I think I just wasted $1000 on upgrades (Vista64, 8GB Ram, Dual 9800gtx)

I just dumped another $1000 of gear into my main box looking to improve the FPS for my 5 boxing in WoW

Previous Rig:

Q6700
Strike Extreme Mobo
4GB DDR2 RAM
8800 Ultra OC 768
Windows XP Pro
4x 150GB Raptor X

With this setup I played on two 20" NEC LCD2070VX Monitors in desktop span of 3200x1200 (main client 1600x1200, alts 800x600). I use keyclone to multiplex my commands and wow maximizer to setup my windows.

New Setup:

I added another Raptor Drive and installed Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit
It automatically found all the drivers I needed, very painless

I removed the 8800 Ultra and put in 2 x 9800gtx cards (on tomshardware benchmarks these cards are very very close in performance but the 9800s run alot cooler)
One monitor is connected to the first port of each card and I downloaded the latest drivers.

I installed 4GB more ram for a total of 8GB of ram, all identical match and model (Corsair XMS2DHX 2GB sticks DDR2). The system sees all the memory and its running well

Instead of wowmaximizer I used keyclones maximizer settings to lay out my clients

Turned off Aero, DWM was running my CPU's at 100%. After doing this my CPU usage dropped back to a normal 20% to 30%

Turned off UAC and Indexing for my drive.

End result:

Absolutely no gain, infact I think the gameplay is a little worse. Memory use never goes above 3.2GB so like someone previously said on these forums more than 4gb is not really needed to 5 box.

Can anyone think of any tweaks I may have missed that can make a major impact? The only thing left I can think to try is to use wowmaximizer for layout and see if that makes a chage.

Was there something that led you to believe your previous setup wasn't sufficient? Your OLD setup is probably a bit better then what I have now, and I feel I run pretty smooth with 5 instances going. While you're machine is definately stronger, it probably just didn't do anything for WoW specifically since it was probably fine to begin with. What kind of FPS did you get before?

Under my old system after several hours of play if i went to a very crowded sunwell isle sometimes i would see some tearing, my card getting too hot I imagine. Out in the wild my fps on my main 1600x1200 client would generaly be 25-45 so it was pretty nice, in OGR and Shat it would drop to around 15-20.

Basically I was hoping to up my in city fps by another 5-10 fps and get cooler running video cards so i didnt burn up the ultra eventualy.

when 5 boxing on 1 PC, I think that no matter what your setup that its expected that Shatt is going to be hell on your PC. Those 5 clients getting 100% of the lag/video resources possible in the game, is rough. I am FINE everywhere in the game, except Shatt (havent been to Sunwell Isle yet).

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Originally Posted by 'Gallo',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56750#post567 50

when 5 boxing on 1 PC, I think that no matter what your setup that its expected that Shatt is going to be hell on your PC. Those 5 clients getting 100% of the lag/video resources possible in the game, is rough. I am FINE everywhere in the game, except Shatt (havent been to Sunwell Isle yet).

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Yea I understand that, I am just always looking for ways to improve my setup. I would have though a graphics card per monitor would have been a big improvement but I guess there is another bottleneck involved that I didnt forsee.

My quad-core rig is handling 4 or 5 WoW's a LOT better then my very high-end but dual-core gaming rig. The dual-core is running at 100% most of the time. The quad around 30%.

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Originally Posted by 'Anahka',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56756#post56 756

My quad-core rig is handling 4 or 5 WoW's a LOT better then my very high-end but dual-core gaming rig. The dual-core is running at 100% most of the time. The quad around 30%.

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I never know what my quad is running at when I'm in shatt, because it lags out so bad that I can't get task manager up lol. I dont know if its a CPU bottleneck, GPU, or memory. Who knows.

I don't think the lag we suffer in Shatt has anything to do with the performance of our video cards.

Rather, as Shatt is so densely populated, there's a hit because of:

Increased network traffic (there's more going on that our clients need to be told about), and
Increased disk/bus activity (more people wearing a greater variety of clothes means more models and textures that need to be loaded off disk and into our video cards).

If your video card and memory weren't the bottleneck before the upgrade, upgrading them won't help.

Similarly, Vista 64 won't help you as WoW is a 32 bit app and Vista will run it in 32 bit mode (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOW64).

