posts.... so finally after 1 day and a few hours i can post in here for help

PD :my main consern is to configure mubox to start dualboxing and if mubox sux plz recomend a free one for now (im planning on getting the $20 buck one but im short in money now)

Thanks in advice

:)

Mubox was designed to function as most people would "expect" out-of-the-box. Unfortunately there are a few "gotchas" that tend to trip people up.

By default, Input Capture and Multicast is enabled. Also by default, certain keys (such as WSAD, ESC and WinKey) are blocked from being Multicasted to slave clients.

Many people assume their keyboard is broken at first, because they can't type anything. What is happening is Mubox is capturing all your input. You have three options, in order of simplicity:

1) Click on the SysTray Icon and De-Check "Enable Input Capture", this should free up your keyboard (and mouse, though Mouse is not such an issue anymore these days since Mubox correctly re-posts to non-client areas. It didn't used to.)

2) Press NUM LOCK, this Brings up the Server UI (or Client Switcher, as some people call it) and also disables input capture.

3) Press SCROLL LOCK. This disables input capture, but does not Display the Server UI.

Also, related to input capture, when you active a wow window input capture is automatically re-enabled. This is a feature, not a bug, for those of us that disable input capture via num lock, alt-tab to our favorite website, then alt-tab back to wow to continue playing.

As for the "windows are stuck and unable to move them", there was a known issue with 1.3.0.52 that, if you selected "remember window position" the windows would be non-movable on the first-tun (subsequent runs wouldn't have any problems), as of 1.3.0.56 I am unable to repro this issue on my machine. If this happens to anyone, a work-around is to minimize your wow window, or resize one of the edges, this forces the "remember window position" feature to "break out" of the default position for the window. When this happens, if I recall correctly, the client window appears in the top-left of the screen instead of the center (default position) of the screen.

Lastly, the "Mouse Clone" feature currently only works for overlapped windows. A future version will change this behavior, but since nobody has complained (and since the original requestors asked for it to function this way) no effort has been made to perform "mouse-casting" to multiple clients at different screen locations.

If you still have problems with Mubox, PM me or e-mail me directl, I'm the Author and would be happy to work with you ti fix whatever issue you're having. If it's happening to you, it's likely to happen to others, and most people don't mention their problems to get them fixed (unfortunately.)

Thanks.

[Ticklebur]

I have a laptop that I use for multiboxing and playing in general.
It is a this Gateway (http://www.gateway.com/systems/product/529668240.php).
Except mine has 1920x1200 resolution and Windows 7.
It basically has WIn 7, 4 GB RAM, 1GB 9800m GTS, 320 GB HDD 7200 RPM, and 2.3 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo.

I can hardly run 5 instances of WoW.

I can do moderately well with 4, but want to do 5.
I run 2 mb of addons on each slave and about 5 mb on master.
I have set all graphics to lowest possible and set resolution of each to 800x600.

I get about 10-12 fps on slaves and 20-30 on master.
I wouldn't expect it to be laggy at 20-30 but it's unplayable.

I'm always losing my followers cuz it lags out and they drop too far behind.

My ping is another factor.
It usually sits at 400~.
I don't think it's the issue because everything runs fine when I have 4 going and both my sisters each play one at a time.
But when I am doing 5 by myself it's just bad, so I don't think the ping is the issue.

Is there tips or tricks anyone can point me to that might help me eek out just enough more performance to pull off running 5?
Or am I simply crap out of luck?

This is weird...

My pc can run WoW x3 without lag and this is my system:

2.0 GHz intel p4 (single core)
512MB ram (rdram O.o)
512mb vidcard (ati radeon HD 2400 Pro, i think)
40GB HDD + 300GB HDD (last for games)
1024x768 resolution :)
Windows XP SP2

important to say: it's not modified.


So im a little confused here:

how come i can run WoW 3 times,
when your pc is way better,
but can't run it 5 times?


