WoW Folder in Ram basic 64G System $1600 WOOT

[Sam DeathWalker]

As you know I have been pushing putting the wow folder in system ram for some time now (ramdisk).

Well seems that the dream will soon be reality.

Prices is down big time.

No SSD needed!



64G ram $600

http://www.provantage.com/corsair-cmp32gx3m4x1600c10~7CSMC0KC.htm

$339 MB

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1498753&SRCCODE=GOOGLEBASE&cm_mmc_o=VRqCjC7BBTkwCjCECjCE

CPU $600

http://www.provantage.com/intel-bx80619i73930k~7ITEP3K9.htm


Not sure if this is all actually available but we have prices and listed items. They say "special order" so supplies might be tight but 2-3 months from now we should be roxoring!


About $1600 for the "no texture lag wow in ram" system basics.

WooT!

[Oatboat]

What about rebooting!?

What about power failures!?!

What about what about what about!

I wonder how fast it would actually be.

[JackBurton]

Thats going to be a beast. So you need more than 32 gigs? how much does win7 + wow need to run like this. Got the link to the guide?

[jstanthr]

IMO i would go with one of the WS or Revolution Asus or Gigabyte boards, that is a good board, but i know that you would have better stability and performance out of the ws or revo boards. I can post benchmarks for all that i have tested so far if you guys would like since the NDA is now lifted.

[moosejaw]

That will be an excellent machine. Imagine a dual processor i7-39xxK instead of the single cpu board listed. You could run most of your team on one machine.

I am hoping this new hardware and hard drive pricing drop together in ~ 6 months. Would make for a crazy "Summer of Sam". :)

[Ughmahedhurtz]

What about rebooting!?

What about power failures!?!

What about what about what about!

I wonder how fast it would actually be.
If you run ISBoxer, I think you can point your character profile to any folder on the hard drive you want, which would save your data in case something catastrophic happened.

[Sam DeathWalker]

You might only need to put the read only folder "data" into ram. 27.7 gig on my computer. Now if you can figure out which is which for which zones or parts fo the world you are in you can work it that way also and maybe, just maybe get by with 32gigs. Well you might be able to do 32 gigs with just 5 or so instances and the data folder .... still that leaves no head room for expansion and $600 is not a lot to blow on ram compared to what we see people spending for top flight systems here.

That way if you do get a power failure you lose nothing.

Ya you have to read the full 27.7 gig into ram each time before you start wow but then all your accounts can use it.

Isnt the sabertooth supposed to be the most stable of all the boards with all these mil spec caps and what not?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Keep in mind an upcoming patch is supposed to do a bunch of data consolidation, which should dramatically reduce the overall size of the data files.

[daviddoran]

You could set up a batch file to copy the data folder to the ram disk at startup, so rebooting shouldn't be an issue.

[Sajuuk]

I already did this. I didn't really test it, since I don't feel like playing wow. But in other games the advantages over my SSD are slight, but noticeable. I don't have an optimal system in place to make loading ramdisk images (Bulk storage is a usb2 external).

Regarding loading the game into RAM each time you load it: Again, depends on the drives you're loading from. Moving 30GB isn't done instantly without an array of some sort, or thinking ahead with scripts to load images or copy/synch folders.

Testing could be done to test performance, but I feel I would be very limited by graphics, since I'm using Sandy Bridge integrated due to a strange performance issue. - If I use an addon card my sound "stutters" when I move my mouse, and the system is slower in general. Unfortunate, but for the games I play integrated actually works quite well.

Also, when I did load games into a ramdisk, Load screens were faster, yes, but I still had them. I don't believe games are being made in such a way that could really take advantage of the high data transfer rates of a ramdisk. There's also managing the games you load into ram. A hassle, really.

So, to state:
1: Performance is great, but for our planned application (loading games into ram on demand, and synching/backing up/reloading), we would need a speedy disc array to back it up, and at that point, performance gains are marginal. Other system components may hinder performance. No money or will to test.
2. The games aren't optimized for it. We load the majority of data in bulk in loading screens, for most games. We would need to load game resources frequently and transparently to take advantage of it. But still, load screens.

It's okay, but not the bee's knees. Also, if you watch on newegg you could get 16gb (2x8gb) kits for 100 dollars.

You could have similar performance, less cost, and more flexibility making an SSD array, two high grade ssds can be had for roughly the same amount of funds.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Where it starts to shine is when you multibox. If you have 5-10 clients all trying randomly read the same files, reading from RAMdisk is a lot faster than even the fastest seek-time drives (SSDs). Of course, if you don't optimize things right, you end up with enough pagefile writes that it kills any benefit you might gain.

You're absolutely right, though, in terms of diminishing returns. Good SSDs in RAID0 on a SATA6 controller are going to be close enough that all the other cruft will mask that last 10-20% you gained. :p

[Sajuuk]

I won't argue that it will probably scale very, very well as your clients increase. The question is: how much. I don't have the will power to make extra accounts, manage macros, or level up and test other than just going into a main city.

It would be interesting to see a graph of performance as clients increase, but I do feel other system components would limit your system before you would really be able to take advantage of RAM.

[Sam DeathWalker]

SSD has to put the data into system ram and then to the video card.

Ramdisk already has the data in system ram, I am confident that you can set it up so that you read from the Ramdisk directly to the video card, but again this is in its infancy and there will be some work to do.

Ya you are getting loading screens cause you are moving the data from ramdrive to system ram, there should be a way around this tough as the ramdrive is already in system ram. The designers of wow of course assumed that hard drive access would be way slower then system ram so they move the needed data from the hard drive to system ram, but our data is already in system ram.