Try using wowmaximizer again instead of Keyclone's Maximizer; when I opened wow with maximizer via keyclone my comp lagged baaaaaaaaaaaaaaad. When I ran wows manually via desktop icon I run smooth as silk. I've mentioned this to him back when I first got it in Jan but I don't really know if it's an issue on his end or mine or if he can even do anything about it, but give it a shot :p

Try with a single 9800 too...never know what an sli/crossfire setup might do or they could be fighting over who gets to render what like spoiled kids, lol, and the sad part is I'm at least partially serious; Computers are very finicky, very strange things that NEVER follow logic in how they act. To solve issues like this you have to think outside the box even if it seems stupid or unlikely :p Oftentimes that unlikely bit is the most likely lol

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Originally Posted by 'Nitro',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56754#post567 54

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Originally Posted by 'Gallo',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56750#post567 50

when 5 boxing on 1 PC, I think that no matter what your setup that its expected that Shatt is going to be hell on your PC. Those 5 clients getting 100% of the lag/video resources possible in the game, is rough. I am FINE everywhere in the game, except Shatt (havent been to Sunwell Isle yet).

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Yea I understand that, I am just always looking for ways to improve my setup. I would have though a graphics card per monitor would have been a big improvement but I guess there is another bottleneck involved that I didnt forsee.

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You mentioned your fps actually went down. I'm using Vista as well (32 bit though) and when I tried to put my second card back in it killed my FPS. Try running off of one card and see if it does anything for you. I'm sure you don't want to have to do that after having bought two new cards to use, but it's at least worth it to see if that's having the same effect on you it did on me.

I'm not sure whats causing that, and I haven't really looked too hard into a fix for it either because my two graphics cards were cheapy's I bought before I even began multiboxing, so I didn't really care that I took one out. Let a friend have it as a hand-me-down.

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Originally Posted by 'Fursphere',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56763#pos t56763

The only "waste" I see is buying Vista.

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Haters :(. I actually rather like Vista to be honest.

Just out of curiosity, what is the typical memory usage for add ons on your main + clones? Certainly you're not running Auctioneer / ItemDB / other large add ons on your clones?

How do you have your affinity configured? I've found that I get the best framerates by dividing up the work as much as I can.
WoW Instance / Affinity
A / 0 1 3 4
B / 0 1
C / 1 2
D / 2 3
E / 3 0
Although you've said your cores are each running between 20-30%, so this might not be the issue. By default Windows won't allocate your last two cores, so if you're not manually configuring them you could get a slight performance increase.

Also, have you tried closing your pr0n vidz while playing? This will really kill your FPS, as well as your concentration (>. .)>

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Originally Posted by 'Fursphere',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56770#pos t56770

I have one computer in my house with Vista. (wife's laptop). My brother also has vista on his new laptop. Not a day goes by that at least one of us says "I hate this thing".

That, and the constant: "Are you sure?" "Are you sure?" "Are you sure?" "Are you sure?" is enough to make anyone go crazy.

And yes, I hate it.

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You can turn of the Are you sure thingy. :p

It is my personal opinion that running 5 different instances of wow, from 5 different installs on 5 different disks is a total waste of both disk space, and money. If you look at how operating systems go about caching on-disk data in memory, I'd say running all instances of a single install is your best bet. So you might want to try that.

I'd say, with your setup, neither CPU power nor graphics power should pose a problem. The more likely culprit would be either disk caching, or maybe the pci bus speed. Or, maybe network traffic, but that doesn't sound very likely tbh, as a bottleneck there would result in you seeing shadows, instead of getting low fps in cities (at least that's what I think).

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Originally Posted by 'Blubber',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56772#post5 6772

It is my personal opinion that running 5 different instances of wow, from 5 different installs on 5 different disks is a total waste of both disk space, and money. If you look at how operating systems go about caching on-disk data in memory, I'd say running all instances of a single install is your best bet. So you might want to try that.

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Junctioning/Symbolic Links is win. It basically achieves this on a single drive, while allowing you to have multiple configurations.

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Originally Posted by 'Kaynin',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56771#post56 771

You can turn of the Are you sure thingy. :p

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Are you sure?

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Originally Posted by 'Fursphere',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56763#pos t56763

The only "waste" I see is buying Vista.

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Well, I'm not too sure about that. If you're running multiple monitors, Vista is the way to go. Otherwise, just for gaming, no. That, and Vista Ultimate is totally unneeded for anything remotely related to multiboxing, so yeah, there's the real waste.

I run a shitty dual core 2 gb ram radeon gfx card computer (ran my dad about 1k)

when i use 3x wow i get the following:
out of city - 40 fps each
in city - 15 fps (shat included) with slight tearing and lag

4x wow:
out of city - 25
in city - 8-10 with tearing

it's playable, atleast for what i want to do at the moment.

i have a extra computer at home i'm going to be using to run 2 of them over the summer so it should be alot smoother.

