Where should I start upgrading to handle shatt / outlands ?

[Mac]

I'm wondering where I need to start upgrading. its been fine up till now on azeroth, however I'm having a hard time in shatt, I can only go a few steps and then have to wait on all the alts to catch up or they will loose follow because its so choppy, it was a little better at thrallmar but still choppy when I tried to kill some boars.

You can see my system specs in my link, I can put them here if needed. I'm running 2 alts off one core, 2 off another, and main off one, and leaving one for the system. I have main in one folder, and the alts in another folder. I have alts turned down in keyclone to 15 fps max. My ram graph on my keyboard is showing ~55% on cpu , and 98% of ram used.

So where should I start upgrading? I was thinking start off with a new gpu, but if I get another I'll have two, and was thinking maybe a good place to start would be put main on one monitor/ card, and put alts on the other monitor / card, but don't have the cards SLI linked? Or, will that not work and I'll just need to upgrade the one card.

If that doesn't work, I guess I will need to upgrade to Vista Ultimate 64 so I can buy 4 more gigs of ram and have 8 gigs of ram to see how that goes..

So what do you experts think?

[Naysayer]

Looks like you're starving for RAM. 5 accounts loading up every character in shattrath each is a lot of work for 1 pc with 3k RAM.

I'd say, the best thing you could do is upgrade to Vista64 SP1, then more RAM. What kind of RAM are you running with now? 4 sticks of 1gig? DDR2800? Yadda yadda? Your board should be able to use and would probably love you if you went for at least 2 sticks of 2 gig each DDR2 1066 (4 gigs total) at the very least. If you have money to spend, go for 4 sticks of 2gig DDR2 1066. Go for sticks of 2gig RAM, not 4 sticks of 1gig.

Your 8800 GTS 512 is perfectly fine for now, and SLI'ing it with another will net you almost no improvement in WoW at all. Kicking it up to a Gforce GTX 200 series will only slightly improve your performance in Shattrath. A GTX 200 series will make the game as a whole look much better, but as for lagging in Shatt, you'll still be doing that.

So, vista64 service pack 1 90$, 2 sticks of 2gig each (upgrade that to 8 gigs total if you have an extra 90$) of DDR2 1066 90$. You should have little to no problems in Shattrath after that.

Also, I'll add that if you create separate folders for each WoW account, it will allow you to save different video and sound settings for each account so that you can pump up the settings on your main and lower the settings all the way down on your alts saving you a bit o RAM usage.

[Kicksome]

Just a quick note. I have Vista 64 with 6 gigs of ram, 8800gts, and a 6600 quad core. It's about 20% slower than my Vista 32 bit system with 4 gigs (3.5 usable) of memory. So don't expect Vista 64 bit and more memory to solve anything. It has to translate everything from 32 bit to 64 bit which causes overhead.

What was helpful for me was sharing 1 wow folder and a 10K RPM raptor hard drive. When you go into shat it has to load all the player models for each character in the city (and on each instance of wow) - that's why when there is no one in shat it probably works fine, but when lots of people are on it slows down big time.

[Lyonheart]

i have 64 ultimate and 4 gigs of fast ddr3 and have same issues in shat when its busy. I have a Q6850 extreme cpu as well .. so a very fast system. i think the only REAL fix for shat is going to a 5pc set up. I have tried setting up in dif folders and the same. I run smoother out of one folder for some reason.

I want to add that WotLK seems like it has more dense environments and I have a feeling ill be needing to go the multi PC rout if i want to see all the eye candy and multibox as well. ( I'm in beta )

[BGuru]

If you are wanting to buy hardware I think the most bang for your buck is getting a second hard drive and putting 4 of your 5 box on it. Here is a post of someone that bought a second drive Adding second hard drive made a world of difference.

Here is what you should do to optimize your Vista. First go to http://www.blackviper.com/WinVista/servicecfg.htm and use his safe config settings if you aren't too familiar with Windows services. I used his tweaked settings with no problem, but you might want to play it safe. Second use the graphics macros from wow in-game graphic detail macros (helps performance) I use the medium macro and never have lag.

