Poor performance on 5 on 1 setup

I have the following. Q6600, 3GB RAM, 512MB 8800GT, 22inch at 1680 x 1050 widescreen, Soundblaster XiFi. I max everything with 2x anti-aliasing on just one account. On the other 4, only texture is maxed and anti-aliasing is off, everything else is on medium. There are two problems:
First, loading takes about 2 minutes. I first bring all 5 windows to the character select screen then press enter, 2 minutes till all are loaded.
Second, I get constant, herky-jerky type lag when playing even in the least populated zones (ie, Elwynn Forest). I tried bumping the graphics settings on all other 4 accounts to check if the problem is my videocard, but the degree of lag remains identical as far as I can tell, so my graphics are fine. No matter what graphics setting I do as long as I play 5 accounts this sort of lag is always there.
I want a way to play 5 accounts smoothly on 1 PC, on ONE screen. I want to max details on 1 account; but want to keep the others at the same resolution and looking decent (high textures). Does 5boxing WoW smoothly require more than 3 GB of memory? Next, will running each account from separate hard drives alleviate this? If so, what is the best way to do it?Needless to say, with the above hardware setup I'd rather spend a bit more to fix this than deal with. Thanks.

Vista or XP?

I use XP and my system spec are a little better than yours with 5 accounts on 1 PC, 2 monitors running 3200x1200 span res. I placed ALL my wow installs(folders) on a seperate drive than my OS and everything runs pretty smooth.

Main toon is running at 1600x1200 on one of the screens and the other screen in split into 4 800x600 windows.

I've tried it both on Vista Ultimate and XP Pro (same machine, dual boot) and XP is much better imo. Usually get 30-40 FPS in most places, like 10-15 in ogr.



http://www.knightsofshadow.org/ftpsc...ts/fivebox.jpg

What kind of HD? It seems like you have a bottleneck somewhere.

What is CPU use at with all 5?
This is all on 1 monitor?
Latest drivers and DX 9c?
Have you tried setting visual settings to minimum?
Are there any ram intensive apps running?
How much ram is free when all are running?

There are others but this is a good first step in troubleshooting.

sorry but full settings take a lot out of your precessor and textures take a lot out of your video card. Memory rarely has anything to do with it, I'm running 5 on 1 box with 2gigs no problems.

Memory becomes an issue when it is too low overall (meaning it has to frequently swap to the slower hard drive) or in populated areas (like Org) because it needs more than you probably have because suddenly the load placed on it is greater and it lacks spare memory so it has to swap to the HD and thus slows down.

Ideally, ~ 768 to 1 gig per WoW, but since you run at lower resolutions and 32 bit OSes don't support more that 3.5ish, 3 gigs is perfectly workable to 5 box with. 2 is a bit low but certainly what most would still consider playable.

It's also possible that running 2xAA on the main screen would cause problems. Who knows if the drivers are good at running AA on 1 window and not on the others.... try no AA all around and the 2xAA on all of them...

I've been running 4 and 5 characters with pretty good results. I only have 2gb of RAM, nforce 680i sli montherboard, 8800GTS video card w/ 320mb. I also run 3 SATA hard drives, running XP.

I noticed a definite load time improvement when I spread my wow accounts out across the hard drives. I leave my main on my C: drive, 2 on the D: drive and 2 on the E: drive.

before I moved them around, when I would take a zep trip across continents in Azeroth, it would sit there on "travel" screen (on all characters) for so long, that I'd end up getting off just as the zepplin left again to return...

This is WoW we're talking about anyways, the graphics are stylized in such a way that turning on AA is like trying to jam a square peg in a round hole :p It's gonna be off a little regardless, you don't need AA on and when you're trying to do something like multi-box on a single machine you need to bite the bullet and deal with a little graphics turn-down in exchange for the power/performance you need lol

Are you limiting the frames per second to say 15fps on the 4 clone WoW instances? You can then leave the main WoW at 45fps or whatever you wish.

Its an option in Keyclone i think maybe that would help.

IMHO the problem is probably having different graphics settings on the windows. Each window needs to have the same settings, otherwise the card will have trouble. I don't see how it could do things like AA/AF on just part of the screen without alot of slowdown. I would recommend having the draw distance maxed, but all other settings as low as possible.

Having each wow on a seperate hard drive will only help load times. Your framerate should not be affected ... unless you run out of RAM and it has to start paging.