Where should I start upgrading to handle shatt / outlands ?

[Mac]

ty for the reply with your experience so far. I was thinking a wiki page on performance might be nice to have.

The OS + ram was going to be my first steps to improve the problem, like you and some of the others, I feel the ram starvation is the main culprit here. I also found the answer to my ram question. You can mix ram speeds, but it will only run at the slowest speed. So, I have 4g DDr2 800, I'm trying to decide if I should buy the whole 8g of previously reccomended 1066, which nobody seems to have around here, or just get another 4g of 800 to match what I already have.

I still have this question.

I have this shiney new raptor 10k rpm 300g hard drive, and since I am going to have to do a complete OS re-install anyway, does it make more sense to make the 10k rpm the master that I put the OS on and possibly move the alts to the slower drive that is now the master, or the opposite, keep it the way it is and move the alts to the secondary faster drive?

The secondary question was if there was a performance benifit of partitioning the master drive and loaded the os on one partition and the apps on another, or would that slow things down ?

[BGuru]

I would leave the old hard drive alone and install Vista64 on the new drive and just switch the boot drive in the bios. That way you can boot to Vista32 for any game you might want to play in the future that wont work with Vista64. I would put my pagefile on the D drive also.

[Mac]

Ok, let me see if I get your idea.

Install the new 10k rpm drive and make it the master so now its the C drive. Keep XP ( don't h ave vista there atm) on the old drive, now its the slave D drive. Then move pagefile to the D drive, did I get that right?

Question is, if the master drive is Vista 64 bit, will it recognize the slave as XP 32bit?

I guess this means you don't think I'd get much performance out of having the alts on the second drive.

Note: Got the 8 gig of DDR3 1066 ram, now its just a matter of reinstalling the OS.

[Mac]

Still have the question about re-installing everything once I get the OS re-installed.

What of my current wow set up can I back up to make the re-install go faster so I don't loose keybinds, macros, etc.

I know I will BU my Keyclone folder. I was thinking of just backing up each wow directory I'm currently using , but at a minimum I think the WTF and Addons folders, anything else?

Edit: Found answer here

[Mac]

I would leave the old hard drive alone and install Vista64 on the new drive and just switch the boot drive in the bios. That way you can boot to Vista32 for any game you might want to play in the future that wont work with Vista64. I would put my pagefile on the D drive also.

[s]I had a question about this, when you have two drives in the same box, don't you need to set the jumper on one to be master and one slave? How does that work in your suggestion?[/s]

Edit: disabled the old drive, installed the new drive and the os, enabled the old drive and it can be seen in vista. So my question now is, do I have to go to the bios if I want to boot in windows XP that was installed on the original drive, or is there a better way to do that?

[Mac]

upgraded to vista ulti 64 on new raptor 10k rpm drive, 8 gig ddr2 800 ram.

Game is multibox playable again for me in the outlands. Frame rate still drops down in the 20s though in shatt, but alts don't drop follow, and I don't have to stop and wait for them to catch up every couple of steps.

Thanks for the help all.

[entoptic]

upgraded to vista ulti 64 on new raptor 10k rpm drive, 8 gig ddr2 800 ram.

Game is multibox playable again for me in the outlands. Frame rate still drops down in the 20s though in shatt, but alts don't drop follow, and I don't have to stop and wait for them to catch up every couple of steps.

Thanks for the help all.

Wow I am running almost the exact same thing you have and my preformance is way WAY higher. Do you have your FPS setup correctly in keyclone?

[Mac]

upgraded to vista ulti 64 on new raptor 10k rpm drive, 8 gig ddr2 800 ram.

Game is multibox playable again for me in the outlands. Frame rate still drops down in the 20s though in shatt, but alts don't drop follow, and I don't have to stop and wait for them to catch up every couple of steps.

Thanks for the help all.

Wow I am running almost the exact same thing you have and my preformance is way WAY higher. Do you have your FPS setup correctly in keyclone?

By the way your asking the question, I would guess I am not. Can you explain how you do it and I'll follow up with what I have when I get home. I think I just followed the recommendations that others have mentioned about their clones min and max fps settings, but I could have totally screwed that up. I'm not above admitting I'm not as good at this as everyone else seems to be around here, but I keep trying

[letxtc]

I too was struggling with low fps while trying to box my 4 accounts. Here is the long story of my setup and the different things I tried to boost FPS.

Vista ultimate 64-bit
Q6600 @ 2.4
8gb ram (800mhz)
500gb 7200rpm 32mb cache HD
BFG 8800 gtx 768mb
Running main on 22” LCD ( 1680*1050 )
Running bots on 17” LCD ( 1024*768 )
I run 4 wow folders (wow1, wow2…) with symbolic links on the data and cache folders from wow1. This allows me to run different mods on each account and set different video settings on all accounts. My main will run with fully loaded settings apart from the terrain view distance that I have that set to half. Bots run with everything set to the lowest.

The mods I use are as follows:
Main:
Bongo bars
Xperl unit frames
Questhelper
Titanbar
Whisper Relay
Cartographer

Bots:
Bongo bars
Xperl unit frames
Questhelper

Running the symbolic links may have given me a few extra frames note sure as I was not taking notes. However the load times were greatly reduced.

I run core affinity set to the following.
Core 0 – OS only
Core1 – Main
Core 2 - Bots 2 and 3
Core 3 - Bots 4 (and some day 5)

Running an account across all four cores had a negative impact on my performance. Doubling up the bots on single cores corrected it. My single core that runs two accounts right now will fluctuate from 70-100% for that single core. Now that is not total system usage just what is registering from the single core graph. For me this seems high but I have not figured out how to reduce it. I have a lemon of a q6600 and have been unable to OC it very high. I am testing running at 2.6ghz right now and can see that it buys me a few fps. I just have to see how stable it will be and go up from there.


Now I am in no way proficient with configuring octopus so those with more experience please do chime in.

Running main full screen on the 22” and bots use ¾ of the 17” I was getting poor frame rates. I had capped my bots to 15fps and my main at 60fps. Yet I was only able to get 20-30 fps. In Shatt I would go into the single digits.

Now when I say I was running the main at full screen it really was not. I play in windowed mode so that I can move my mouse from one screen to the next to perform manual tasks on the bots. Choosing loot, quests dialogues ect. In windowed mode the start menu and taskbar would always show as the option in windows was always on top. This bothered me as it covered part of my wow screen. I modified the maximizer so that the main screen was compressed a tiny bit to accommodate for the task bar and start menu. I thought that it was unavoidable as I did not really want to turn of the taskbar always on top option off.

However after some experimenting I found that if I set the screen resolution to the full 1680*1050 of the monitor and turn off the always on top option I gained a significant performance increase. My FPS went up to 30-60fps on my main. In shatt my FPS can go into the 30s. I guess rendering the game plus the taskbar was too much for it.

Anyway I thought I would add my experiences thus far to this thread, as some of the fixes seemed quite obscure to me.

I am at work trying to write this on the sly. Sorry for typos and such.
Oh and sorry for the wall of text.