Quad Core Setups

[Gigatron]

Today I will be building a new machine, now that quad cores are down to $300. 2 gigs memory and a geforce 8800GTS.

Right now I am 3 boxing on a dual core amd x2, 2 gigs memory and an ati x800 pro. Frame rates are good, but can bog down at times when lots of action on the screen.

I will attempt to see how it runs with 5 to see how viable this could be.

Anyone on here using a quad core setup?

[Bradster]

Today I will be building a new machine, now that quad cores are down to $300. 2 gigs memory and a geforce 8800GTS.

Right now I am 3 boxing on a dual core amd x2, 2 gigs memory and an ati x800 pro. Frame rates are good, but can bog down at times when lots of action on the screen.

I will attempt to see how it runs with 5 to see how viable this could be.

Anyone on here using a quad core setup?

Nice system! I have core 2 system, well had. In a month I might get it back! how I'd love a quad core.

So its $300 for the mother board then? Is cooling an issue to watch for with so many CPU's in a single case? Just wondering.

[Gigatron]

Nice system! I have core 2 system, well had. In a month I might get it back! how I'd love a quad core.

So its $300 for the mother board then? Is cooling an issue to watch for with so many CPU's in a single case? Just wondering.

I don't think I'll need extra cooling, it's just one cpu with 4 cores. I'll be grabbing an Asus P5N32-E motherboard, it's about $150. I was debating whether or not to go SLI, but I don't think it will help much and may cause problems.

[Bradster]

Nice system! I have core 2 system, well had. In a month I might get it back! how I'd love a quad core.

So its $300 for the mother board then? Is cooling an issue to watch for with so many CPU's in a single case? Just wondering.

I don't think I'll need extra cooling, it's just one cpu with 4 cores. I'll be grabbing an Asus P5N32-E motherboard, it's about $150. I was debating whether or not to go SLI, but I don't think it will help much and may cause problems.

Oh ok, when I heard quad I was thinking 4 cpus hehe.

[Gigatron]

Oh ok, when I heard quad I was thinking 4 cpus hehe.

Imagine that! Quad, Quad cores ftw! :lol:

[Bena]

fyi.. wow doesn't support sli and will run slower with it :( I found this out when I picked up my second gf8800gtx.. so far I have to say the whole SLI is a disappointment. I've only tried cs:source, hlf2 and wow but none of them showed any significant performance increase.

The only good thing is that I can run 3 monitors; thought the performance goes down if the window is on non primary screen. With the price cuts I've been also looking at the quads.. thinking of getting the q6700. Thought I'm 5boxing on a dual core; 4 minimized windows and main maxed and my cpu doesn't go above 50 so I might wait with the purchase.

The one thing that gave my a boost was upping my memory to 4gigs. yeah winxp uses only 3 (2.75 reported anyway) but it smoothed out laggines when I was in IF/SW or any other populated area. Before things would start chugging a bit but now they're smooth.

[Gigatron]

fyi.. wow doesn't support sli and will run slower with it :( I found this out when I picked up my second gf8800gtx.. so far I have to say the whole SLI is a disappointment. I've only tried cs:source, hlf2 and wow but none of them showed any significant performance increase.

The only good thing is that I can run 3 monitors; thought the performance goes down if the window is on non primary screen. With the price cuts I've been also looking at the quads.. thinking of getting the q6700. Thought I'm 5boxing on a dual core; 4 minimized windows and main maxed and my cpu doesn't go above 50 so I might wait with the purchase.

The one thing that gave my a boost was upping my memory to 4gigs. yeah winxp uses only 3 (2.75 reported anyway) but it smoothed out laggines when I was in IF/SW or any other populated area. Before things would start chugging a bit but now they're smooth.

Ya, I decided against SLI, its seems like you only benefit if your running at insane resolutions with 16x aa. Plus lots of driver bugs, not worth the trouble. I may go for 4 gigs since memory is dirt cheap.

[Gigatron]

Alright, I got my new system up and running. Pretty amazing, I can 5 box no prob with this setup. It's very smooth and responsive with 5 characters, no system bogging down even when running around Org and I'm on one of the most populated servers as well, Zul'jin.

I was originally 3 boxing priest and 2 locks, now I am adding 2 mages to the mix. So I'll be 2 boxing the mages for awhile until they catch up to the rest. :lol:

[Xzin]

Are you running 5 on 1 computer?

[Gigatron]

Are you running 5 on 1 computer?