TBH having 60fps is a little much, the game runs perfectly fine at around 30.

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Originally Posted by 'Maz',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56777#post56777

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Originally Posted by 'Kaynin',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56771#post56 771

You can turn of the Are you sure thingy. :p

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Are you sure?

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Haha I almost fell for this. I was thinking "Yeah, I definite sure that you can turn that off.... oh wait" lol.

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Originally Posted by 'Nitro',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56747#post567 47

Under my old system after several hours of play if i went to a very crowded sunwell isle sometimes i would see some tearing, my card getting too hot I imagine. Out in the wild my fps on my main 1600x1200 client would generaly be 25-45 so it was pretty nice, in OGR and Shat it would drop to around 15-20.

Basically I was hoping to up my in city fps by another 5-10 fps and get cooler running video cards so i didnt burn up the ultra eventualy.

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I am not running 5 on my main system like you are, but i do run 3 at 1600x1200 on a 8800GTX. I have the focus window set to a max of 90 and the two back windows at 25. In most areas the fps remains at the max. In the past i would on a rare occasion have an issue with texture ripping, eventually leading to a massive crash due to ground no longer being rendered and dropping to 2 fps. A fire totem would usually be the culprit for starting the meltdown. I always assumed it was a heat issue as well and had considered getting the 9800. There was a long time between occurrences so i couldn't really test it either.

The Sunwell release changed everything... Being on the Isle for more than an hour doing dailies would regularly cause the meltdown. So I loaded up the nVidia tools and started monitoring and adjusting settings. My card was not overheating... with fan speed at 100% it never went above 60C, even while it was in meltdown mode. I tried throttling and other things to make it stable but had no luck. However, if i only loaded 2 clients, I could not repeat the problem.

If you are still experiencing something similar to this with that setup? Could it be a memory issue with the cards?

Just dittoing Mages' post... AMD x64 4200 or 4500+ dual-core processor, 2gb dual-channel ddr2 ram, XP pro sp2, 7900 GS vidcard(unsure on ram, been so long I've forgotten lol) and I get about the same FPS he does in the same places, with maxfpsbk set to 20 and main maxfps set to 64 since it seems to max out around there anyways even if I set it higher. 30+ is playable though, wow ain't the most beautiful/realistic game in the world so a little fps/purdiness loss won't kill ya for performance ;p

I reiterate to OP though, try 1 card at a time as someone else suggested afterwards as well, and try non-keyclone maximizer, or outright manually setting the windows yourself; extra programs to do that work still eat cycles and every bit can count for us ;p you can also try running multiple windows that're the same size/stacked on top if you don't NEED to see them all at once(like I do; all 3 windows = 1280x1024, same res as my desktop res, windowed mode but maximized and none minimized to taskbar); having them maximized but not visible saves rendering cycles without being as bad for your switching as minimizing is, the latter causing lag as it brings the window back up and catches up to what's going on.

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A fire totem would usually be the culprit for starting the meltdown. I always assumed it was a heat issue

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I can't be the only one who lol'd at that. :P But yeah Sunwell Island has ALOT of npcs, ALOT of players just like shatt, but these players are ALSO in combat with fast-respawning monsters who chase for miles, adding constant varied spell graphics to the equation, and then take the fact that blizzard likes to make blood elf areas look too fucking good for it's own good, lightning texturing etc you name it, there's extra load, plus all the bombing in those areas, constant flights, people porting in and out; it's a madhouse. :P Also, try toning down your front fps...90 is OVERKILL lol, 64 should be fine, maybe tone down the backgrounds to 20, barely noticeable difference :p

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Originally Posted by 'Maz',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56777#post56777

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Originally Posted by 'Kaynin',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56771#post56 771

You can turn of the Are you sure thingy. :p

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Are you sure?

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Funny, but just incase you are sincere and really don't know.

(I do this by translating my dutch vista into english words, if any of you english people notice I didn't quite translate one proper that might cause confusion, please correct me. :P )

1. Go to configuration panel.
2. Go to user accounts.
3. Click on "user account configuration turn on/off"
- Turn off user account configuration (UAC) by clicking the check box.

4. Restart your pc.

Basicly, all it does is put an Are you sure, before every change to your system. It's designed for people who don't know how to use common sense when browsing and click on stuff they shouldn't click on. If you feel you are sufficiently informed on how things go online and properly protected by other means. (Common sense, ad blockers, etc, etc.) Then turning this off will not negatively effect your pc and you won't have to click the are you sure everytime something changes.

