Where is my hardware bottleneck? *5 Boxing on single PC*

[DLoweinc]

Should I just expect lag in Dalaran?

I disabled my page file in Vista (64) and if I turn up the draw distance to full on my slaves Innerspace crashes because I run out of RAM! (Works fine in instances, but on a gryphon or in Dalaran it dies)

I would recommend enabling the page file and setting it to 500 mb. There are certain applications that require a page file being present and if it isn't there they will address your physical ram. This is why you ran out of physical memory. Been there, done that. Use a page file.

I have been contemplating creating a ramdisk on my SSD's for the pagefile. I have been following some advice on the OCZ SSD Forum as far as utilizing SSD's in general. My goal is to move my whole boot partition onto the SSD's (as well as wow).

I have tried using a 4gig readyboost drive with this so that it could swap to that if needed (i see it use it, the flash drive activity light gives it away), but no performance increase. perhaps it is helping...

I noticed a moderate increase (5-6FPS increase) when i moved my innerspace install onto my SSD array instead of my hitachi HDD.

How bad IS dalaran? Honestly I don't think you can expect too great of FPS in dalaran. I have similar specs to you (except no SSDs) and I generally get around 15-18FPS in dalaran running around the streets, and ~30-40 inside of small buildings. I don't really expect anything better than that and its fine for me since I'm never in Dalaran for more than 15 minutes.

on my main guy it is anywhere from 10-40, but usually around 20 when i am in the streets. If I am in a building it is maybe 20% higher. I don't check my slaves all that often unless they break follow, but I would say 10 to 12 for them on average.

I just did a full reinstall (game + mods) and changed my unit frames from pitbull to perl classic and seem to have picked up better frame rates. IE less breaks on follow (haven't had one in dalaran yet, only while on flying mounts)

Reinstall directx and video drivers. I find that helps with my 4870 1gb.

You don't have enough video RAM. 1Gb is minimum for Dalaran.

Funny, I get maxed out FPS on my slaves and around 30 on my main while in dalaran.

Using a 9600GT 512MB.

It depends on your resolution, AA\AF level and texture quality settings. Of course for example 1280x1024 0xAA\0xAF all min will consume much less video memory than mine 2560x1600 4xAA\16xAF all max

I'm at 1680x1050, 1xAA, 24bit color/depth for my main and 800x600, 1xAA, 16bit color/depth for my alts