Box Specs

I read this from a web site

Quote:

---

I have been playing World of Warcraft quite a bit lately. In fact, I've been multiboxing--playing with five characters at a time. Yea, I know this makes me quite the nerd.

Luckily, I can do all this with one computer, unlike the old days when multiboxing could only be done with several computers. My system has an AMD Athlon X2 64 Dual 4800+ processor with 2GB of RAM and a striped volume set up using two hard drives and the Windows Disk Management utility. My video card is an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of RAM, and I have a 21" LCD screen running at 1680x1050.

---

Now I dont have the striped volume setup but these are my system specs


AMD athlon 64 x2 dual core 5000+ 1.8 GHz 2gb ram video card is a ATI radeon hd 4870 not sure on the gpu ram i forget
displays are 21" 1280x1024 and a 19" 1280x1024

i run 2 toons
main screen is
full screen
fps cap set to 30
mid lvl graphics
res 1280x1024


second screen is
slave toon set to window size 1024x819
fps cap set to 10
mid lvl graphics
game res at 1280x1024


and i lag sometimes and when i check my system it says cpu is at about 85% steady with 100% spikes
I started a third account once and ran all settings an low for all accounts with the main full screen and the other 2 sharing the second screen at 1/4 screen size each one top left and one top right corner of the screen and it kept cpu at 100% i was afraid i would cook the system so i never used the third account past trial

i use hotkeynet to size windows and broadcast keys and mouse and my fps settings i use the macro
/console maxfps 30
/console maxfpsbk 10

anything over this fps setup and the second window sized down to 3/4 of the second screen and its nearly unplayable

what gives what am i doing wrong ive boxed for over a year now and was content with 2 and the thought that i need a better system but this post ive read makes me a bit unhappy with the performance of my system

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Boogieman

I read this from a web site

Now I dont have the striped volume setup but these are my system specs


AMD athlon 64 x2 dual core 5000+ 1.8 GHz 2gb ram video card is a ATI radeon hd 4870 not sure on the gpu ram i forget
displays are 21" 1280x1024 and a 19" 1280x1024

i run 2 toons
main screen is
full screen
fps cap set to 30
mid lvl graphics
res 1280x1024


second screen is
slave toon set to window size 1024x819
fps cap set to 10
mid lvl graphics
game res at 1280x1024


and i lag sometimes and when i check my system it says cpu is at about 85% steady with 100% spikes
I started a third account once and ran all settings an low for all accounts with the main full screen and the other 2 sharing the second screen at 1/4 screen size each one top left and one top right corner of the screen and it kept cpu at 100% i was afraid i would cook the system so i never used the third account past trial

i use hotkeynet to size windows and broadcast keys and mouse and my fps settings i use the macro
/console maxfps 30
/console maxfpsbk 10

anything over this fps setup and the second window sized down to 3/4 of the second screen and its nearly unplayable

what gives what am i doing wrong ive boxed for over a year now and was content with 2 and the thought that i need a better system but this post ive read makes me a bit unhappy with the performance of my system

---

Turn off the mid-level graphics. All of that eye candy will swamp any system pretty fast. You don't need spell detail and high res textures on your slave, and it is the first thing to look at for performance. Set your effects slider on the slave to the minimum. I run 5 accounts on a dual core 2.8 GHz, with 4 megs of ram, and if I bump up the graphic detail, it slams to a crawl instantly.

If you want to run multiple accounts with half or full eye candy, you'll probably need to bump the graphics card to a more powerful one.

Not sure about what your specs are, but any ATI radeon hd 4870 is a great card, one of ATI's newest. The CPU and mabye the RAM is the problem. Did you say 2 gigs of system RAM? not enough for more than 2 WoWs. I would also look at what CPU your MB can take as an upgrade. Those 2 things will be the best upgrades.

I currently run 5 on my box and sometimes run short of memory and I have 8GB. I have to scale back my view distance etc on my alts when i'm in some zones even with the memory I have.

So like alcattle mentioned, you need more RAM.

I started 5-boxing with:
-- Q6600 at 2.4 ghz
-- 8gb of 800mhz ddr2 ram
-- Nvidia 8800 GTX (not sure the memory)
-- Raptor 10,000rpm 150gb hard disk
-- 22" Samsung monitor.
-- Keyclone

The game ran fairly smooth except in Shattrath. With lower settings, even Shat was easily playable.

My first major upgrade was:
-- Sapphire Radeon 4870 X2
-- 30" Samsung monitor.

I found flights would frequently freeze one of my wow windows.
Once I limited my slaves to 12 fps in the background that issue went away.
Interestingly enough, aside from flightpaths the system could run with more eye-candy enabled and not slow down, but flightpaths (even with everything off) would result in windows freezing unless I limited background fps.

Latest upgrades:
-- Core i7, 920 @ 3.00ghz
-- 12gb of 1600mhz ddr3 ram
-- Asus x58 motherboard
-- Innerspace + ISBoxer Toolkit

I've continued to limit the background fps, although haven't experimented with the default 30 fps for background toons. Cannot lose follow on epic flyers, unless the lead toon is the Paladin with crusader aura on.

I've 5 boxed with 2gb of ram just fine. I only had problems in capital cities and dalaran but I would just have to move slowly whenever I went there.

"AMD athlon 64 x2 dual core 5000+ 1.8 GHz" would be your bottleneck. I had a 2.6ghz dual core and set my background FPS to 5 and foreground to 20. With that processor you may be able to do 2 fps back and 15 front lol.

Hmm i have

Qud 6600 overclokced to 3ghz
8 gb ram
and 2 x 8800GTS

I run 4 screeen with five account across the screen and find it have major issues if i try to interact on some of the slaves.

i use the following macro on my slaves;

Quote:

---

/say detail: low
/console groundEffectDensity 16
/console groundEffectDist 1
/console horizonfarclip 1305
/console farclip 177
/console characterAmbient 1
/console smallcull 1
/console skycloudlod 1
/console detailDoodadAlpha 1

---

Perhaps i should limit the fps and background fps a little.

Limiting the slaves background FPS should help some.
Limiting the main's FPS will help too, but I'd start with the slaves first.

Having your toons look down (other then the main) can help a lot too.
Especially in the cities.