Question - What to upgrade

[Biz]

I have an E6400, 2gb RAM and a 7600gt. I currently run all of my WoW instances from the same folder. I set my maxFPS to 35 and I can run 4 characters just fine but if I add a 5th, running through a city will bring fps down to like .5 . I can either up my ram to 4gb, buy a 9600gt or buy another hard drive and run from separate folders.

Problem is I run on XP so if I upgrade to 4gb ram, only 3 will be recognized. Will this kill dual-channel? As in does XP not even recognize the 4th stick, or will it only use half of it?

I currently do not have enough free space to paste in 4 extra WoW folders. However, I haven't been having problems with instance/zepp load times so I'm not convinced that another HD will make a big difference.

Clearly, the 9600 would be a big upgrade.

[Eteocles]

Someone in another thread proved it was like 10x as bad if you ran multiple folders anyways, disk queue length was like 180 vs 10 for same folder; don't worry about wasting space on that, 1 per HD though might be nice if you can afford/want multiple HDs

Video Card, I'd suggest an nvidia 7900 minimum, 8800 preferably; 8600 SUCKS and is BAD and it should feel bad. I've not heard good things about the 9x00+ series either, and 8800 is more than enough for any game today let alone WoW

A 3rd gb of RAM wouldn't hurt, and I'm personally not fond of Vista, so that'd be your other upgrade route ;p As long as the first two are in the right colored matching slots their dual-channel SHOULD still work, while the third is just plain ddr2/3 ram.

[Biz]

Thanks for the reply,

The 9600gt is fairly new and the reviews I've seen show it performing nearly as well as the 8800, but for $100 less.
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nvidia-9600gt-review.ars

I'm tempted to just buy it all, but I also need another monitor and the total cost is above my budget (Budget: Amount of money I can spend without my gf, with whom I share living expenses, completely flipping her $%!t).

[Eteocles]

This is where newegg and buying Used comes in handy ;) I got a nice 19" monitor on the cheap from a local computer business/lan center going out of business/moving, and newegg's got some pretty nice deals usually

[Notes]

If you buy the 9600, please post your findings as I'm abou to buy this card as well .... You go first though :whistling: ^^

and yeah Vista 64 rocks ;)

[Dezeral]

I have an E6400, 2gb RAM and a 7600gt. I currently run all of my WoW instances from the same folder. I set my maxFPS to 35 and I can run 4 characters just fine but if I add a 5th, running through a city will bring fps down to like .5 . I can either up my ram to 4gb, buy a 9600gt or buy another hard drive and run from separate folders.

Problem is I run on XP so if I upgrade to 4gb ram, only 3 will be recognized. Will this kill dual-channel? As in does XP not even recognize the 4th stick, or will it only use half of it?

I currently do not have enough free space to paste in 4 extra WoW folders. However, I haven't been having problems with instance/zepp load times so I'm not convinced that another HD will make a big difference.

Clearly, the 9600 would be a big upgrade.

I suspect your RAM is the major limiting factor here. Each instance of WoW will use 300mb or more of RAM. Also, XP's limit of 4gb of addressable memory space will not affect the performance of dual-channel memory. Your computer knows it has 4gb of memory in dual-channel configuration and will access it at the specified rate of the memory. XP will only be able to use 4gb minus the amount of address space needed for overhead. XP will usually reports 3.XX gb of memory available when you have 4gb of memory in the computer (Vista will report 2.XX as it has more address space overhead).

You might also be CPU starved to an extent. A quick way to check it to open up the task manager and select the performance tab. You can see the load on each CPU here. If your CPU's are pegged at 100% utilization, then it might be an indicator that your CPU is doing all that it can do to supply your videocard with the data it needs to render each window. This method of checking CPU utilization is not foolproof though. Some applications will show 100% CPU, but if you open another application, then the new application will get the CPU cycles it needs. You typically see this on really old software (i.e. DOS era applications)

[Ughmahedhurtz]

WoW is not a very CPU or GFX intensive game. RAM should be your first upgrade. More RAM = less paging to disk = less lag, especially during zeppelin/shatt/org/IF loading and zoning.

[Eteocles]

Pardon the semi-hijacking but it's possibly related, question:

If I were to buy 2gb of dual-channel DDR2 ram and put it in along with the currently-existing/used 2gb dual-channel DDR2 ram, and I run XP Pro 32bit, even though it REPORTS 3.xx, will I still get the running BENEFIT of 4gb? Would it be a more-noticeable increase than simply adding a 3rd gb? Will I have to go through any bullshit besides simply sticking the ram in if I do go the 4gb route? I'm lazy and don't wanna deal with more than i have to ;p lol

Edit: By the "go through bullshit" bit I mean like you had to do something on win98 to make it recognize or even boot with more than however many gb of RAM it was, vague memory from pre-XP upgrade I have lol

[Ughmahedhurtz]

If I were to buy 2gb of dual-channel DDR2 ram and put it in along with the currently-existing/used 2gb dual-channel DDR2 ram, and I run XP Pro 32bit, even though it REPORTS 3.xx, will I still get the running BENEFIT of 4gb?Short version: no. Programs cannot allocate anything outside of what Windows shows as "available." So you'd start paging to disk about time you hit 3.2GB of used RAM, just like if you only had 3.2GB of physical RAM installed.
Would it be a more-noticeable increase than simply adding a 3rd gb? Not really. You'd get some slight benefit but you'd probably not even notice during normal usage. Unless you started running 5 accounts. ;)
Will I have to go through any bullshit besides simply sticking the ram in if I do go the 4gb route? Nope. Not unless you want to upgrade to XP/Vista 64bit. Note that you should always put your RAM in matching banks for DDR2/DDR3.
Example: say you have two Kingston HyperX (hereafter "H") and two crucial ballistix (hereafter "B"). When you look on your mobo, you'll have 4 slots labeleb 0 through 3 (or 1 through 4). You'll wanna put 'em in like so:

BANK0 -- BANK1 -- BANK2 -- BANK3
---H-------B--------H-------B

[Biz]

I think I'm going to pick up the memory, and perhaps the 9600 if I'm feeling frisky. I'll report on how well it goes.