EDIT:
if anyone wants, i can post more detailed system info

[Mubox]

This is weird...

My pc can run WoW x3 without lag and this is my system:

2.0 GHz intel p4 (single core)
512MB ram (rdram O.o)
512mb vidcard (ati radeon HD 2400 Pro, i think)
40GB HDD + 300GB HDD (last for games)
1024x768 resolution :)
Windows XP SP2

important to say: it's not modified.


So im a little confused here:

how come i can run WoW 3 times,
when your pc is way better,
but can't run it 5 times?


EDIT:
if anyone wants, i can post more detailed system info

If I run 3 clients I get 60fps no problem using default gfx settings, with 5 clients I get 30fps avg with lowest graphics settings. While I'd like to say that WoW scales, it doesn't. running 2x the number of clients doesn't result in 50% of the perf per-client, it results in far worse. At some point a system hits its own limit in terms of CPU, GPU and Memory.

The first bottle-neck is the CPU, CPU-use does in-fact scale. The CPU use of 1 client can be multiplied evenly to determine your max supportable clients (without overheating, you can obviously push beyond the calculated limit at the expense of heat and FPS).

The second bottle-neck is GPU, GPU-use does not scale. I don't blame WoW for this, it's likely driver and or hardware specific. In my case, I had to turn texture filtering down to the lowest setting, so, in my case, I assume the bottle neck is the GPU bus-clock and/or pipelines for texture processing. A particular make of a graphics card usually only has so many pipelines for processing, and can only move data along those pipelines so fast. I don't know the spec of your gfx card, but it would be interesting to know what your FPS are with 5 clients on your machine. Like I said, 3x clients runs like butter on my rig (and probably most rigs which were 'decent' circa 2005/2006) but tack on another two instances and you may find that, while your CPU isn't pegged, WoW may be IO bound against the graphics card, first the bus, then the available pipelines.

Is there anyone who is DX/GPU savvy enough to detail how perf can be monitored for ATI and NV graphics cards? For example, is there any way to determine if/when you are IO bound on the bus of your gfx card, or constrained by the available GPU, etc?

As a side note, my P4 2ghz, 2GB ram and ATI X800 512MB could only 'cleanly' run 1 instance of WoW, the constraint was CPU. Running once instance of WoW eats about 90% cpu. Running additional instances reduced performance for each instance, the most I ran was 4 instances and performance at that point became unbearable. I ultimately bought a dual-core laptop with an NV 8700m, primarily for the CPU boost. Now I run 5 instances at 90-100% CPU, should do well until Cataclysm, at which point I suspect many of us will be upgrading graphics cards and/or RAM to keep up.

[Fizzler]

Mubox it is always good to see another developer on the forums. Although I do not use MySpace anymore :P

This is a very interesting discussion on hardware limitations.

[Ticklebur]

If I run 3 clients I get 60fps no problem using default gfx settings, with 5 clients I get 30fps avg with lowest graphics settings. While I'd like to say that WoW scales, it doesn't. running 2x the number of clients doesn't result in 50% of the perf per-client, it results in far worse. At some point a system hits its own limit in terms of CPU, GPU and Memory.

The first bottle-neck is the CPU, CPU-use does in-fact scale. The CPU use of 1 client can be multiplied evenly to determine your max supportable clients (without overheating, you can obviously push beyond the calculated limit at the expense of heat and FPS).

The second bottle-neck is GPU, GPU-use does not scale. I don't blame WoW for this, it's likely driver and or hardware specific. In my case, I had to turn texture filtering down to the lowest setting, so, in my case, I assume the bottle neck is the GPU bus-clock and/or pipelines for texture processing. A particular make of a graphics card usually only has so many pipelines for processing, and can only move data along those pipelines so fast. I don't know the spec of your gfx card, but it would be interesting to know what your FPS are with 5 clients on your machine. Like I said, 3x clients runs like butter on my rig (and probably most rigs which were 'decent' circa 2005/2006) but tack on another two instances and you may find that, while your CPU isn't pegged, WoW may be IO bound against the graphics card, first the bus, then the available pipelines.

