Nvidia GTX280

[kermitforney]

FYI ~ Leaning toward dual graphics cards pushing two monitors.

Wow will only render on the primary graphics card*. If you have a second GPU hooked up to a second monitor and want to run wow clients on your second monitor (connected to 2nd GPU) you will see a big fps drop from just one GPU and two monitors. What happens is windows has to push the data from the primary gpu to the 2nd gpu accross the bus decreasing fps.

I have had personal experience with this - I was sorely disappointed when I added a GTX260 to sit alongside my 8000GT with a monitor off each GPU and discovered that my overall FPS was much worse.

* I believe InnerSpace can hack around this limitation of Wow.

Thanks Jafula for a VERY informative post!! Are there any threads here or online to confirm this??

[Souca]

I run a GTX280 and 9500GT x 2. The GTX 280 has more than enough oomph to handle 5 clients on two monitors. I have 5 22" LCDs running at 1680x1050. The biggest problem you will see with running WoW clients is the CPU and the single card limitation. WoW isn't very intelligent when it comes to picking a graphics card to run on, so you end up having to run all your WoW clients on monitors conencted to the primary graphics card. Al 5 of my clients have to run on the two moonitors conencted to the GTX 280. The minute a single pixel shows up on another monitor and Windows will switch to software rendering for that client and your machine will lag to hell. There have been some other posts about this issue, but I haven't found a solution or looked too hard since I'm not really playing WoW much.

When I was running 5 clients, once I'd gotten used to the single card issue, I found that the clients tended to be rather CPU heavy after Wrath. Running a 9550 quad I find that the client that has focus will consume all of the core it is set to run on. Most of the lag I saw seemed to be resultant from the CPU topping out as the graphics card never seemed to break a sweat and graphics settings had no impact on performance for me.

So for one machine boxing, my suggestion is a big CPU and a single graphics card that can drive the two monitors you want all your clients on. If I were doing it again, I'd go with multiple machines personally. I just happen to have other uses for my beast so it worked out in the end.

- Souca -

This isn;t the case in Vista.

While 2x 24" monitors will still tax the hell out of your GPU, it isn't software rendering like in XP.

Forgot to mention it's Vista Ultimate x64. And it isn't the software rendering that swamps the CPUs. I make sure I'm only running clients on the monitors on the same graphics cards.

- Souca -

[kermitforney]

Thanks, guys!

I ended up going with a GTX275 and cranking the speed up in between 280-285 range. This card has great headroom for overclocking and runs pretty cool. I still may splurge on another one considering they are so cheap now and will probably continue to be in the near future. IMO this card is a great bargain, not as great as the 8800GT's but pretty damn close.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I think a safe rule of thumb is one monitor per video card and a single gpu per computer, sad but true. So bacisally if you want to run two monitors you have to get some old computer to hook up to the 2nd.

Not to say it can't be done two monitors on a single card but problems seem at every turn.

[aboron]

I'm running the gtx280 with 2 21 inch wide format monitors attached, each at 1680x1050. I run 5 clients, 4 on the left screen and 1 big one on the main screen. Works just fine for me, I am almost always at the fps limiter on the main (60) unless i'm in dalaran, then it goes as low as 20fps sometimmes.

If i had it to do over, i'd get the 285, but that wasn't out yet when i bought mine.

[Moorea]

I'm considering building a new PC and using an i7 920 and a single gtx 275, using 12gb ram and vista (or windows 7 actually) - I'd like to confirm that this is enough - including not having lag in dalaran - or maybe that 2 sli card can actually be beneficial or not : Jafula in your case/disappointment - maybe it had to do with not having 2x the same card ? which OS were your using ?

[Sam DeathWalker]

i7 is the best, but it ALSO has the 2G/s DMI buss that any hard dive on your system is connected to. Normal hard drives can output like 1.7 or so G/s so that Intel DMI buss is a killer. (this is wrong information you cannot saturate teh DMI buss no matter what you put on it so dont worry about it).

On the other hand the path from system to video ram and cpu on I7s is like 24G/s lol ...

If you can get the wow data folder into system ram (Lax said that IS can virtulize files) and have enough space for your os and instances of wow then wham yur done with "texture lag".

You are not limitied by the video card with a 275 or anything similar its moveing data from the wow data folder to the video card and with intel going from HDD or SSD or Velcoraptor or whatever they go though the DMI buss and thats 2G/s.




AMD useing Hypertransport with is 8G/s. But the system ram buss and pci buss is not comparable to the i7.

Can you get 18G ram? With 18G you just might make it.

I'm considering building a new PC and using an i7 920 and a single gtx 275

Thats all you need more is overkill I think.

BUT you want 18G or even 24Gs system ram ( you dont need ddr3 though; ddr2 is good enough I would think).

With 24G you can just use a normal hard drive and don't need SSD.


You just have to get that 24G of ram and put the whole wow folder in it (or the data folder at least) and you are there!


NOTE WOW ONLY USES ONE GPU no matter what. You put in 4 duel GPU cards and wow uses ONE GPU. I would think that you could put another instance of wow to use another gpu if you can do that. But if you run one wow sli etc. is usless. And i have no idea how you would force your second instance of wow not to use your primary gpu ....

[Crucial]

PreviouslyI had a 7900 GTX and 8800 GTS and found the performance was worse with two cards on Vista 32bit (5 wows, 8 gigs ram, AMD Phenom 9950, raid 0), so I just left the 8800 in there and went with a single card for quite a long time. After a recent thunderstorm (non-shaman), I thought the video card was nuked so I put in the old 7900 GTX, but as it turns out the original card was ok so I stuck them both back in for shits and giggles now that I'm running on Vista 64 and the performance FPS wise is exactly the same however overall my system performs slightly better. This is noticeable when exiting 5 clients at the same time which is instaneous now. I'm guessing the extra video cards ram is being utilized instead of system ram when things get heavy, IIRC there was also vista fix with the second GPU not being utilized properly but in any case there hasn't been any fps increase.

[Frappuccino]

I have a 280 (2 actually,, with 3 monitors and 5 accounts.. yea you can do it, just change your primary monitor each time you load up a wow session) - It's plenty for 5 sessions of WoW. Memory will become a factor before the vid card I would say.