Pushing the CPU limits

[alcattle]

The affinity is set to 3. 4 cores on all WoWs. Sound is off on all WoWs. Will get a sound card this weekend. What else? Overclock? Oh usage on each Wow runs about 23-25% plus the rest of the crap loaded. Web, and HKN

[Ellusionist]

The affinity is set to 3. 4 cores on all WoWs. Sound is off on all WoWs. Will get a sound card this weekend. What else? Overclock? Oh usage on each Wow runs about 23-25% plus the rest of the crap loaded. Web, and HKN

I've never used HKN, but if it's passing the same variable 'setProcessAffinity' that config.wtf uses, then your "Affinity" in HKN should be set to 15.

[Ellusionist]

[confusedtx5]

If you're using Vista64, don't use Xp64 instead. Vista wastes alot of hardware resources. that said, your cpu shouldn't be maxing just from 5 wows. As with Bot above, I used to 5box with that same cpu, and only 4gigs of ram. Check that all your wow clients are running at the lowest detail possible and no addons and see what happens.

[Ellusionist]

If you're using Vista64, don't use Xp64 instead. Vista wastes alot of hardware resources. that said, your cpu shouldn't be maxing just from 5 wows. As with Bot above, I used to 5box with that same cpu, and only 4gigs of ram. Check that all your wow clients are running at the lowest detail possible and no addons and see what happens.

I'd be interested in seeing screenshots of your CPU utilization below 100% while running five instances of wow.exe as well as temperatures per core. Very interested, actually.

Q6600 (Stock @ 2.4GHz), 4GB RAM? Screenshots please.

I'm just sayin'...

[confusedtx5]

Ill see what i can do. Unfortunately that rig is currently my media server. Im on a Corei7 940 w/ 6Gb ram now.

Edit: its an i7 940, not a i7 640 >.<

[Ellusionist]

Well I guess I was wrong, technically... idling in Dalaran with all five running, it was teetering between 97-98-99-100% usage across all cores.

You could post us a fullscreen shot of 5 WoW's on the taskbar with Task Manager loaded in the foreground from your new machine. I'm curious how the new i7's handle multiboxing. The numbers (and multiboxing review[er]s) show that they handle it VERY well, but it would be interesting to see what kind of load they carry while boxing.

We always hear the "dude, it's awesome!" or "man, this is so much faster than my old machine" comments, but nothing else... feed our minds with pictures!

[confusedtx5]

Maybe thats why I did ok with the q6600, i havent been to dal with my multibox teams yet :/

Yeah sure, ill take some screenies when i get home

[mrmcgee21]

I don't get how cool your Q6600 is running, I have the xact same cooler on my 9650 and it gets into the low 60's just going up to 3.6ghz ( from 3.0 stock ). I'm curious to know how you have your affinty's setup running 5 wow's Ellusionist if you care to share, I have 4 set to individual instances and the 5th spread across all 4 cores. Also I get maybe 30ish fps on whatever window I'm focuses on on dalaran and cap my backround fps at 10 on the other 4, I still get some hitching if I mount up and do laps around the main square of dalaran but its pretty smooth, fps stays around 18-24 or so even while running on the mount. That's with graphics basically all the way down except my main window has full clip. I guess I'm curious to compare my system to yours Ellusionist as we have very similar rigs except I'm running a 9650 which, I can barely clock past the speeds you can with a 6600 ... lol.

[Ellusionist]

I don't get how cool your Q6600 is running, I have the xact same cooler on my 9650 and it gets into the low 60's just going up to 3.6ghz ( from 3.0 stock ). I'm curious to know how you have your affinty's setup running 5 wow's Ellusionist if you care to share, I have 4 set to individual instances and the 5th spread across all 4 cores. Also I get maybe 30ish fps on whatever window I'm focuses on on dalaran and cap my backround fps at 10 on the other 4, I still get some hitching if I mount up and do laps around the main square of dalaran but its pretty smooth, fps stays around 18-24 or so even while running on the mount. That's with graphics basically all the way down except my main window has full clip. I guess I'm curious to compare my system to yours Ellusionist as we have very similar rigs except I'm running a 9650 which, I can barely clock past the speeds you can with a 6600 ... lol.

No idea man, wish I could just point and say "there's your problem" but if you're running the same heatsink/fan combo and nearly the same chip, we should be about equal.

Amongst this list may be our differences:
1) I used Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste. (Reviews are great, but is it better than conventional *cheap* paste? No clue. I just bought it because of the reviews. Might be a mental thing!)
2) My config.wtf files (all five) have "setProcessAffinity" set to 15.
3) I have five separate WoW folders on my Desktop for multiboxing, in which the "Data" directory is symlinked. It is symlinked to a sixth WoW folder, which I use if I'm playing one character. It looks like this:

Folder: World of Warcraft --> When I'm playing one character (damn me!), I use this. All graphics settings are cranked wide open.
Folder: World of Warcraft 1 --> Main multiboxing character's folder. The front guy. This runs fullscreen 1680x1050 with terrain distance and spell detail turned up, that's it. Its Interface\Addons and Data directories are also symlinked to the copy of WoW above.
Folder: World of Warcraft 2 --> Plain jane stripped down graphics, only has the "Data" directory symlinked to the top folder in this list. Plays on a 19" widescreen to my right. (All slaves are on that monitor in a 2x2 tiled fashion.)
Folder: World of Warcraft 3 --> Same as #2.
Folder: World of Warcraft 4 --> Same as #2.
Folder: World of Warcraft 5 --> Same as #2.

There may be an easier way to accomplish having different settings for characters #2-#5, but this works. Technically, I could just have one folder for Accounts #2-#5 with bare minimum video settings.

4) No affinities are set within Keyclone.
5) No maxfps or maxfpsbk variables are set within Keyclone. None. I noticed some inconsistencies while doing spread macros with maxfpsbk set. Some characters would spread correctly and some would skip frames (video lag) and look out of line.
6) As far as hardware, it's all run off of a 7200RPM Seagate Barracuda, so nothing fancy here. No RAID 0, not spanning across multiple hard drives to even the load, nothing. Video card is only the 512MB version of XFX's 9800GT.
7) Antec Nine Hundred computer case. After seeing it in person (building this machine), I build all my customers' PC's in this case now. Tons of fans, keeps everything cool.


I can't really think of anything else...