Is there anyone who is DX/GPU savvy enough to detail how perf can be monitored for ATI and NV graphics cards? For example, is there any way to determine if/when you are IO bound on the bus of your gfx card, or constrained by the available GPU, etc?

As a side note, my P4 2ghz, 2GB ram and ATI X800 512MB could only 'cleanly' run 1 instance of WoW, the constraint was CPU. Running once instance of WoW eats about 90% cpu. Running additional instances reduced performance for each instance, the most I ran was 4 instances and performance at that point became unbearable. I ultimately bought a dual-core laptop with an NV 8700m, primarily for the CPU boost. Now I run 5 instances at 90-100% CPU, should do well until Cataclysm, at which point I suspect many of us will be upgrading graphics cards and/or RAM to keep up.

So, what your saying is:
If i upgrade my CPU (be it a new CPU, or new pc) i can run more?

Btw, does it matter if i seriously tune my windows so that it's a gamers edition?
Cuz i tried making my own windows version, and i cut the RAM-usage back to about 30MB.

I don't know a lot about registry tuning, but maybe that will increase performance even more.
I hope so, cuz i don't have the money for a new computer.

[zanthor]

The processor may be an issue, but you'll find that 4 boxing with 4gb is fine, 5 boxing with 4gb can create exactly the issue you are describing - particularly in crowded areas.

I was able to get away with 5 boxing a single system into TBC but anywhere crowded like Org or Shattrah would play hell on it. Once Lich King released it's not feasible to even 5 box remote areas on 4gb of ram... especially if you are on a 32 bit OS.

[Mubox]

So, what your saying is:
If i upgrade my CPU (be it a new CPU, or new pc) i can run more?

Btw, does it matter if i seriously tune my windows so that it's a gamers edition?
Cuz i tried making my own windows version, and i cut the RAM-usage back to about 30MB.

I don't know a lot about registry tuning, but maybe that will increase performance even more.
I hope so, cuz i don't have the money for a new computer.

It's true that WoW is a CPU-intensive game (e.g. uses more CPU than GPU), so usually upgrading a CPU can have a more positive impact than upgrading anything else (GPU, RAM).

However, WoW is also RAM-intensive, since WoW doesn't immediately flush unnecessary data out of memory as you change zones (since it's cheaper to swap the data back into memory than to re-load it from a a compressed MPQ + in-memory re-init.)

To know if a CPU Upgrade would benefit you, simply crack open Task Manager (taskmgr.exe, or CTRL+SHIFT+ESC Hotkey) and switch to the Performance Tab. It should show CPU Utilization. If CPU Use appears at 100% you are "CPU-bound", that is, performance in WoW is negatively impacted due to a lack of CPU. If CPU Use doesn't ever hit 100% then you are not CPU-bound.

On my machine, I can run 4 instances at an average of 90-95% CPU, depending on what is going on. I get 30-40 fps. With 5 clients I become CPU-bound, CPU is constantly at 100% and my fans go into overdrive. I've actually had my box shutdown due to heat 3 times over the last 6 months.

Even if you are CPU bound, it may still take a heavy CPU upgrade to get any real benefit. Such as my case. If 4 clients are at 90% CPU I can extrapolate that each instance is using roughly 23% CPU, thus, I would need an upgrade that reduced the CPU cost of running wow by roughly 5% per instance, or put another way, I would need a CPU upgrade that improved my CPU performance by (5%*5)=25% to provide my 5th instance with the extra CPU it needed to not be CPU-bound. Unfortunately, there is no CPU swap I can perform to become unbound from the CPU in my machine. So, I'm stuck waiting until I can upgrade to a significantly faster system (Probably a quad-core i7, which would probably increase the number of instances I can run significantly.)

