mac pro and rift

About to start trying to multibox rift. I have a 2 year old mac pro 8 core xeon with 4 gig ram and an ati radeon 5770 - boot camp to windows 7. It ran 5 copies of WoW decently well at low settings. Rift beta I was able to run 3 well enough but it did start to chug after a couple of hours of play. I'd like to have the option to run 5, or at least not lag on 3. I'm wondering if upping to 12 gigs ram would solve a lot of the problem? Or should I save the money and look to upgrading to a true PC for gaming. Anyone with much experience comparing boot camp to native PC systems? I did notice ISboxer doesn't seem to recognize all 8 cores, only 4 - is that just a setting I need to find or is it inherent with boot camp windows?

You need to increase your RAM and upgrade your video card. 4 gigs is really low. I'd try and upgrade to 12 to 16 gigs of memory and a nvidia 570 video card or 580gtx if you have the money.

Not sure how old your Xeon is, but is it one or two physical processers? I'd guess 1 with 4 cores, and 4 HT cores.
You might be able to throw another processor in there and get a really nice boost as well. But first the memory and video card.

I believe it's 2 of the same quad-core processors.

Hey Keth! Precious few of us Mac Users around. I'm running on an iMac 27 inch late 2010 model with 12gb Ram and core i5 4 core 2.8ghz.

The main problem with macs atm is the heat dissapation issue. Using the apple ram is the best way to avoid heat build up as their ram is designed for it but the downside is you'll pay through the teeth for it! Especially with something as annoying to find as old mac pro ram.Also, graphics card will always be a limiting issue. Mac seems to dislike having the top end graphics cards compatible with their systems.

If I am correct, your MacPro can handle dual 1gb graphics cards at best? And 16gb DDR2 ram?

Sadly, I'm looking at buying a new computer for Rift boxing as well. I think that this is your best option as well. I've been a loyal mac user all my life and have owned every model of emac, imac, macbook and macbook pro but I am being forced to the conclusion that at present, the best option for a multiboxing computer is a PC.

However, my suggestion would be to wait. Don't try buying now. Wait til the sandybridge processors come out before you upgrade.

Also, inside sources are talking that the only changes to new iMacs and Mac Pros this season are processor and increased GPU options. If the MacPro does get upgrades to both of those (about damn time for the GPU options), I'll be buying one of those.

I also run a Mac Pro from early 2009. It is a double quad-core Xeon with 16GB RAM and a Radeon HD5870 with 1GB RAM. It runs 5 WoWs flawlessly, including the main with all possible eye-candies on (I dynamically reduce settings when switching characters).

I think more RAM and a better graphic card would solve your issues. The HD5870 is available directly from Apple. But you could also keep your existing card for the Mac OS X side, and install something non-compatible but more powerful that would be used only in Windows to play.