Yup, I know sounds crazy. I didn't think it would be possible or playable, but so far it looks like this may be viable. Last night I was running around org and fps was steady 60, all characters very responsive. I haven't done any pvp testing yet since my mages are still level 2. :lol: I'll let you guys know how that goes.

This of course is everything all on lowest video settings and only my main character window full screen and the rest minimized. But switching between the windows was instantaneous.

[Xzin]

Oh... minimized will work fine. I thought they were all visible.

Still.... quite playable but suboptimal, IMHO.

[Ubor]

Oh... minimized will work fine. I thought they were all visible.

Still.... quite playable but suboptimal, IMHO.

Xzin - no offence. You are the man mate. I have serious respect for you and the playing skill. I personally can't wait to get into this all. I've seen your (hardware) setups and they are sick. I want want want :P

Suboptimal maybe - but we aren't all as lucky as you with that hardware to hand. What this gives you is that "dip in the water" to see what its like. I didn't know if you could do this, but now I know you can I'll be doing it this week. If it goes well I hope to get the hardware to match. No idea if I'll get to the same level as Xzin, but if it even gets me 50% of the way it will be a laugh.


Me? Well I've played since release, been a raid leader, worked to much for a guild, and my love of the game sort of vanished. Now tho - this is really getting my mind to wander at work.

Dangerous man Mr Xzin is. Be warned :)

Thanks to all who have gone before us, but remember the accessibility for everyone. Thats really really key...

(but agree hardware >> software. For EULA - tho is it really legal that crap.. and for response times and usability. Plus hardware on the desk always looks great) :P

Edit: typos and end.

[Stabface]

I can run 4 WoW instances all visible with a fairly mid-tier machine: AMD x2 6000, ATI x1650 Pro, 4 GB of RAM. They are at 800x600 windowed with most graphic options turned down and sound off, but frame rate is smooth and the machine isn't even really bogged down, runs around 30-50% CPU and maybe around 1.5G of RAM in use, a bit higher in cities.

[l0de]

I have a q6600 running 2gb of ram on an xp pro machine with an 8800gs

Runs 3 windowed instances fine at once, 5 minimized with no problem.

[Xzin]

Oh... minimized will work fine. I thought they were all visible.

Still.... quite playable but suboptimal, IMHO.

Xzin - no offence. You are the man mate. I have serious respect for you and the playing skill. I personally can't wait to get into this all. I've seen your (hardware) setups and they are sick. I want want want :P

Suboptimal maybe - but we aren't all as lucky as you with that hardware to hand. What this gives you is that "dip in the water" to see what its like. I didn't know if you could do this, but now I know you can I'll be doing it this week. If it goes well I hope to get the hardware to match. No idea if I'll get to the same level as Xzin, but if it even gets me 50% of the way it will be a laugh.


Me? Well I've played since release, been a raid leader, worked to much for a guild, and my love of the game sort of vanished. Now tho - this is really getting my mind to wander at work.

Dangerous man Mr Xzin is. Be warned :)

Thanks to all who have gone before us, but remember the accessibility for everyone. Thats really really key...

(but agree hardware >> software. For EULA - tho is it really legal that crap.. and for response times and usability. Plus hardware on the desk always looks great) :P

Edit: typos and end.

You make several good points. I think I should clarify a bit. 5 on 1 computer will eventually be the way to go. For all sorts of reasons it is not right now. It gets you going though and for many (most) this is not a hobby they want to spend $10k or more on. I totally respect that. The software approach will get you what you want. It's a Honda Accord vs a Lexus 430. You don't need the Lexus to get from point A to point B. But damn if its not so much more safe, comfortable and more flexible in the Lexus.

So by saying it was sub optimal... yes it is not the best solution out there in my opinion. But you can get 90% of what I have for 10% of the cost with software or minimizing screens, etc. Just don't expect to be a 2700 team in Arenas either though. Does that help clarify a bit? This hobby is not cheap but given the amount of entertainment you get from it - the costs are staggeringly low compared to movies, bars, etc. Even 5 boxing. Most of the time anyway.

Anyway, my goal was not to dig on people who cannot afford but to point out there are some things you give up by not doing things a certain way. That's all.

[Bollwerk]

fyi.. wow doesn't support sli and will run slower with it :( I found this out when I picked up my second gf8800gtx.. so far I have to say the whole SLI is a disappointment. I've only tried cs:source, hlf2 and wow but none of them showed any significant performance increase.That's odd, since WoW and HL2 are listed as SLI supported games here:
http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_game.html
You may want to make sure you're not overriding the customized driver profiles with your own settings. I had a 7900GTX SLI setup for a while before moving to a single 8800GTX and I found most games supported SLI, although how much faster they were was widely varied.