There seem to be conflicting posts regarding how adding just one more gig (3 sticks total) will affect dual-channel, or am I crazy.

[Eteocles]

Okay thanks Don ;p

Bottom line on 3rd gig of ram: 3.2 recognized(despite 4 being installed hardware-wise) is more or less equal to simply 3gb; though if you 5box, it might make a noticeable difference. The 2 dual-channel sticks, if placed in the correct slots, will still work as dual-channel, then adding a third will simply make that single, third stick non-dual

I have 2gb ddr2 dualchannel setup as the H's in your diagram so yeah I'm good then ;p I might grab a third stick just for the performance increase soonish, though at this rate I may just sit down one weekend and do a complete overhaul of my case and specs; I've got a perfectly good, probably-faster(than my current IDE HD) SATA drive sittin around brand new unused, my case is getting crowded(and probably a bit dusty) and not to mention is an ugly 7+ year old beige case I've simply upgraded parts "into" over the years, I think it's about time to get a fancy tower case with more room for my drives and without the poor processor being stuck under the power supply lol in addition to the extra RAM and HD

[BobGnarly]

Get more RAM.

I had a pretty similar situation, 5 boxing on one comp (6600 core2 duo, 2G, 8800gtx), getting 60fps(main, 15fps capped on slaves) everywhere, but would slideshow in areas with lots of people. Did two things, moved everything to one folder (helped lots more than I thought), and bought 4G of RAM.

Even though I'm using XP and only getting 3G of it, it fixed the problem. Pretty sure you are gated by the same thing given your description.

[Biz]

Last night I picked up 2g of cheap ddr2 and a 9600gt. 7600gt --> 9600gt is a seriously huge upgrade. It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. As for the ram, loading times are significantly shorter and my page file usage is way down. With the two combined I can run 5 characters smoothly. One strange issue is that while running 1+ characters through a city, even though my fps is at or above my refresh rate, it gets choppy. Not screen tear but fraction of a second stutters, which never happened previously. It is just as bad if I enable vsync. Any ideas?

[Eteocles]

Probably just simple load lag, there's ALOT to load in shatt, especially near the pvp battlemasters(the hundreds of lazy welfare-epic assholes who queue and stand there lagging everyone to hell instead of moving away) and those in the center returning from raids via mage portal or taking the major city portals let alone the dozens of useless npcs standing at the fp and other areas doing nothing all day lol

I'm just guessing, though

[Biz]

yeah it's just strange that I stick in more memory and a new video card and the issue gets much worse. I have a feeling that my motherboard auto-decreased memory performance to compensate for adding 2 more sticks. I didn't have time to check it this morning but I will when I get home from work.

[Dezeral]

yeah it's just strange that I stick in more memory and a new video card and the issue gets much worse. I have a feeling that my motherboard auto-decreased memory performance to compensate for adding 2 more sticks. I didn't have time to check it this morning but I will when I get home from work.

That is a very real possibility. Some motheboards will operate using 1t command rate with only two memory slots populated, but drop to a 2t command rate with 4 memory slots populated. Check your mobo manual or the manufacturer's website to see what they have to say about memory configurations.

[Biz]

My motherboard basically set my memory to ultra-slow. Upped the voltage, put the settings back where they should be, and everything is much more smooth. But now 5 windows is making my vid card artifact so looks like today I'll be pulling it apart to re-grease.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Last night I picked up 2g of cheap ddr2 and a 9600gt. 7600gt --> 9600gt is a seriously huge upgrade. It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. As for the ram, loading times are significantly shorter and my page file usage is way down. With the two combined I can run 5 characters smoothly. One strange issue is that while running 1+ characters through a city, even though my fps is at or above my refresh rate, it gets choppy. Not screen tear but fraction of a second stutters, which never happened previously. It is just as bad if I enable vsync. Any ideas?That is 90% read-from-disk stutters. Adjusting your RAM settings seems to have helped you, but you might also be seeing it more often because it was previously masked by poor framerates. :P I had that problem when I upgraded recently to a Q6600+4GB+8800GT. When you get used to 85fps consistently, any hitch is obvious.

[Biz]

Last night I picked up 2g of cheap ddr2 and a 9600gt. 7600gt --> 9600gt is a seriously huge upgrade. It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up. As for the ram, loading times are significantly shorter and my page file usage is way down. With the two combined I can run 5 characters smoothly. One strange issue is that while running 1+ characters through a city, even though my fps is at or above my refresh rate, it gets choppy. Not screen tear but fraction of a second stutters, which never happened previously. It is just as bad if I enable vsync. Any ideas?That is 90% read-from-disk stutters. Adjusting your RAM settings seems to have helped you, but you might also be seeing it more often because it was previously masked by poor framerates. :P I had that problem when I upgraded recently to a Q6600+4GB+8800GT. When you get used to 85fps consistently, any hitch is obvious.That makes a lot of sense, thanks!I'm still getting stutters, just not as frequently and then really only in highly-populated areas. I can't see myself purchasing 4 new HDs any time soon though.