SCSI Drives - Taking your machine to the next level?

I am with you on this one but Nitro wanted to know his options ;)

I am five boxing on Vista 64 with 4 GB of Ram, Ram usage goes up to 3.2 GB when running five instances (I do run a batch file to kill off unnecessary processes before playing and turn off Aero). I am only low lvl atm so do not know if Outlands would use more Ram but would not have thought so. I guess a faster drive may shave fractions of a second of load times but is that worth the money?

Remember that vista uses memory in a different way to XP. It will maximise the memory usage offloading into the page file only when necessary... XP used to keep as much of the Physical RAM free for spikes and so used the PF a lot more.

Basically Vista will show a lot more memory in use than XP for the same load

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Originally Posted by 'Xzin',index.php?page=Thread&postID=54149#post5414 9

WTF people. This isn't some corporate DB. WoW DOES NOT NEED 320+ MB / sec of bandwidth. 40 from a single hard drive should be fine per WoW install. I guess you can go for broke if you are hellbent on cramming this 5 box into one machine but I still fail to see the benefits here. Surely there are other bottlenecks too. CPU? GPU? Memory?

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From a bottleneck perspective I can only see the graphics card being the blame. My CPU is at about 40-50% average across 4 cores and hovers @ about 37c
even after being overclocked to 4ghz. My gfx card on the other hand is split between two monitors, one 22' widescreen @1680x1050 and one 19' @ 1280x1024
(split by 4 alts). The 9800GTX is HOT AS ALL HELL and hovers around 60c with framerates of 60+ on the 1680x1050 and 20+fps (max settings) on the 4 alts (low settings).
All this heat from a processor that had a die shrink and is running at a stock frequency????? YEah definately the gfx card.

I run SCSI RAID 0 on my dual XEON machine. I actually see better load times on my new quad core/SATAII/64-bit system. I see no reason for SCSI other than in a server a server environment.

I agree, if you're using your swap file, you need more ram, not faster hard drives.

And I absolutely love the multi machine setup. I, too, have a hex-LCD setup, and I utilize every monitor. With mouse sharing setup, I can move the mouse anywhere I want.