Intel Core i7 Quads!!!!!!!!!!!

[Multibocks]

adequate being keyword.

Look I'm not looking for "adequate" - I'm looking for the most badass computer you can assemble (short of the Skulltrail stuff) for a reasonable price (4k is reasonable to me.) As for your response to it's 8 cores the hyperthreading isn't vaporware this time, check a few articles on it most of what I have read says that the editors are actually impressed this time around.

[not5150]

Heh, you really don't know where I work do you?

You want to spend serious bucks on the newest gear... I understand that. I've gone down that road before.

But, you'll soon find a point of diminishing returns and the Core i7 won't be the silver bullet that you are looking for. I know, I'm staring at a few Core i7 cpus/mobos at work and a shiny new Falcon Northwest machine. Great for video rendering, but guess what folks still laggy in Shatt because of ... you got it ... a hard drive.

Good chip, yup. But multiboxing WoW isn't CPU limited, especially with regular quad-core. You may get a few frames per second increase. If this justifies spending the thousands of bucks on a new machine, then more power to you.

[puppychow]

Please Please Please please visit Dalaran with your current config and 5 box, and then visit Dalaran when you get your i7. I would love to hear what the difference turns out to be. I'm finding cities in Northrend, even small ones like Vengeance Landing but especially Dalaran, lag to hell and back 5 boxing. I get 40-50 FPS on my 2 year old dual core in most of Northrend, but it drops to 5 fps and lower in Dalaran

Also you may want to seriously look at the new Intel SSDs, the price is dropping to under $500 for the 80GB model Nov 30th I believe. Its supposed to be really awesome, and you can even put the OS on it. I think this is the MLC, the SLCs are due out next year? dunno. Multi vs single layer, don't really know what that means though, I assume the way the data is stored on the drive.

[Noids99]

mmm and even better than the intel ssd is the ioxtreme aka gamer iodrive. Not out until next year, but this will hopefully make city lag a thing of the past.

Cheers

[weeep]

Multiboxed WoW is not CPU limited. I've never seen my Q9550@3.6GHz loaded higher than 80%, usually it is around 50-60%. I'm running 5 box with 2560x1600 res on main screen and 1280x1024 secondary screen, and the ONLY thing that raises my fps is lowering graphic settings. I have 4870 1Gb and even though my slaves are running at lowest possible res with lowest details (slightly lowered high settings for main), GPU load is always at 100%. I'd say that getting more GPU power is more important.

A Q9550 is a great cpu, you need a good balance of CPU/GPU. Downgrade your cpu to a Q6600 and tell me how that goes.
are you using dualview? spanned? vista?

im currently using 8800GTS 640MB/9600GT 512MB/Q6600 to quadbox, using both videocards give me a small boost in fps but not huge.
Places with high mob/people concentration is more of a cpu limitation than gpu.

Yes, I did upgrade from Q6600 and the performance gain is not that great. You are probably using it at default clock and mine was overclocked to 3.2GHz. I did the upgrade because of huge L2 cache and better overclocking capabilities (current 3.6GHz is mobo limited, I'm sure it can hit 4GHz with something better). If you are against overclocking then yes, current inexpensive quads are not enough to run 5box smoothly in major cities at default clock, and same priced core i7 should do better.
I'm running it on vista64 with desktop extended to 2nd monitor and my slave windows on it.

[Multibocks]

Heh, you really don't know where I work do you?

You want to spend serious bucks on the newest gear... I understand that. I've gone down that road before.

But, you'll soon find a point of diminishing returns and the Core i7 won't be the silver bullet that you are looking for. I know, I'm staring at a few Core i7 cpus/mobos at work and a shiny new Falcon Northwest machine. Great for video rendering, but guess what folks still laggy in Shatt because of ... you got it ... a hard drive.

Good chip, yup. But multiboxing WoW isn't CPU limited, especially with regular quad-core. You may get a few frames per second increase. If this justifies spending the thousands of bucks on a new machine, then more power to you.

Actually pricing up a quad core with similar mobo and ram is more than the i7 I want to get. Another thing is I plan to buy the intel MLC drive from newegg when I get my comp just for my wow folder.

[puppychow]

Yes, I did upgrade from Q6600 and the performance gain is not that great. You are probably using it at default clock and mine was overclocked to 3.2GHz. I did the upgrade because of huge L2 cache and better overclocking capabilities (current 3.6GHz is mobo limited, I'm sure it can hit 4GHz with something better). If you are against overclocking then yes, current inexpensive quads are not enough to run 5box smoothly in major cities at default clock, and same priced core i7 should do better.
I'm running it on vista64 with desktop extended to 2nd monitor and my slave windows on it.

What kind of FPS do you get when you are in Dalaran on your multibox team? I currently get between 4-8FPS on a c2duo @ 2.4ghz (OC'd), 8800GT w/ 512MB, and OCZ SSD with the data folder on it. Used to get around 30 FPS in Shattrah same rig too. This is with video settings on all windows lowered as far as they will go too

It'd be great to build some data points so we can see how much FPS c2duos, Q6600s, Q9550s, and I7's do in Dalaran, and what effects CPUs, GPUs and SSDs have on it.

[weeep]

Yes, I did upgrade from Q6600 and the performance gain is not that great. You are probably using it at default clock and mine was overclocked to 3.2GHz. I did the upgrade because of huge L2 cache and better overclocking capabilities (current 3.6GHz is mobo limited, I'm sure it can hit 4GHz with something better). If you are against overclocking then yes, current inexpensive quads are not enough to run 5box smoothly in major cities at default clock, and same priced core i7 should do better.
I'm running it on vista64 with desktop extended to 2nd monitor and my slave windows on it.

What kind of FPS do you get when you are in Dalaran on your multibox team? I currently get between 4-8FPS on a c2duo @ 2.4ghz (OC'd), 8800GT w/ 512MB, and OCZ SSD with the data folder on it. Used to get around 30 FPS in Shattrah same rig too. This is with video settings on all windows lowered as far as they will go too

Not in Dalaran yet, but I was getting around 50 fps in Shattrah and Org mailbox even in peak hours on high pop server. I'll try and check it because your results are quite surprising

[weeep]

BTW I dont think that hard drive is an issue if you use symlinking for all accounts. I'm using regular HDD and 8Gb ram with page file turned off and I dont experience any extreme HDD activity. Loading times are almost instant (I have only 1 addon for slaves and porting to Shatt or just initial loading takes like 2-3 seconds)

[Multibocks]

so this is strange, I've always thought of turning off pagefile, but this says it's a really bad idea. Enlighten me please!