Where is the weakness in my hardware set up.

[Arryth]

This is my current "main" rig I'm using my multibox WoW. I use this machine + keyclone + 2 moniters. Vista Home Premium is the OS. For isp I run on time warner cable premium highspeed internet for gaming, my computer is connected to the net via a router, that is connected to my cable modem. The game is showing my ping to be in the 150's most of the time, with all five instances of wow going at once. I use a single wow folder for all 5 instances. I assign two wow instances to one core, and one each to the remaining three cores.

My problem is, that when I'm running four or even worse all 5 of my wow instances on this machine, I'm getting some significant fps lag. When out of heavily PC populated areas its not bad at all, but in Shat its horrible, and can also be bad in other cities, though not as bad. My mains fps drops to 2-4, with severe shuttering and pauses in all windows, even with almost all addons disabled, and all graphics settings bottomed out, and sound disabled. I have the main window set to 30 fps when in front, and 8 when in the background, the others are set to 15, and 8 respectively. Having all toons look at just the ground does not seem to help with this. It can take me up to five min to get from the windrider in Shatt to the island portal when it gets bad.

I have tried getting one of those new speedy usb flash drives for the supposed Vista performance enhancer. (its an 8 gig one), which seems to have not helped. I have tried updating all of my drivers and have full windows updates. To my knowledge nothing is running in the background other then keyclone.

I use Nortons 360' for my virus protection and other stuff, as well as manually keeping clutter down. I have checked it over relentlessly for spyware, ect and I'm clean.

I can't seem to find my weakness here causing my lag. I have included my full computer specs below. I run Windows Vista Home Premium for my operating system on this. I use keyclone with maxamizer to have the lead account on monitor 1 in its own maxamized window, and the other four instances on monitor 2 in a four way split screen.


Here are my official specs.
Gaming Computers, Custom Gaming PC Systems, PC Gaming Rigs : Velocity Raptor™ DCX Custom Gaming Computer System

Weight: 75 lbs



Case

LXe-W Silver- Velocity Micro Signature Case - Pure Aluminum, side window, removable front door, extended depth

Power Supply
1200 Watt Velocity Micro® Power Supply - Nvidia® SLI™ Certified

Motherboard
EVGA nForce 680i SLI, Socket 775, PCI-E, DDR2

Processor
Intel® Core™ 2 Quad processor Q6600, quad 2.4GHz cores, 8MB L2 Cache

CPU Cooling
Arctic Cooling® Freezer 7 Pro Heatsink, Ultra Quiet Fan, Copper Heat Pipes, plus Arctic Silver™ 5 Thermal Compound

DDR2 Memory
4096MB Corsair Dominator DDR2-800 Twin2X2048-6400 with Dual-path Heat Xchange (4x1024)

PCX Video
1GB Diamond Radeon HD 2900XT HDMI/HDCP Velocity Micro Performance Edition (850w PSU Recommended)

Monitor
Velocity Micro™ W220 - 22" Monitor 1
HP 20 Inch w1907 as monitor 2

Audio
Creative Labs SoundBlaster® X-Fi™ XtremeAudio

Hard Drive 1
2 x 400GB Hitachi 7200rpm 16MB Cache SATA 300 w/NCQ - RAID 0 (800GB Total)

Optical Drive 1
20x Lite On® DVD+/-RW/CD-RW Dual Layer, Black Bezel

Floppy Drive & Media Reader
1.44MB Floppy Drive, Black

FireWire
2 Integrated IEEE 1394 FireWire Ports, 1 front & 1 rear

On-Line Gaming Accelerator
ONLY Integrated 10/100/1000MBps Gigabit Ethernet Network Adapter

USB 2.0 Ports
8 USB 2.0 Ports, 2 front & 6 rear (2 rear ports may be unavailable in some configurations due to available resources)

Operating System
Genuine Microsoft® Windows® Vista Home Premium 32-bit

Internal Cables
Rounded Silver Braided IDE and Floppy Cables

Keyboard
Velocity Micro™ Keyboard with Lighted Palm Rest - Black, USB

Mouse
Velocity Micro™ Ultimate Laser Mouse with 2400 dpi Resolution, USB

Assembly
Immaculate custom hand wiring by Senior Technicians, assembled in Richmond, Virginia, USA

Quality Assurance
Individual custom testing for complete system functionality, signed by the system builder and QA inspector

Documentation
Owner's Portfolio with Velocity Micro manual, driver disks, and accessory pack.


Where am i going wrong with my hardware, or am I making some stupid configuration errors? I have tried every thing I can think of to make this better, and remove the city lagging, but I just keep meeting with failure every time. Can any of you help me?

[Golle]

Ehm I think it's your graphic's card that is your weakness. Thought im not sure what equivalent to 2900 nvidia got, but that's the only reason i can think of.
Are you running vista 32 or 64 bits? I read in another thread about a guy with more ram then the computer could handle, making his graphics ram unused(slowing down his computer). For what i have understood 32 bits only supports a maximum of 4 gig ram+graphic ram.

Those are my thoughts and I hope they will be to any help for you.

[Arryth]

I hope its not my card.. I thaught I was getting a decent one when I had this built.

Keep the ideas coming. What should I switch to for cards? Should I use dual video cards with my set up as is?

[entoptic]

Hello,

I don't know anything about your video card however when I google it I see reviews from last year.

The rest of your system is awesome! The video card however is the weak point but before I saw go get a new video card lets try somethings first!

1. Change the non active window framerate to 5 from 8. Not much of a difference but it helps.

2. Disable all addons from all accounts and try again. If it starts to work then its a case of to many addons loaded. I know for a fact that if I use the new version of questhelper it will drop fps like MAD!

3. Check your system temp and speed of the fans. Go download speedfan and let me know if you see any flames next to anything. (it will explain itselfs once you install it)

4. Well I am pretty certain its addons... so go back to step 2.

Let me know how this turns out. :thumbsup:

[weedelf]

I don't think it's your video card. Do you have video settings set to max in WoW? That could help a bit if you lower a few settings for it. Another idea is, perhaps using a second wow folder. Just copy it over to a new folder and have that folder run on low settings, that way you can keep your original settings if you ever want to just have 1 instance of wow open.

I use the maxfps and minfps options in octopus, not sure what you are using but it seems to help, look into that as well. I run 4 instances of WoW with a much weaker video card just fine, in big cities I'll get a slight pause once in a while but nothing near 2-3 fps. But then again, I'm on windowsXP...

Good luck.

[Arryth]

I have all video settings set to as low as the ingame sliders will allow, and all special video featured disabled. I also disable the sound. I do use a fairly large amount of add ons though.

[Xzin]

The AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT is a direct competitor to the 8800, which is a very solid video card, still.

[weedelf]

I have all video settings set to as low as the ingame sliders will allow, and all special video featured disabled. I also disable the sound. I do use a fairly large amount of add ons though.

ya, addons will be a factor as well, although i'm not sure why your fps is that low still unless you seriously have tons and tons of addons. I just use alphamap, thotbot, and partyquests.

[entoptic]

The AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT is a direct competitor to the 8800, which is a very solid video card, still.

With seeing that answer then I am firm in my belief that is it your addons.

[Xzin]

Try launching without your addons on at all and see. Simple to test.