How to spread out to all 4 cores?

I just upgraded from a dual core E6850 (3.0ghz) to a quad Q9550 (2.83ghz) and so far the performance improvement has been minimal - I'm seeing slightly higher FPS and my toons aren't breaking off of /follow in Northrend but when I look at my task manager, performance tab it shows cores 1 and 2 maxed out but cores 3 and 4 barely being used. Overall CPU usuage varies between 55-75% with 5 instances of WOW.

Is there a way to spread out the usuage so all 4 cores are being evenly used?

My other system specs are 8 gigs of DDR2 ram and a GeForce 8800 GTS GPU w/ 640 megs of video ram.

CPU temps run between 38 and 50 degrees C after I replaced the stock HSF with a artic cooler freezer extreme (with the stock cooler it ran at 45 degrees at Idle and 75 with just one instance of wow, causing warning beeps.

Thanks,

-Clov

I know that with keyclone, you can configure each character's client to be allocated to a seperate core. Not sure how to control that outside of this specific software though.

I use keyclone but I'm unaware how to allocate that - how is it done?

Ahh, the power of google :) I didn't find the answer for specifically Keyclone but I did find out how to do it in windows - I'm not sure if this is specific to Vista but I imagine it's the same for XP.

Go to task manager (ctrl-alt-delete), click on processesses, select the wow.exe instances, right click and "set affinity" - click all of the CPUs (0-3 in my case). -- Previously only the first 2 cores were selected instead of all 4 - no CPU usuage is overall lower and spread out much more evenly.

After selecting each wow client to use all 4 cores, I saw an immediate increase in performance frame rate wise - I haven't yet tried setting each wow to it's own core (which would require 1 core to run 2 instances, or having 2 cores run 3, ect since I'm running 5 instances total).



Thanks!



-Clov

I still take the position that a higher clock rate dual core is better then a "higher rated" but low clock rate quad core for wow.

The CPU is not what limits frame rates in this game, its moveing textures to the GPU.

Well, the difference between 3.0ghz and 2.83ghz stock speeds is negligable, plus the Q9550 can be overclocked.

With all 4 cores now firing, I'm seeing a very noticible improvement in performance, especially in WOTLK zones. While the dual core previously worked fine, it was choppy in some areas - now it's very smooth with frame rates between 40 and 70 consistantly on the main.

Clov