[Drakkun]

Oh ok, when I heard quad I was thinking 4 cpus hehe.

Imagine that! Quad, Quad cores ftw! :lol:

At work I have dual quad cores. Its an amazing setup, I am thinking about purchasing one for home.

http://screencast.com/t/Yjrwahtaiz

[Olibri]

I've been 5-boxing on a Core 2 with a similar setup. 5-boxing isn't really playable. 4-boxing barely works. 3-boxing works pretty well. I was considering upgrading to a quad core, but instead picked up 2 Pentium 4s to act as slaves. I'm still trying to get it setup.

[Nitro]

Xzin - no offence. You are the man mate. I have serious respect for you and the playing skill. I personally can't wait to get into this all. I've seen your (hardware) setups and they are sick.

Where did you see Xzin's hardware setups? I though he said he didnt want to show anyone.


P.S. Building out my Quad Core setup as we speak (Q6700). Setting up Dual Boot Vista Ultimate / XP Pro atm. I'm tired but i cant sleep till it's done :p

[Jezebel]

multiboxing on a single PC seems great at first, because its your first experience running multiple characters.. but you dont realise how sub-par it is until you actually start running dedicated boxes. ive been 10 boxing shadowbane since it was released (4+ years, i think?) and 5 boxing WoW for 8 months or so.. i thought i was doing fine until i finally decided to start doing it more seriously. consider the difference between 5 boxing on one pc (even a high end one) and 5 dedicated boxes.. the same difference between going from one toon to 5. the effectiveness of your group, your response time (and thus your survivability) goes up immensely.

1: the most ANNOYING thing.. whenever you hit high load areas (cities, heavy casting, new zone, PvP, lots of mobs, pretty much anything that requires you to pass a load barrier).. the windows that arent in focus start to lag behind and will eventually drop out of /follow. the higher the load and the faster youre moving (faster data has to load) the more it happens. very, very irritating when youre on horse. this has nothing to do with your hardware or your connection.. its a client issue caused by a combination of latency and not having CPU focus.

2: you dont realise how amazing being able to instantly view each character and their HP bars (group bars are nowhere near as reliable), whats hitting them, debuffs, buff times, different points of view, etc.. until you have a screen for each toon.

3: your system performance will rapidly degrade over a period of X hours (more clients = faster) because of memory/gfx memory leaks. eventually you wont be able to restart any clients (which you will need to do occasionally, since WoW errors a lot when you box on one machine) without a reboot because all of your graphics RAM is locked up from the software leak. FPS degrades hideously and it gets to the point where you lock up every time something needs to load. you may think having to reboot every 2 hours or so isnt a big deal, but you notice the performance difference quickly.

personal experience on my existing high end gaming rig, i can tell you first hand that the difference is absolutely huge. no matter how high end your rig is, WoW doesnt window well. and, at the end of the day.. why not buy more PC's? i just bought 4 PC's to use with my existing gaming system.. cost me under AU$650 per machine (around US$450, i think?).. thats including a 17" LCD.. combined cost equal or less than that of a serious high end machine ( that you will NEVER use to its full potential if all you play is WoW and MMORPG's).

and theyre hardly 'poor' systems..

E2160 (oc'd to 3.2GHZ)
2G 667 RAM (oc'd to 800)
8600GT (oc'd to 1400mhz)
P5B
CAC-T05 /w 430w PSU

really sweet machines for the prices..

[Xzin]

Xzin - no offence. You are the man mate. I have serious respect for you and the playing skill. I personally can't wait to get into this all. I've seen your (hardware) setups and they are sick.

Where did you see Xzin's hardware setups? I though he said he didnt want to show anyone.


He hasn't. I have shown about 8 people IRL and none are on these boards. One day I do plan on documenting it and releasing details - the documentation is already about 90% done. Still trying to decide how best to do so.

[Jezebel]

He hasn't. I have shown about 8 people IRL and none are on these boards. One day I do plan on documenting it and releasing details - the documentation is already about 90% done. Still trying to decide how best to do so.

one thing id like to know.. do you run the PXE setup you posted, or a central HDD? or do you have individual HDD's? i really like the idea of being able to wipe and simply cut and past a drive image over the network if anything screws up on a pc. plus only having to manage one set of updates, drivers, etc. but the PXE solution was a bit too expensive for me combined with the cost of buying the new systems.

