New computer has been purchased - specs, rationale, and thanks

[Owltoid]

Sorry for the OS drama, but I called them back and asked them to install Vista Premium. $105 later but with peace of mind. Now watch later today it is announced retail Windows 7 is available in June 2009 :cursing:

[-silencer-]

Sorry for the OS drama, but I called them back and asked them to install Vista Premium. $105 later but with peace of mind. Now watch later today it is announced retail Windows 7 is available in June 2009 :cursing:

That definitely WON'T happen. MS learned their lesson from releasing Vista early.. if Win7 isn't fully polished upon release, I'd be shocked. If anything, they'll try to make the Holiday season, but I'd bet the odds are greater than 50:50 that it gets delayed to mid-2010. Mid-2009 isn't happening, so you've got nothing to worry about.. I've completely enjoyed Vista on my new machine.

[Freddie]

I like Vista too. I dual-boot back and forth between XP and Vista all day on my main machine, and I much prefer when I'm in Vista.

But maybe I'm weird -- I like UAC. I'm hoping there will be a completely un-nerfed setting for it in Windows 7.

[-silencer-]

Your knowledge is enormously valuable, and I wish I had known what you know to warn Owltoid in time. It's a lucky thing having you on this board.

But I want to defend the "idiot-user reviews on newegg." They are good for revealing certain kinds of facts but not others. They have to be read with discretion.

One of the things they are good at revealing is a product's inability to do something it's advertised to do. Ordinary customers notice this kind of thing easily. (Of course they often make mistakes about this so their complaints have to be investigated further. But they are good at ringing warning bells.)

That's the kind of problem we have here. So why did the Newegg reviews fail in this case? (If they did, I didn't read them.) Probably because these boards aren't selling in large numbers yet and because relatively few people are installing 12 GB in them.

If this had happened next year, when far more reviews will exist and far more people will have installed 12 GB of RAM, I think the Newegg reviews would have revealed this problem.

Thanks..
I love Newegg, but it's unfortunate that they don't have staff reviewing the reviews properly. I can't tell you how many times I see elaborate posts by people claiming to have "high" tech knowledge posting comments that are flatly wrong. (The 32-bit vs 64-bit memory issue is a BIG one.) For every 1 valuable review on Newegg, there are dozens that have to be completely ignored.. which is why I thoroughly research a product on professional reveiwer sites first - anandtech.com, xbitlabs.com, tomshardware.com, silentpcreview.com are some of my favorites, and forums with good info include hardforum.com, forums.extremeoverclocking.com, and overclockers.com. I go to the review sites to get generally good info on specific products, then search forums for detailed info on who's used specific components.

Anandtech.com has an article from Nov/Dec comparing X58 boards, and they had problems with MSI's X58 Eclipse even running well on 12GB memory (even though MSI said it was supported). Anandtech worked very hard with manufacturers to get them to push newer BIOS out, so hopefully many of those issues have been fixed. At any rate, if this machine is being built by someone else, they should notice that it's not working properly if the BIOS and 12GB are having issues. The manufacturer's comments are that no gamer should use 12GB, since generally the more memory you put in a machine, the slower you can overclock it. While true, there are certain aspects of gaming where more memory helps over pure memory speed - like multiboxing.

[Owltoid]

Thanks for your help, Silencer. I read a few articles on Anandtech regarding the X58 motherboards. It seems in early December everything was coming out crap and the reviews were pretty awful. However, good news is that I saw a review dated near the end of December that mentioned the RAM problems had been 98% solved. I have no idea if I'm going to get a "good" mobo, but at least buyxg.com should do some thorough testing beforehand. Once the new rig arrives I may ask for advice on checking my components to see if everything is working properly (i.e. is it recognizing all 12GB and utilitzing them). At least I know that it has an OS coming... once you mentioned mobo problems I thought that was the last straw and I wanted to get it, turn it on, and if something was wrong immediately call them for support. If I had to install my own OS then I wouldn't know if I screwed something up or if they did.

[jettzypher]

i didnt say every choice made was bad. i agree that many things he bought was a great choice. still doesnt deny the fact that some things are unnecessary. /point

[Owltoid]

The new computer arrived and I have played on it for one night. Here are a few of my observations:

1.) The OS was installed on the SSD and made the default drive. Although there wasn't any bloatware, and Office 2007 was promptly uninstalled, a large portion of the 64GB was already used. After installing WoW, I have 20GB left... I'm a bit shocked and unsure what is taking up so much space.

2.) Boot-up time is fast, but nothing mind blowing. WoW loads just as fast, but in cities there isn't that extra 2 min trying to load 5 clients at once. I have only tested this in Shat and will test in Dalaran this weekend. Other simple applications, such as internet browsing, seem to be much faster, but that could be because I'm used to my system struggling with WoW while browsing the internet.