Goodluck

[Naysayer]

i have 64 ultimate and 4 gigs of fast ddr3 and have same issues in shat when its busy. I have a Q6850 extreme cpu as well .. so a very fast system. i think the only REAL fix for shat is going to a 5pc set up. I have tried setting up in dif folders and the same. I run smoother out of one folder for some reason.

I want to add that WotLK seems like it has more dense environments and I have a feeling ill be needing to go the multi PC rout if i want to see all the eye candy and multibox as well. ( I'm in beta )

Could be your connection since your pc is slightly better than mine and I don't have that big of a problem in shattrath. About the only time I notice the pc start to choke up in Shatt is when I am just logging in next to the battleground npc areas and there are 50 people standing around, but the lag clears up after a bit.

vista64 sp1
q6600 2.4
4 x 2gig DDR2 1066
i do run 2 crossfired EAH4850's, but with 1 or 2 cards in the box the difference is minimal with WoW.

The problem multiboxers have with Shattrath is simply loading all the other players and, like RAM, connection speed also has a lot to do with that.

[HPAVC]

Many warlocks to summon has its benefits

[Mac]

Thanks for all the suggestions guys, I was hoping working toward a solution would be a little more straight forward, but apparently not. Money's not really the issue here, but it just makes sense to me to start with the lowest cost improvement first, and see what makes it better as I go.

The cheapest thing I can do is try running all from one folder. I had two so I could keep the setting separate for my main and clones, but I can try that to see if it would be playable, but it appears that just might be a bandaid looking at the expansion comming soon.

The ram I have right now is 2 x 2g DDR2 800. I suspected the ram running at 98% was not a good thing, so expected I would need to upgrade the OS so it would handle additional ram. Although some are saying it won't solve it because of the translation issues from 32 to 64 bit, looking around these two hardware forums it has helped more then those who said it didn't help. So, I think I might try that and see how it goes. Can I put 2 more 2g sticks of DDR2 1066 in with the DDR2 800 , or do all 4 sticks need to be the same 1066 ?

The HD I have is a Western Digital WD1600 Serial ATA 160 GB 7200 rpm , reading the other thread about adding another HD, do you think my HD is too slow? Swapping that out for a 10,000 rpm might help? I guess I could buy one and then that would give me two to try the other suggestion of moving alts to the second drive.

As for the OS, it looks like I will have to do a complete re-install, what folders from wow should I back up in order to copy back over when I do the re-installs to make the set up go faster, is it just wtf and addons? I just realized I'm not looking forward to re-installing everything again :wacko:

I wouldn't mind going for the 5 pc set up, but I'm concerned about the heat and electricity use, plus added complexity and maintainance of 5 pcs just for doing this, if I can do 5 on 1, it would be better I think.

[Mac]

ok , wen't shopping today, bought Vista Ultimate 64, but nobody had 4 g of 2x2g@1066, lots of 800, no 1066, so I guess I'll be buying that ram online.

Bought the second drive too, got a WD3000GLFSRTL Veloci Raptor SATA/300 10k rpm 16 mg buffer.

Question is, since I'm going to be reinstalling the OS, should I put it on the original drive and save this new faster one for the alts, or would I be better off making this the main drive, installing the OS on the new drive, and making the older drive the one for the alts? Also, I read somewhere people partition the drive and put the OS on one part, and install the applications on the other, would that help multi-boxing performance?

[Memn]

I have a similar setup that I was having the same issues with. (Q6600, XPSP2, 3GB Ram, 5 boxing) Basically, everything worked fine most of the time, until I went to a capitol city or Shattrah. I was already running off of a single install folder, and I have a top notch internet connection. I found the upgrade to a 64 bit OS + more RAM (I had 3 GB, I now have 6GB) made an IMMENSE difference. The Resource Manager tool in Vista is showing my memory usage with 5 clients at around 4.75 GB, so that is 1.75 GB worth of memory that my system was previously having to shuttle back and forth between RAM and a page file. I can now do mounted loops around the city without loosing a clone, whereas before I had gotten in the habit of stopping every few meters to let stragglers catch up. My disk usage is extremely low, so I don't think hard drive speed effects performance once you eliminate the page file hits.