How to spread out to all 4 cores?

[Clovis]

I just upgraded from a dual core E6850 (3.0ghz) to a quad Q9550 (2.83ghz) and so far the performance improvement has been minimal - I'm seeing slightly higher FPS and my toons aren't breaking off of /follow in Northrend but when I look at my task manager, performance tab it shows cores 1 and 2 maxed out but cores 3 and 4 barely being used. Overall CPU usuage varies between 55-75% with 5 instances of WOW.

Is there a way to spread out the usuage so all 4 cores are being evenly used?

My other system specs are 8 gigs of DDR2 ram and a GeForce 8800 GTS GPU w/ 640 megs of video ram.

CPU temps run between 38 and 50 degrees C after I replaced the stock HSF with a artic cooler freezer extreme (with the stock cooler it ran at 45 degrees at Idle and 75 with just one instance of wow, causing warning beeps.

Thanks,

-Clov

[Valdemarick]

I know that with keyclone, you can configure each character's client to be allocated to a seperate core. Not sure how to control that outside of this specific software though.

[Clovis]

I use keyclone but I'm unaware how to allocate that - how is it done?

[Clovis]

Ahh, the power of google I didn't find the answer for specifically Keyclone but I did find out how to do it in windows - I'm not sure if this is specific to Vista but I imagine it's the same for XP.

Go to task manager (ctrl-alt-delete), click on processesses, select the wow.exe instances, right click and "set affinity" - click all of the CPUs (0-3 in my case). -- Previously only the first 2 cores were selected instead of all 4 - no CPU usuage is overall lower and spread out much more evenly.

After selecting each wow client to use all 4 cores, I saw an immediate increase in performance frame rate wise - I haven't yet tried setting each wow to it's own core (which would require 1 core to run 2 instances, or having 2 cores run 3, ect since I'm running 5 instances total).



Thanks!



-Clov

[Sam DeathWalker]

I still take the position that a higher clock rate dual core is better then a "higher rated" but low clock rate quad core for wow.

The CPU is not what limits frame rates in this game, its moveing textures to the GPU.

[Clovis]

Well, the difference between 3.0ghz and 2.83ghz stock speeds is negligable, plus the Q9550 can be overclocked.

With all 4 cores now firing, I'm seeing a very noticible improvement in performance, especially in WOTLK zones. While the dual core previously worked fine, it was choppy in some areas - now it's very smooth with frame rates between 40 and 70 consistantly on the main.

Clov