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Originally Posted by 'Fursphere',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56798#pos t56798

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Basicly, all it does is put an Are you sure, before every change to your system. It's designed for people who don't know how to use common sense when browsing and click on stuff they shouldn't click on. If you feel you are sufficiently informed on how things go online and properly protected by other means. (Common sense, ad blockers, etc, etc.) Then turning this off will not negatively effect your pc and you won't have to click the are you sure everytime something changes.

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The "enhanced" layer of security with the "are you sure" crap in Vista is nothig more than a smoke and mirrors game. The end user is generallly still lost.

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Sssshhhhhhhh :)

Well, the general idea behind it is, if you dont know what its for, dont click yes. :P

But yeah, I suppose most people would even then still click yes. xD

Don't be afraid to ask questions before you blow up your computer kids! Better to look a lil dumb about newfangled technology and learn from it than to stupidly click yes and end up having bonzi buddies having an orgy while advertising male growth pills on your desktop while someone hax into your Steam accounts and cheats on 'em without your knowledge getting you permabanned, followed by a rootkit turning your comp into a warez distro :p

Computers're still relatively "new" tech...and the computer generation is only now hitting adulthood while the majority are still old people who shat themselves at the wonders of "CLAP ON CLAP OFF LOL"; and as I said before, they're a finicky non-logical thing that the weirdest things will fix ;p

Also, post #1,000! Ding, 375/375 Forum Trolling skill ;p

I get better results with Vista.

But maybe it's just me being a driver junkie.

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Originally Posted by 'Blubber',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56772#post5 6772

It is my personal opinion that running 5 different instances of wow, from 5 different installs on 5 different disks is a total waste of both disk space, and money. If you look at how operating systems go about caching on-disk data in memory, I'd say running all instances of a single install is your best bet. So you might want to try that.

I'd say, with your setup, neither CPU power nor graphics power should pose a problem. The more likely culprit would be either disk caching, or maybe the pci bus speed. Or, maybe network traffic, but that doesn't sound very likely tbh, as a bottleneck there would result in you seeing shadows, instead of getting low fps in cities (at least that's what I think).

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If your disk activity is a blip here and there, using one vs many install directories won't yield a perceptible difference. Load times are really the only thing that affects, which should only result in Org/Shatt/IF lag for the first few seconds assuming you have _enough_ RAM.

I do agree that PCI or FSB speeds may be an issue here. That or RAM configuration/compatibility.

Nitro, what brand/spec RAM are you using?

[quote='Ughmahedhurtz',index.php?page=Thread&postID =56832#post56832][quote='Blubber',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56772 #post56772]It is my personal opinion that running 5 different instances of wow, from 5 different installs on 5 different disks is a total waste of both disk space, and money. If you look at how operating systems go about caching on-disk data in memory, I'd say running all instances of a single install is your best bet. So you might want to try that.

I'd say, with your setup, neither CPU power nor graphics power should pose a problem. The more likely culprit would be either disk caching, or maybe the pci bus speed. Or, maybe network traffic, but that doesn't sound very likely tbh, as a bottleneck there would result in you seeing shadows, instead of getting low fps in cities (at least that's what I think).[/quote]If your disk activity is a blip here and there, using one vs many install directories won't yield a perceptible difference. Load times are really the only thing that affects, which should only result in Org/Shatt/IF lag for the first few seconds assuming you have _enough_ RAM.

I do agree that PCI or FSB speeds may be an issue here. That or RAM configuration/compatibility.

Nitro, what brand/spec RAM are you using?[/quote]

[url='http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145176']CORSAIR XMS2 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory[/url]

The cheap stuff :P

I purchased 2 sets of these for a total of 8GB

Is there a test I can run to find out if my memory is a bottleneck in this situation?

I've always wondered if the 1066 RAM is THAT much better. My mobo supports it, but the 800 was so much cheaper, I couldnt resist.

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I added another Raptor Drive and installed Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit
It automatically found all the drivers I needed, very painless

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BAD idea! As much as I like Windows, it does not handle drivers very well.

You should immediately go to the manufacturer's websites and download all the drivers. Get your motherboard/chipset drivers from intel.com, gfx card drivers from nvidia.com.

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Originally Posted by 'd0z3rr',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56848#post56 848

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I added another Raptor Drive and installed Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit
It automatically found all the drivers I needed, very painless

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BAD idea! As much as I like Windows, it does not handle drivers very well.

