All my guns at once

Xzin said: Since WoW is mostly GPU limited (as long as you have enough ram and CPU power)...

Being fairly inexperienced in knowing what does what inside the case I would sort of like to know what is not required to run WoW. I know other games are a completely different story but I'm just talking about WoW.

For example: I've heard that WoW does not use SLI. Is that true? What if I'm recording with Fraps? Would SLI be used then? Would SLI be used when I'm processing the vids with AfterEffects or Vegas or even Windows MovieMaker?

At what point, if ever, would one reach overkill with a graphics card? Could WoW actually use 768meg of video memory?

I've heard that XP can only use 3Gig of RAM. True?

Should Fraps record to a separate drive from WoW?

Is it wrong to run WoW from a network drive?

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Originally Posted by Katharsis

I've heard that XP can only use 3Gig of RAM. True?

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true.

4 GB with WinXP = 3,3 GB Ram

to get better performance use two equal ram-simms on bank 1+2 and bank 3+4.


I've used

Bank 1: 1024 MB PC-800 DDR
Bank 2: 1024 MB PC-800 DDR

Bank 3: 512 MB PC-800 DDR
Bank 4: 512 MB PC-800 DDR

because my XP can't handle more :)

the 3.07 - 3.3 Gigs of ram issue is specific not just to XP, its with either Xp or Vista 32-Bit version, the 64-bit versions do not share that problem.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Katharsis

For example: I've heard that WoW does not use SLI. Is that true? What if I'm recording with Fraps? Would SLI be used then? Would SLI be used when I'm processing the vids with AfterEffects or Vegas or even Windows MovieMaker?

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Recording is done using your normal RAM and processor, AfterEffects and Vegas use the Processor and the RAM and only use the Graphics card to play it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Katharsis

At what point, if ever, would one reach overkill with a graphics card? Could WoW actually use 768meg of video memory?

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This depends on how many clients you will be running on the PC. At present, its generally accepted that SLI doesn't work with Multiboxing, additionally, using the Primary slot of two graphics cards doesn't give you maximum frame rate in Dual-View mode. If, however you horizontally stretch your desktop across the two monitors there is a significant boost in FPS. When buying a Graphics card it's good to consider the future, whats on the horizon, what games are coming out, do these games use DirectX 10 and if so is the graphics card I'm buying using DirectX 10 features. In short, WoW *could* use 768 megs of Graphics and would give you a fairly decent framerate for all 5 characters.

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Originally Posted by Katharsis

I've heard that XP can only use 3Gig of RAM. True?

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32 bit Operating Systems can only use 3 gigs, this is correct. 64 bit Operating systems don't have this limitation.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Katharsis

Should Fraps record to a separate drive from WoW?

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Definately if you have the luxury of secondary drives :-D Some people swear that they get far fewer problems if they have multiple installs of WoW to run their clones from. If you are running multiple installs of WoW, you will bog your HDD down a fair bit. It will be pretty much constantly reading/writing to the HDD. Opposed to using multiple clients from one Install directory, this will allow you to make the most of your HDD's cache.

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Originally Posted by Katharsis

Is it wrong to run WoW from a network drive?

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No, however you may have greater load times when zoning in/out. It might also effect your latency to the server in some cases, i.e When one character is zoning in/out and the others aren't or vice versa.

I'd suggest making use of what you currently have at your disposal to "test the water" so to speak. Experiment with diffrent setups and see what you like best.

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Definately if you have the luxury of secondary drives Some people swear that they get far fewer problems if they have multiple installs of WoW to run their clones from. If you are running multiple installs of WoW, you will bog your HDD down a fair bit. It will be pretty much constantly reading/writing to the HDD. Opposed to using multiple clients from one Install directory, this will allow you to make the most of your HDD's cache.

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One of the main issues you run into when running multiple clients from one directory (loading the same wow.ese up multiple times) is when each opened client needs to read/write from the wow directory, it can crash wow.

I actually use VLC to record and transcode in real time rather than FRAPS which can only record (and generates HUGE files to boot). To record AND transcode takes a quad core CPU though (or at least dual core, with 1 core for WoW and 1 for transcoding). That heavily stresses your CPU though.... so don't expect to be able to record 5 WoWs at once or anything.

Search the forums for my instructions for how to do this if you are interested.

SLI is useless for WoW as far as I am concerned. If you NEED to SLI to make your system work, you need new video cards anyway. And almost all SLI cards can run WoW no problem. In fact, my 8800GTXes can't even RUN SLI due to a long standing and well known bug (?) in the driver.

This is the beginners area.... but a quick primer is needed on bus technology and hard drive transfer rates:

Keep in mind that most, but not all, bus lines are shared. For example. USB has about 480 mb/s FOR EACH EVERY DEVICE IN TOTAL. So if you use 2 hard drives, they will both cap out the entire bandwidth. Note that is 480 mb NOT MB. So only about 60 megaBYTES per second OF TOTAL BUS. So if you have two drives, both will run at 30 MB per second. 3? 20 MB.

Most people assume that gigabit networking = 1 gigabyte per second. This is false. A byte is 8 bits. So a gigabit network can transfer, at most, 125 MEGABYTES per second. In practice, it is even less. Assume about 100.

Hard drives have about 50 - 60 MB/s transfer rates. MegaBYTE. They may say ATA 150 or whatever but trust me, they cap out at 40 - 60 megaBYTES per second. Of course if you are running SATA, this will likely not be a problem. I have transferred 500+ megaBYTES per second with a RAID6 array. Then you start to hit network bottlenecks.... 1 GigaBIT = only 125 megaBYTEs per second (theoretical).

WoW needs to access a ton of data when you load a new instance. It needs it quickly and there is a good amount of it to load. To a lesser extent, the CPU is also involved as is the GPU to render the scene. It would make sense to split the drives up if possible but the TOTAL bottomline is that playing with even 5 WoWs on a single hard drive is perfectly doable. It would just be faster to fan them out to either an ultra fast hard drive (solid state has better access times but about the same transfer rates) or a RAM based drive (but you lose data if power goes out) or multiple hard drives (more ideal but more expensive and more points of failure).

But ideally, get 1 drive per instance and put them on a SATA bus, not IDE (ATA) or USB. Failing to use the proper bus will actually not improve load times as it has to go through all of these bottlenecks first.

SATA 1.5 (1500 megabits/sec) gives about 120 megaBYTES per second of transfer potential. That is more than any single commercially available rotating disk hard drive out there today. SATA is NOT shared like USB, IDE, even PCI and PCI-E are.

Hope that helps some.