I "local-box" 5 instances, and in AV's my FPS can dive down to 6fps. I blame this on a combination of CPU, BUS Clock (MB and Gfx) and GPU performance. With 30+ geared toons surrounding me I simply lack the power overall to handle the load. My point? Even if you can increase CPU, you may find you are still bound to bus clock rates (you can only move data around so fast) and available GPU performance (I have a "lowly" 8700m, 512MB.)

So, it would help to know what you have in terms of hardware, and what your upgrade options are. This is why I was curious if there was any tool out there that would indicate being IO-bound or GPU-bound, because a CPU upgrade may not always solve the problem (it may only be part of the solution.)

My current rig is a single Core2 Duo 2.0Ghz Laptop with a 512MB 8700m and 4GB of Ram, running on Windows7 X64. For the most part, I get decent-enough framerates running 5 instances of WoW to not claw my eyes out. FPS is usually above 20-25fps.

On the subject of Memory usage, I use a multibox app that lets me "trim" memory per-instance of WoW, I trim at 612MB. This trim occurs every 30-60 seconds or so, which allows WoW to "grow" momentarily when it really needs to. This trim ensures that each instance of WoW only ever uses 612MB of physical memory. 612 * 5 = 3060MB, or 2.9GB. This is nearly all my physical memory (as out of 4GB, 1GB is reserved by the host hardware for shadowing video, audio and other hardware-writible portions of memory.) Thus, runnign 5 instances I've consumed almost all my physical memory. I've tried trimming wow down to 256MB of memory, but I wind up seeing "gray texture" glitches in-game. 512 seemed sufficient, but I simply pdid the math and ensured that each instance of WoW got an equal share of ALL my physical RAM.

With memory trimming, I can ensure no one instance of WoW overtakes all of my physical. Without this, I lack the memory to run WoW and experience occasional swap-hell when zoning, running through Orgrimmar, etc. If left unchecked, during my casual play WoW will eat as much as 800MB of memory. On average, with everything tuned down, WoW consumes 400MB of physical and 200MB swap. IMO per instance of WoW you will want 512MB of memory, and also assuming that the total memory of all AddOns is under 32MB, it's possible for a full AddOn suite to each more than 100MB of RAM easy.)

Lastly. Heat management.

Modern CPUs will degrade their own performance internally as they reach a critical tempurature, I believe this is around 77 degrees celcius (I could be wrong.) Once a critical tempurature is hit the Cores will clock at 0, halting the system until the heat dissipates. If heat does not dissipate, a modern system will reboot. Some systems may opt to reboot instead of clocking down to 0. I haven't researched this behavior since the P4 began "stepping" its clock rate due to overheating.

What this means, though, is that poor heat dissipation will negatively impact CPU performance. For example, I smoke, and I ash right next to my laptop. Call it what you will. The problem I had was severe overheating. My fans would run full-blast non-stop and my framerates would decline to <20FPS. Why? Because the ash from my smoking was building up on all of the cooling components (fan, heat-sink fins, etc.)

I went out, bought a can of air (Eckard's Can-of-Air or Duster, 3-5$ depending) and sprayed everything clean. The result? My framerates have improved from <20fps to >30fps, and my fans, well, I don't hear them at all ;) Moral? Check your cooling components, you'd be surprised what a can of air can do, or at least how excessive heat can ultimately degrade performance.

Hope that helps.

[Mubox]

The processor may be an issue, but you'll find that 4 boxing with 4gb is fine, 5 boxing with 4gb can create exactly the issue you are describing - particularly in crowded areas.

I was able to get away with 5 boxing a single system into TBC but anywhere crowded like Org or Shattrah would play hell on it. Once Lich King released it's not feasible to even 5 box remote areas on 4gb of ram... especially if you are on a 32 bit OS.

I haven't yet hit Northrend with my team, I'm just now breaking L55. However, on my setup I get decent enough framerates in Badlands (I'm hearthed to shatt for the portals).