If windows can use say 50G as the ram cache then you dont even need to set up a ram drive. Wow will load from HDD once then subsequently will find the data in the ram cache if it looks there first, which is most likely the desigenrs of wow did set up. Meaning that the first time you zone into a zone you will have a loading screen but if you leave and come back without turning off the computer or exiting wow the 2nd and mroe times you go into that zone you wont have a loading screen

No doubt there will be some set up time to get things optimal but once that is done things will rox.

I am very sure the 64G system will handle 10 wows without any problems and your bottleneck will be the video card. In fact it will be a wonder to find out how many wows this can handle.

Keep in mind MOST systems are bottlenecked by the Hard Drive or SSD. This eliminates that.

Plus a lot of the cost here is the CPU, clearly you will be reducing the possibility of the cpu being the bottle neck. And you can upgrade the cpu for another $500 lolzors ....

Duel CPU's have not be able to access the others ram in the past.

Clearly the limitation on this system will be the video card, and maybe the cpu if you go over 10 wows.


Ya we might just get by with 32G but considering if you can get 16G at $100 paying the extra monies for 64G dosnt seem that much more additional cost ($200).

[traedoril]

So I think I am missing something. I see alot of people running their 5 accounts accross multiple machines and paying quite a large sum of money for them. I use this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152266 and I can run all 5 copies on one machine ( a laptop at that) and they are all on max settings.

Am I missing something?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

So I think I am missing something. I see alot of people running their 5 accounts accross multiple machines and paying quite a large sum of money for them. I use this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152266 and I can run all 5 copies on one machine ( a laptop at that) and they are all on max settings.

Am I missing something?
Yes. Some of us like doing other things on our main PC while boxing. Watching DVDs, encoding in-game movies, etc. Having alts on another PC frees up a lot of the system. Obviously, some of our systems arguably have enough to do both but if you have the capability, desire and budget, why not? It's also nice to be able to mouse over to my 2nd PC to do things while I'm playing a full-screen single-player game on the main. <3 Input Director.

[Sajuuk]

SSD has to put the data into system ram and then to the video card.

Ramdisk already has the data in system ram, I am confident that you can set it up so that you read from the Ramdisk directly to the video card, but again this is in its infancy and there will be some work to do.

Ya you are getting loading screens cause you are moving the data from ramdrive to system ram, there should be a way around this tough as the ramdrive is already in system ram. The designers of wow of course assumed that hard drive access would be way slower then system ram so they move the needed data from the hard drive to system ram, but our data is already in system ram.

If windows can use say 50G as the ram cache then you dont even need to set up a ram drive. Wow will load from HDD once then subsequently will find the data in the ram cache if it looks there first, which is most likely the desigenrs of wow did set up. Meaning that the first time you zone into a zone you will have a loading screen but if you leave and come back without turning off the computer or exiting wow the 2nd and mroe times you go into that zone you wont have a loading screen

No doubt there will be some set up time to get things optimal but once that is done things will rox.

I am very sure the 64G system will handle 10 wows without any problems and your bottleneck will be the video card. In fact it will be a wonder to find out how many wows this can handle.

Keep in mind MOST systems are bottlenecked by the Hard Drive or SSD. This eliminates that.

Plus a lot of the cost here is the CPU, clearly you will be reducing the possibility of the cpu being the bottle neck. And you can upgrade the cpu for another $500 lolzors ....

Duel CPU's have not be able to access the others ram in the past.

Clearly the limitation on this system will be the video card, and maybe the cpu if you go over 10 wows.


Ya we might just get by with 32G but considering if you can get 16G at $100 paying the extra monies for 64G dosnt seem that much more additional cost ($200).

If my limited understanding is correct, it loads the World of Warcraft executable (wow.exe) into RAM, Then loads game resources as necessary.

So, I still think it's a coding issue (that would hinder the utmost awesome performance). One that can possibly be worked around? Sure.

[Sam DeathWalker]

http://www.raxco.com/user_data/white_papers/pc-io-acceleration.pdf


They had a substiantial improvement in 3d mark using a 4G "prefectcache" (eighty bucks), on a 24G machine

I would think that using this product with a 30 to 50G cache (assuming that you can set the perfectcache size as you wish) on a 64G machine would make it super fast.

The advantage of this kind of product is that you dont need to load anything into ram on your own. You don't have to do anything. FIrst time you zone will be slow, but the 2nd time you enter should be blazing fast.

[lans83]

Outside of back to back instant BG/Arena ques, how would this really benefit an average multiboxer running 5+ accounts on a single system? I mean, about how long are loadscreens into these areas really on your current systems to really make the $600+ investment for instant loading, but only if you almost never log out of WoW or shut down your PC? I'm all for faster gaming but even I can't warrant this kind of investment unless loadscreens with 5+ clients takes minutes instead of just seconds loading from an SSD.

[daviddoran]

spending $600 on ram doesn't sound too much to people who drop 1k on the 6 core extreme chips and 500 on high end graphics cards. It is excessive for most, but theres always that small niche that can afford the best, and they help drive the costs down for everyone :)

If I had a setup like that, I would have a batchfile set at startup to copy the wow folder back to the ram disk.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Thats not the problem, the "zone" load time, its the lag caused by getting textures from the hard drive (or SSD) everytime a new character moves into view, this is why you lag a lot in SW or Org, cause new people are coming into your field of view all the time, out in the "wild" there are few new textures to load so you don't lag there as much.