QFT. Fine.. I'll explain in small words. Sorry for the attack, but people are spending a lot of money on advice here for a fast system and I'm tired of seeing post after post of info that is simply WRONG.Originally Posted by 'Drizzit',index.php?page=Thread&postID=103542#post 103542
I never said anything about 32 vs 64-bit since only 2GB of memory was listed. I was talking about more than 2GB of memory, which means boosting to 4GB. 4GB is *much* better than 2GB even if you can't squeeze out the last bit of the 4GB in 32-bit Windows. Also, faster speed does NOT mean faster access. Faster speed allows higher memory bandwidth, but that's rarely EVER the bottleneck in a computer and doesn't have much of a performance increase at all. Your water analogy is a bit miscalculated. A better analogy would be, we have two liters of water to pour with 2 instances of WoW. We have a pipe with 5 feet diameter and a pipe with 7 feet diameter. They're both HUGE pipes and won't affect the speed of such small amount of water worth noticing. Again, memory bandwidth isn't the issue. The ironic thing here, another case that proves you shouldn't be giving hardware advice, is that faster memory actually has SLOWER "access" times. Look at how latency (delay) increases as memory gets faster. My DDR2-675 is running at 4-4-4-12 timings. There aren't very many bang-for-the-buck DDR2-1066 sticks running at those low timings. Most DDR2-1066 is 5-5-5-15 or 5-5-5-18.Originally Posted by 'Drizzit',index.php?page=Thread&postID=103542#post 103542
By your logic of "wasting" money by going to DDR3-1333 or DDR3-1600 memory, why should he waste money going from DDR2-800 to DDR2-1066 for a 1-3% performance increase? Again, the memory bandwidth isn't the bottleneck. The money spent is better used in about 5 other places than memory speed.Originally Posted by 'Drizzit',index.php?page=Thread&postID=103542#post 103542
You're way over your head here. You seem to think speed is a single measurement. We're talking about multiboxing WoW, not transferring very large media files. Here's your lesson on RAID0 striping vs access times on hard drives:Originally Posted by 'Drizzit',index.php?page=Thread&postID=103542#post 103542
There are two primary measurements of hard drive speed: access time (the delay it takes to locate the beginning of a file on a hard drive) and transfer rate (the amount of MB/s the drive can read).
In WoW, we are not dealing with large data files, but rather thousands of very small files (actually file locations within large data files). This means that access time for each of those files is far more important than how long it takes to transfer one large file.
RAID0 increases *transfer rate* (faster) which means that large files can be moved at higher bandwidth (not 2x, but more like 1.3-1.5x). This is very good for large data files that are not fragmented - like MP3s, Videos, a game terrain map, etc.
RAID0 slightly increases *access time* (slower) since we have to find the beginning of the file shared across both drives.
Now, back to the discussion. Your OS and background tasks will access the swap file on your hard drive during gameplay. You do NOT want this swap file on the same drive (or RAID array) you're trying to access thousands of little files. The map load times will be improved with a RAID0 setup, but the lag in cities is caused by WoW having to fetch hundreds (or thousands) of object/texture files. Most of this "lag" is caused by the delay in having to locate every file on the drive, not from the actual transfer rate of each file. Having the OS and swap space on the same disk while all this is going on is just causing more "lag." I was using two 36GB raptors in a RAID0 array for a long time, then tried them as separate drives - one for OS/swap, and one for 5 WoW installs with symlinks to the data directory on the first WoW install. The separate drive setup was much better for reducing lag in cities, at the cost of slightly slower map load times. That's a sacrifice that's well worth making for WoW, which is why I'm now using two 150GB Raptors independently. In the future, I'm going to add a couple 300GB Velociraptors in RAID0 and put WoW on those, but I'll then configure my two 150GB Raptors in RAID0 for the OS/swap space. I didn't say RAID0 is bad. I was stating that if you only have two hard drives, it's better to make sure the OS/swap space is on a different drive than your WoW install to prevent HDD head thrashing.
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