Though, I use a memory-limiting feature.

I do suffer horribly when I 4-box AV. To compensate I shut off all AddOns, perform an "End Process Tree" on explorer, etc. Ultimately I find I'm CPU-bound. With 4GB of memory, 3GB are available.

With WoW "tuned-down" (lowest effects, 1024x768 windowed) I'm not swapping unnecessarily. The tools I use display the physical memory commit for each instance I'm running, on average they report at less-than 400MB physical. If I pull up perf-counters for page activity, once loaded into a zone, I don't really swap at all. Most of the Disk IO I suffer is related to texture loads (filemon, sysinternals.)

5-boxing with 4GB is doable, but I agree it gets dangerously close to entering swap-hell. Before adding a memory-limiter and trimming back all of my AddOns I would occasionally enter swap-hell and it would last for 20 seconds, which is simply unacceptable. Memory limiting at least distributes the swap-out cost over-time, ensuring that the only data in memory is data that WoW has been needing for normal operation. When I first began multiboxing I ran two instances, and each one ate 1.2GB of RAM, I learned over time that WoW with medium or high effects and/or a "bad" collection of AddOns can result in horrible memory utilization.

[wowphreak]

If yeh drop the resolution you play at it will reduce the lag considerably.
After that kill shadows, reduce yer view distance, those are the big ones.

On all the other wows take the graphics affects bar, the big one, and drag it all the way to the left.

The problem yer running into is not enough memory the higher the res yeh play at the more memory yeh need.
Alll those affect require a considerable amount of cpu cycles. WoW does most of the graphics on the cpu.

[Mubox]

If yeh drop the resolution you play at it will reduce the lag considerably.
After that kill shadows, reduce yer view distance, those are the big ones.

On all the other wows take the graphics affects bar, the big one, and drag it all the way to the left.

The problem yer running into is not enough memory the higher the res yeh play at the more memory yeh need.
Alll those affect require a considerable amount of cpu cycles. WoW does most of the graphics on the cpu.

Just an update, I recently purchased a new laptop (Sager NP9280, i7-975, 6GB, NV 280M 1GB, WoW is on a Intel SSD) and I can now run all 5 instances locally, windowed, maximized. I get 60fps in the foreground, 30 background, no hiccups. I set all settings to max for one client (my primary driving toon) and set the rest to lowest. On my "secondary driving toon" I set the display distance to full.

The primary FPS killers on this hardware?

1) Shadows
2) Specular Lighting
3) View Distance

I knock shadows down, ensure that Specular lighting is disabled on all but one client, and knock the view distance down to half on all but one client. I get excellent FPS.

On my old Alienware (core2 2ghz, 4gb ram, NV 8900m), to achieve 30fps+ in the foreground: Windowed mode, 1024x768, all effects set to lowest, desktop BPP set to 16 bits. Going 'maximized' with just one client would tank FPS, increasing effects would also tank FPS. CPU for 5 clients was around 90-95%, on the i7 cpu is less than 15%. Same multibox configuration, and higher settings.

Thus, if you're CPU bound an i7 (desktop, not mobile) appears to be WAY more than you would need, whereas a T7200 core2 is sub-par for 5 toons. Likewise, the gfx performance of the 280m surpasses that of the NV 8900m with reckless abandon.

The only downside? My new rig cost me around 4200$ shipped. Most people don't have that kind of dough on hand for a laptop, but I would imagine a similarly configured Desktop would cost significantly less. If I had to 'guess', I can probably run 10+ clients in terms of available CPU/GPU on the Sager/i7, and 5 was pushing the CPU limit on the Alienware/Core2.

[boxblizzard]

i would recommend in your graphics card advanced option choose "performance" option for overall graphics. makes a shed load of difference.

[DrChaos]

If i spent 4200.00, i would have certainly got the extra 800.00 and ordered the WoW laptop.......