You should immediately go to the manufacturer's websites and download all the drivers. Get your motherboard/chipset drivers from intel.com, gfx card drivers from nvidia.com.

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I'm a big proponent of if it aint broke dont fix it. I've had many cases where I went to upgrade drivers when things were already working trash my system so im a lil shy on it. But when all else fails here in a few days if I dont find an avenue to increase performance I will go dig up all the current drivers from the manufacture sites. The only drivers I specifically went and downloaded was my nvidia drivers and I updated the bios on my mobo.

Something that helped me get my fps back was cleaning out old mod files from my wow folders. I went through and removed all the old shit and installed all the mods I want to use fresh and my fps is now normal. I was able to trace it down to old mod files because the fps on a few toons were rock solid but the other two sharing the same wow were crap. Once I cleared them its much better. I suggest you doing the same. I have vista 64 8gig ram quad 6600, two ati 3870 cards running 3 LCD's. Two hard drives running one wow on each with keyclone.

Clean out that WTF folder of all the old lua files.. or whatever they are called.

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Originally Posted by 'Gallo',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56844#post568 44

I've always wondered if the 1066 RAM is THAT much better. My mobo supports it, but the 800 was so much cheaper, I couldnt resist.

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Well, the answer is "It Depends." If you're doing a task that does a LOT of memory transfers, the 1066 stuff is noticeably faster. If you're doing stuff where it isn't stressing the RAM much, obviously, you won't see much difference. 5-boxing on one PC would qualify as "stressing the RAM" IMO. :P The key, though, is the timings on the RAM itself. If you go from expensive 800MHz low-delay RAM to cheapie high-delay 1066 stuff, you won't see as much difference. Here is a great article that explains this stuff in more detail if you're interested: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...s,1236-10.html The TLDR version of that article is that you're better off OC'ing/upgrading your CPU than upgrading your RAM if you're already using good PC6400 or higher.

Yeah, I have my CPU slightly OC'ed and my memory slightly OC'ed. I don't think I'm willing to upgrade until prices come down, or I'm forced to due to system req's.

Just so you know..you all have ruined this game for me with your talk of 30+ FPS....

I've been playing since beta with 30 or less FPS. I'm happy when it's above 15 FPS. 8)

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Originally Posted by 'pinotnoir',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56868#pos t56868

Something that helped me get my fps back was cleaning out old mod files from my wow folders. I went through and removed all the old shit and installed all the mods I want to use fresh and my fps is now normal. I was able to trace it down to old mod files because the fps on a few toons were rock solid but the other two sharing the same wow were crap. Once I cleared them its much better. I suggest you doing the same. I have vista 64 8gig ram quad 6600, two ati 3870 cards running 3 LCD's. Two hard drives running one wow on each with keyclone.

Clean out that WTF folder of all the old lua files.. or whatever they are called.

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I did all the addon cleanup long ago, and I would also like to note that depending on where im at in shat if I just run a single client with my updated setup at 1600x1200 I will average 90-140 FPS in shat.

Would OC'ing my proc help at all if its not stressed?

I'm running a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 Kentsfield 2.66GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor

I mounted a Zalman 9700 on it and it runs nice and cool. I'm sure there is tons of room to overclock it but I've never done any OC'ing before and since all 5 wows only use about 30% across all 4 cores I didnt think there would be a need to.

What do you guys think about OC'ing a Q6700, is it something I should look into?

I run all my stuff as i get it, ive never OC'ed my Proc, Mem or Gfx.

OCing is pretty easy. I run a Q6600 (stock is 2.4ghz) at 3.0ghz with hardly changing the voltage no problemo. I have an aftermarket cooler like yourself. You could prob get to 3.2ghz EASILY. 3.4-3.6 if you're feeling it.

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Originally Posted by 'Gallo',index.php?page=Thread&postID=56886#post568 86

OCing is pretty easy. I run a Q6600 (stock is 2.4ghz) at 3.0ghz with hardly changing the voltage no problemo. I have an aftermarket cooler like yourself. You could prob get to 3.2ghz EASILY. 3.4-3.6 if you're feeling it.

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But have you checked your multiboxing performance before and after and noticed a difference?

No, I can't say that I have. I OC'ed it from Day 1. But, for you, it's a pretty easy process. You work it in your bios. Just do it in very small increments. Bump your voltage a teeny bit, and bump your speed a teeny bit, start up, run Prime95 with some sort of program to watch your CPU temp, restart and repeat until satisfied.