3.) Shutting down the computer seems to take a much longer time than I'm used to. I'm not sure why or if there is a tweak I need to do. I have told the computer to not use a pagefile on the SSD, but to use one on the data drive. Defrag, prefetch, and superfetch is turned off. I have not messed with the Windows backup because I'm not sure what that really does. Also, I turned off hibernation mode which did seem to free space on my small SSD.

4.) I tried all video settings in Shat on high and it was pretty laggy. Please note that this is before I turned the maxfpsbk to 10, so the computer may have really been straining to get maximum FPS out of all clients. Although I should have tested it incrementally, instead I turned the settings to good (75%) and set my background FPS to 10. It works extremely smoothly and I haven't seen any lag since. It's amazing how much of the game I was missing playing on the lowest video settings (especially view distance). Note that I play at 1360x768 settings since I'm sitting so far back from my TV... many wouldn't dream of playing at that low of resolution so it may not be an accurate measure.

5.) While I was doing my initial testing in Shat (on high video settings) I took a look at the resource monitor. Eight processors are shown and the first two out of the eight were at full utilization while the other 6 looked low (under 25%). There were some reponses about setting the affinity in the other thread I commented on, but I want to do some research into hyperthreading and get more input before I mess with the default settings.

6.) The computer is very quiet. Between the water cooling and the SSD it's very hard to hear it over my laptop or regular noise. The biggest difference in noise is my keyboard which apparently isn't the quiet key type like my laptop.

7.) I used to experience a little bit of problem with summoning my treants. I believe this is due to HKN trying to quickly switch between each window and my computer just not being able to handle it. That problem is gone and the treants summon smoothly... it's wonderful. That's probably my favorite aspect of the new computer and I can't wait to get all 5 of my moonkins going at once. However, mouseover healing still seems to be buggy and I'm wondering what's going on. I'm going to chat with Freddie about it and hopefully get a system that works nearly 100% of the time.


I'm happy with my system and think that it will run 5 clients at enjoyable video settings without much problem. I'm getting a bit burned out on leveling which is coming at an unfortunate time... pally tanks are so damn boring that it's like work to quest, but I'm sick of running BC instances. I may just say screw it and start running 5 druids... hopefully one as a tank and one as a healer is doable in the heroic world. Although I have yet to go to Dalaran, so far RAM isn't even close to an issue. When my computer was laggy due to the high settings and not setting maximum background FPS, the used RAM was still less than 6GB. That may change when I go to Dalaran, but I can't imagine it getting anywhere near 12GB. Really I think the current bottleneck is figuring out to get all the processors working at once instead of beating the hell out of one core.

[Memn]

Thanks for keeping us up to date on your progress Owl. As far as the affinity goes, I recomment just setting each window to all 8 cores. This lets windows decide how to run each. By default. Blizz just sets each instance to the first two cores.

In KeyClone, you would set the affinity mask to FF in keyclone.ini.

You can also try setting the affinity mask to 255 in wow's configuration file.

You can manually set the affinity by right clicking on each wow instance in Task Manager and selecting the option to set the processor affinity - then selecting all cores.

[Freddie]

Eight processors are shown and the first two out of the eight were at full utilization while the other 6 looked low (under 25%).

That's a picture of what Memn described in words. By default, WoW restricts itself to the first two cores, so all five WoW instances are running to full capacity on just those two cores and bottlenecking. Meanwhile the other six cores have practically nothing to do. It's sort of like driving a Ferrari with the pedal to the floor, but with most of the spark plugs disconnected.

This default setting (which is programmed deliberately by Blizzard) is horrible. The only way you could invent a worse setting would be to restrict all your WoWs to one core. I agree with Memn that the best thing you can do right now is set every WoW to run on all eight cores. That will be pretty close to optimal because (like Memn says) it gives maximum latitude to the operating system's thread scheduler to optimize things. Later if you want you can experiment and fine tune it.

If you choose to set your affinity that way, the HotkeyNet command (for each window) is

<SetAffinity all>

[Owltoid]

Thanks, Freddie, it works like a charm! Every once in awhile one of the eight processors will get to 90%, but it's definitely load balancing on all cores and working very smoothly.

On another note, I again tested turning my video settings to maximum on all clients. Once again I got massive lag. However, by turning the settings to "good" (about 75%) and still having maximum view distance, there is hardly any lag with 3 toons in Dalaran and 2 toons in Shat (haven't tried all 5 in Dalaran yet). I think it could be my video card just not being able to handle 5x high settings... the CPU looks fine, RAM looks fine, but the FPS drops below 5 when trying to move around in Dalaran with 5 accounts running.

Thanks again to everyone for their help. Slowly but surely everything is getting tweaked. The only outstanding issue is whether to disable the recovery and why there is such a long shut-down time.