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Thinking of upgrading to a new motherboard and possibly a core i7 920 but I have a question.
Does anyone currently use more than 8gb ram in their setup?
If so what are you running (i.e. Motherboard, processor, etc) and does it make a big difference say to run 12gb than 8gb with wow and vista 64?
Thanks.
my advice would be if you are just 5 boxing 6gb of ddr3 should be enough. spend the money on a raid0 with 2 or 4 HHD or better yet get a SSD.
I am using SSD and 12g of ram. I'm not sure if i am doing something wrong but i don't see any faster load times, which is why i went with the ssd over raptors. BUT on my old rig when i went from 4 gigs of ram to 8, it made a ton of difference in my FPS. This new one runs great, but not noticeably better than my other pc.
Old PC specs:X38MB, QX6850, 280GTX, 8gigs DDR3, non raid 7200rpm 1TB HD, Vista64 Ultimate
New PC: X58MB, Core i7 920, 2x280gtx, 12gigs DDR3, 128mb SSD, Vista64 Ultimate
( why 2 bad ass PCs? Im crazy like that! ohh..and I plan to 10box later on. And I play other games and demand that they ROCK!)
You may also want to seriously consider just using 2 PCs. I've debated on and off the past month whether to upgrade my dual core to a i7 920 w/ GTX 260, but I just have this nagging feeling in my head that the current i7's are "starter kits" and the next generation will be much, much, much better -- and probably out in six months. I have loved multiboxing with a single PC, but I just turned my 2nd PC (a real crappy AMD dual core with a Nvidia 7950!) and hooked it all up via Octopus (or Keyclone, whichever you prefer) and its working great.
Previously I was getting 5-8 FPS in Dalaran with all 5 on my c2duo w/ 8800GT, I was hitting 30-50fps in the rest of northrend (and shattrah) but dalaran just brought the system to its knees, and I was a bit worried even a i7 w/ 260+ would be the same.
Now with 2 PCs I am hitting 20fps in dalaran with my main toons graphics turned all the way up, and everything is working great. have 3 WoWs on my main and 2 on my second PC.
Of course I already had a second PC and it was a much easier decision to spend $0 (well, I'm going to buy some memory so I can upgrade it to 3GB), especially when I priced out a decent i7 DIY setup and it was running over $1400. I figure in 4-8 months there will be a whole bunch of new CPUs, video cards, etc and will be a good time to look at stuff. Right now especially with all the live.com cashback and holiday sales, you can get some amazing deals on dual core systems -- like under $500 for a really great one, one that could run 2-3 WoWs no problem at max FPS.
I box 5 on a quad core 2.3ghz amd with 8gb of ram and a single 8800gt. I get 30fps in Dalaran and no lag issues anywhere. The jump from 4gb of ram to 8gb really REALLY made a difference, I sit around 5-7gb used in Vista 64, I run a lean system (No anti-virus software for example) and don't keep a bunch of crap running (IM clients, etc).
I was really stunned at how well things worked, and I honestly used to think that if you wanted to compete in PVP you needed to play 5 hardware boxes, but I now believe that the better solution is actually one solid machine with InnerSpace handling the PIP swapping and broadcasting. I can change mains faster than anyone, never have to take my hands off the keyboard/mouse to hit other keyboards or mice, no KM switching, etc.
Looking at intel's site, the top end i7's are out this quarter.
The low-end cheaper i7's will bell be out second quarter of next year.
Pretty much intel seems to follow this pattern:
Year 1, new processor model.
Year 2, make it better.
With Year 3, being Year 1 of a new technology.
if you already have a quad core system than there is no reason to upgrade to an i7, since an i7 is a quad core with faster memory bus speed and multi threading. if you have a core duo and want to upgrade to a quad core than get the i7.
the i7 supports different memory numbers than the quad core. so my advice is if you get an i7 is: get 6gb of ram, since that is more than enough and adding 3 more gig to have 9 gig of memory is pretty expensive and the improvement from 6 to 9 won't be that much. instead use the money from the extra 3 gig of ram to buy a raid0 or SSD. since the i7 motherboard supports raid0/1 already you don't need the controller card, so it is pretty cheap. less than $200 for the 2 raid HHD.