Any tricky ways to handle Dalaran x5?

[puppychow]

fwiw I was unhappy with dalaran performance a few days after Wrath. I was running 5x on a dualcore OC'd to 2.5ghz and a 8800GT w/ 4 gigs of RAM (3 gigs under XP). I moved first to this config:

PC1: c2duo 2.1ghz (unOC) w/ 8800GT and 3 gigs, running 3 clients with symlink'd WoW data\ folders
PC2: AMD dual core (4100? something like that, around 1-2 years old) with 2 gigs of RAM and 7950, running 2 clients with symlink'd WoW data\ folders

That ran ok for the most part, Dalaran still sucked but other stuff was a bit better, esp instances.

I upgraded a week ago to Vista64, added 4 gigs ($25AR from newegg!) to PC1, moved 2 gigs from PC1 to PC2 (so PC1 now has 6 gigs). I was a little hesitant that PC1 was going to suffer performance problems with Vista64, after all its a dual core PC thats nearly 2 years old now. But nope, no problems, Vista64 installed (new install, didnt upgrade) without a problem and Octopus/WoW are running fine. I don't really think Vista64 has improved anything a lot, but its nice having 64 bit and more memory to use up.

I still do get 6-15fps in Dalaran, but I don't have any load problems and all my guys have their hearth set to Dalaran. The nice thing is when I just want to play a single person I do so on PC1 (all 5 wow dirs exist on there too), only when I bring up all 5 does PC2 come into play.

Each of the machines has less than $600 in parts in it, probably even cheaper now, so its a fairly barebones cheap setup. The other nice thing is that in the future I can build a new cheap quadcore machine w/ 4870 or 260+, make PC1 into PC2 (and retire existing PC2) and I should be able to hit 30-60fps in Dalaran no problem.

[pengwynman]

I run a 5man and I can't go to dalaran for more than 5minutes. My screens artifacts like crazy after it lags in 5 minutes.

8800gtx
Dualcore E6600
4gig ram
3 harddrives 2/2/1 accounts

i would assume that the reason for this is heat. i have an 8800gtx in my old comp and i know it runs hot as hell, i can't imagine running 5x wows on it

[Hachoo]

Well eventually I plan on upgrading to a 64 bit OS, 8GB of memory, and a quad core 2.5GHz processor (and overclock it to 3+GHz), but I'm the single breadwinner in my family and support my wife and daughter and we have a lot of other bills and its christmas time so a lot of money spent on presents, so buying half a new computer at this point (and in this economy) would be a pretty dumb thing for me to do Guess I'll just suck it up for now and hope they fix dalaran and then maybe next year sometime look at upgrading. I don't ever want to use more than 1 PC to play WoW, for multiple reasons.

[blast3r]

I hear a lot of people get horrible FPS in Dalaran. I think the best solution is to upgrade to a 64 bit OS and then get 8 gigs or better of memory. I bought a new i7 processor based computer with vista 64 and upgraded the memory to a total of 9 gigs and I have no issues at all with lag or FPS. Even raids on cities don't slow me down. With 8 gigs of memory you literally have enough storage in memory where you don't even need a hard disk swap file. I really don't think there are a lot of workarounds that would make enough of a difference with Dalaran. Shatt maybe but not this baby.

[welwyn]

just as a side note blast3r.. are the new i7 CPUs that good? i can understand the logic behind them but over say a duel core 3.2 to an i7 2.66 OC'ed to 3.2 what would be the performance improvement do you think? thats assuming you meant with similar specced other parts ( 6 gig ram atm was thinking of going for 12gig on the i7 system if its worth it?)

[Rin]

Ahh, the i7.. I was hoping someone would mention this.

I'm going to be building another comp here next week (to go along with my initial comp... specs on comp 1 are: 8 gbs RAM, e6600, vista 64, and an Nvidia card that I couldn't even begin to tell you the number of while I'm at work here... it ran me around $350ish, 1 year ago)

What I'm planning on building is as follows:

i7 920 processor (g/f gave me one of my xmas gifts )
12 GBs DDR3 RAM, PC-12800 spec
?? Video Card(s).. (I'm not opposed to buying two, but read my note below)

What I'm wondering is as follows:

1. SLI is currently not an option because I *NEED* to have 2 monitors running together (try doing web programming without two monitors... it sucks, trust me... and I don't want to have to unplug a monitor every time I wish to play WoW, UNLESS it's my only option). From what I've seen (one of my friends runs a SLI setup), you can only have 1 monitor active at a time w/ SLI... If theres a way around this, I would like to hear it

2. What would it take (theory crafting here) to run 10 WoW copies on 1 computer with 30 fps (min) in Dalaran? Could a single i7 Processor + 12 GBS of RAM + (the video cards you mention) handle it with 2 monitors running? Thoughts? I can currently run all 10 copies of wow on 1 computer (but the FPS begins to diminish at like 8 copies or so on my machine listed above - the 8 gb one); RAM doesn't seem to be the issue, but the gfx card does, and I'm assuming it has something to do with both monitors running.

Thank you

[Bovidae]

I have a strange relationship with FPS in Dalaran. When I first went there at 72 (mage port) I got game crashes nearly constantly. As the days went by, therse crashes came less and less frequently. Between crashes, I was getting about 5fps across all screens. As time went on, my framerate has inproved on a near daily basis. Perhaps it's lower traffic, but I cant complain about 20-10-10 fps that I get now (with the slaves capped at 10, and the main open ended)

System specs Q6600@3.0ghz, 8gb DDR2-800, 8800gts, Raptor 150gb, dual 1680x1050 monitors

[king.pa]

try to build a raid array ...
it works like a charm
I'm considering adding a third disk to my raid array...to increase loading time and decrease amount of freeze

[blast3r]

just as a side note blast3r.. are the new i7 CPUs that good? i can understand the logic behind them but over say a duel core 3.2 to an i7 2.66 OC'ed to 3.2 what would be the performance improvement do you think? thats assuming you meant with similar specced other parts ( 6 gig ram atm was thinking of going for 12gig on the i7 system if its worth it?)

I don't have any benchmarks to compare but I have noticed a huge improvement in pretty much anything I do with this new system. When you set affinity it shows 8 cores (even though it really isn't 8 but is hyperthreading). I set affinity to 2 cpus for each client and my main gets all of them. 9 gigs is enough but 12 gigs is even better!

[OzPhoenix]

I think it's pretty clear that Dalaran is the litmus test for any multiboxer setup, especially for those of us running 5 or more clients.

I can get around in Dalaran without any problems, even hearthing in, but it's noticeable that it's pushing a lot more through the system than anywhere out in the world.

Quad-core 3.0ghz, 8gig ram, 64vista, nvidia 9800gtx card here.

I don't see how it would be possible really to run Dalaran well inside a 32it OS, given the memory limitations.