[warwizard]

If i land the new job next week, by xmas i will be getting a new quad system.

I Love the idea of multi boxing, but my apartment is a tad small for a monitor/box setup... that and the wife would kill me!

[mmcookies]

dear god the wife aggro >_<

hope she doesn't enrage after 10 minutes!

[unit187]

ye if wife goes enrage she might land Hateful Strike on you o_O

[beyond-tec]

hope she doesn't enrage after 10 minutes!


I prefer "Tranquilizing Shot":


Attempts to remove 1 Frenzy effect from an enemy creature.



:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

[unit187]

I have just been told that win vista home premium doesnt support duo core processors oO

which OS x64 should I install so it will work with my quad core processor? (I have to reinstall windows anyways)

[Wilbur]

I'm fairly sure it does support Dual Core processors, I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't seen as Windows NT supports them..

[unit187]

I'm fairly sure it does support Dual Core processors, I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't seen as Windows NT supports them..
I was searching through internet for difference of vista versions and I have found on a few sites that vist basic/home do not support 2 processors and vista bussines/enterprise (or smthing)/ultimate do. I wanted to pay 140$ for windows home but now I should get ultimate for 400$.. huh? hell no -_-

[Wilbur]

Link?

[unit187]

doh nevermind

I have found this site http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsVista/vista-which-version.html

and then found out then this table was translated and spread out through russian internet with wrong translation, it wasnt mentioned about phiscal processor

[defiant]

Just upgraded to a Q6600 3.5GHz OC with 4GB of RAM. Running two monitors (1920x1200 main and 1280x1024 secondary) in dualview on 8800 GTX, I dualbox WoW. About 50-60% load across all 4 cores running 2 WoW windows with everything turned on except AA. It's great how WoW scales to multi-core CPUs.

In addition to AHK+G15, I am also playing around with Voice Commander. Voice control works amazingly well. Thru voice control only, my boxed priest moves around, nukes, fades, dots, novas, shoots wand, plus doing all the healing. Compared to keyboard only control, I feel that the added voice control allows you to play both toons more actively. I can easily see 3 boxing with this setup, especially a caster as the 3rd toon. Still plenty of power left in the Q6600, although the single 8800 GTX is already stressed haha.

[Drakkun]

The correct statement for Vista and processors is:

Vista Home Versions: Unlimited cores in a single cpu
Vista Business and Ultimate: Unlimited cores in dual cpu's

[unit187]

The correct statement for Vista and processors is:

Vista Home Versions: Unlimited cores in a single cpu
Vista Business and Ultimate: Unlimited cores in dual cpu's
yep thats what I have found out reading original english "vista version difference" article. Damn our newb translators, cant even translate something without losing the main idea =/

[Ticks]

Oh ok, when I heard quad I was thinking 4 cpus hehe.

And you'd be absolutely correct. There are four processing units on a single chip. The only downside is that they all share the same memory bus, PCI bus, etc... However, just like the Dual Core, Quad Core performance is extremely close to a four processor system.

[Djarid]

Oh ok, when I heard quad I was thinking 4 cpus hehe.

And you'd be absolutely correct. There are four processing units on a single chip. The only downside is that they all share the same memory bus, PCI bus, etc... However, just like the Dual Core, Quad Core performance is extremely close to a four processor system.

multi processor (as in separate die) systems from Intel also share memory and PCI buses... as they all hang off the Front-Side bus which is the bottle neck on all Intel and some AMD systems... the only architecture not currently suffering from this limitation is the AMD Opteron.

[Wilbur]

HyperTransport 3.0 came out three days ago, with the release of the new Barcelona Quad Core Opterons. Surely now AMD will increase their 'strangehold' on the server Market.

[Djarid]

about time! ;)

I just changed jobs so am not involved in speccing servers anymore...


I used to be hard to convince managers that AMD was the way forward for VMWare... they kept seeing quad core in Intel and thinking it was better :roll:

[Wilbur]

Managers aren't paid to think, they are paid to "manage" Which a fool could do. Intel have been falling behind, through no real fault of their own, its just that Opterons are becoming more and more awesome, and as most server software is now Multi-Threaded, more cores = win.

[Djarid]

at the risk of derailing this topic completely... Intel are succumbing to the inevitable and have said they will be implementing a similar technology in their next but one processor architecture.