Single machine 10-boxing survey/speculation

[Ishar]

What do ya do with em? any fps drops around lots of people? PVP? PVE? (I mean, what are the limits of what ya can do with 10 on that machine=0, if any) How are ya using the 3d cards, i.e. hooked to different monitors w/ wow windows on each? Also kinda curious, do you ever get to 100% utilization?

Interestingly, changing it from 5 extended desktops to 1 display group (3x2 configuration) yielded another performance boost; in fact my processor even managed to get down to 95% once while watching people be generally crazy outside the bank. (Still wouldn't say performance was great, but it wasn't 6 FPS either...) . 3d card activity went down quite a bit as well. I dunno if this is a fluke or not, guess I'll find out. Before ya wonder why i bought an eyefinity card and was running em in extended desktop mode, my monitors were mounted ind different orientations, and its an utter pain to unmount them, rotate them, and remount them by yourself. I actually finally took that step so I could see sc2 in all its glory. (As an aside, I'm unsure if I like playing a RTS at that resolution, hehe. It does look really nice, though.)

An aside that took me a few minutes to figure out, is because I don't have wide screen monitors, when I tunred them into a display group my 'composite monitor' was wide screen...so my instances of wow had a distorted aspect ratio when forced into the 1280x1024 size by ISBoxer...except one, who was set to windowed mode, as opposed to windowed (full screen). Switching them all to Windowed mode fixed it. yay. The funny thing, is i had never paid attention to that setting before =p. lol.

[EaTCarbS]

What do ya do with em? any fps drops around lots of people? PVP? PVE? (I mean, what are the limits of what ya can do with 10 on that machine=0, if any) How are ya using the 3d cards, i.e. hooked to different monitors w/ wow windows on each? Also kinda curious, do you ever get to 100% utilization?

It gets a little bad when I'm in high concentrations of players, but otherwise it runs great. I'm also running 4 monitors - 2 on each card.

[Ishar]

Got mine running pretty good now (combination of frame capping + the performance boost that I suspect has to do with overhead managing extended desktops that I no longer have now that windows is treating my 6 monitors like one big monitor, more or less; though the decrease in GPU activity would indicate some decreased load on the GPU as a result of the same.) Except in gobs of players. eg, SW bank hehe.

I actually read the your thread fef and implemented it. Its a fairly awesome thread, and I was aluding to that in the last line of my first post, but perhaps not too clearly. It was kinda a mixed bag, trade off between switching speed and the min settings. I'm still trying to find a happy medium between slave clip plane and switching speed; also I tend to look at some slaves windows, particularly my healers, to keep an eye on my casters during fights, since I lead from my tank. Capping the FPS of the minimized slaves a bit lower had a drastic impact on performance too; I wonder if it wasn't partly GPU issues. I was sort of abusing the 5870's expected use by runing 6 monitors in extended desktop mode. And I believe this might have lead to some additional CPU overhead as well?

That thread looks really familiar...I'll have to reread it.

I'm not doing anything WRT purchasing components in the immediate future, tho I might get a high end cooler and tinker with OC'ing it. Kinda a forward looking thing. I dunno, I think its somewhat up for debate....for sure Intel has the performance crown...and I concede the findings of that report, but its important to keep in mind that a comparison of a single wow instance on a 1090T and a single wow instance on a quad i7 is not really a fair comparison point for what we do. (5-10 instances of wow is a significantly different beast.) I honestly went with AMD because I felt that more physical cores were better than throughput for my application; and couldn't justify the expense of a 980.

Currently I'm leaning towards thinking that going with a multi-processor mobo in the future might be a pretty good idea for this sort of thing, even if its a server-based board as long as it supports 3d card goodness. As a programmer, I'm sure I could take advantage of N cores, so having a ridiculous amount of physical processors just excites me, bleh.

And yes, I'm running windows 7. Moved temp folders and the page file to another hard drive. Firefox is also installed on another drive.