5x WoW and Vista 64

[keyclone]

another thing to do if you have 4 or 8 cores would be to set the cpu affinity to use 2 cores per wow, since wow is optimized for 2 cores, then spread the load evenly across the cores.

let's say you have 5 wows and an i7 (8 cores)... i would set it up like this:

wow1 - cpu0 + cpu1
wow2 - cpu2 + cpu3
wow3 - cpu4 + cpu5
wow4 - cpu6 + cpu7
wow5 - cpu1 + cpu2

note that i avoided using cpu0 more then once. this is due to the OS already being on cpu0, so i wanted to avoid the extra load.

if you have a quad core:

wow1 - cpu0 + cpu1
wow2 - cpu1 + cpu2
wow3 - cpu2 + cpu3
wow4 - cpu0 + cpu1
wow5 - cpu2 + cpu3

[Sam DeathWalker]

PAE in theory does work:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

Some confusion comes from the fact that there is a limit on the amount of ram each process can execute.

Nonetheless in practice PAE is a joke:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system...AE/PAEdrv.mspx

System Board Issues: DAC Capabilities for Buses
Various chipsets are capable of supporting more than 4 GB of physical memory. By using PAE, the Windows Datacenter and Advanced Server operating systems can use this memory.

On a 64-bit platform, for optimal performance, all PCI adapters (including 32-bit PCI adapters) must be able to address the full physical address space. For 32-bit PCI adapters, this means that they must be able to support the Dual Address Cycle (DAC) command to permit them to transfer 64-bit addresses to the adapter or device (that is, addresses above the 4 GB address space). Adapters that cannot provide this support cannot directly access the full address space on a 64-bit platform.

Unfortunately, Microsoft is finding that not all PCI buses on a system board support DAC, which is required for a 32-bit PCI adapter to address more than 4 GB of memory. Furthermore, there is no way for a DAC-capable PCI device (or its associated driver) to know that it is running on a non-DAC-capable bus.

Regardless of who is right or wrong with Win7 being around there seems little practical choice but to go to Win7 if you want over 4G ram.
MIght try:

os cpu0/1
main cpu2/3
alt12 cpu4/5
alt34 cpu6/7

So you can run main at higher resolution then alts and have a core and virtual core for OS. DO NOT set anythign to only virtual cores.

There is really only one question left as to optimal hardware:


With a 920/I7 and 12G is your non latency lag due to cpu saturation or texture lag going to the SSD/HHD or whatever your wow data folder in on. Has anyone gone from a 920 to a 965 and seen a lot of impovement? Do all 920/I7 users still get low frame rates when loading new textrues (i.e. anyplace a lot of pc's are coming in and out of view?). Does video card with 2G ram per single cpu improve this?

[Moorea]

PAE is a useless workaround (which also isn't working on vista32 so fur you should do your own research too but even if it was it would be just a ugly useless kludge). Why would you not get a 64bit OS if you need 4gb and more... just get vista64 or windows7 as said; and 6+ gb and you'll be fine

[Ozbert]

IMO, theres not much point in buying Vista64 now.

Download a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate Release Candidate from Microsoft and run it until Windows 7 releases for real.

Windows 7 is looking like a very, very promising OS. It'll be the first version of Windows that I'll be more than happy to buy. I've been running it since the beta was made available in February and have had no problems so far.

[Tonuss]

you can run the i7 as either 4 cores at 2.6ghz or 8 cores at 1.3ghz. ( change 2.6ghz to the speed of the cpu you purchase and half it if you run it with 8 cores )

Hyperthreading/SMT doesn't halve the speed in order to use extra cores. It makes better use of gaps in the CPU pipelines to make the CPU more efficient. The Pentium 4's hyperthreading was not very well implemented and thus you were often better off not using it, but the version in the Core i7 CPUs is much better. It's not really 8 cores, but it works pretty well nonetheless. Turning on Hyperthreading does not change the CPU speeds at all. I'm running 4 cores @2.66GHz with hyperthreading on, so Device Manager shows 8 cores @2.66GHz.

[Momo]

IMO, theres not much point in buying Vista64 now.

Download a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate Release Candidate from Microsoft and run it until Windows 7 releases for real.

Windows 7 is looking like a very, very promising OS. It'll be the first version of Windows that I'll be more than happy to buy. I've been running it since the beta was made available in February and have had no problems so far.

This.

Yeah...This is what I would do. Windows 7 will be pretty much the first OS that I will dump serious money on.

If I didnt already have Vista Ultimate 64 set just how I want it I would use the release candidate of 7 for sure.

[John110]

Thx for the tips. Guess ill go with Windows 7 and a i7.

Didnt like vista anyway so no big deal to wait for w7.

[Starbuck_Jones]

How did he or you Keyclone get over the second monitor or in this case a lot more monitor performance hit. Im Running Visatx64 and I can run 5x accounts just fine on one monitor. It eats up too much real estate for my tastes but if I hook up a second monitor and move slave accounts over there, the whole thing grinds to like 10fps. Ive tried useing the same video card as well as adding a second one with no change. XP doesnt have this problem useing the same unified driver sets. I have read several threads about something with how xp allowed this to all work with a spanned desktop and such where vista doesnt do it the same way and thus the hit.

[Tonuss]

I have two video cards and two monitors. I have the main WoW on one monitor, running at full resolution and windowed mode (maximized). Then I used the maximizer in keyclone to set up the alt WoWs on the other monitor. The alts are all 800 x 600 with everything turned down and they run fairly well, a slight bit choppy but I rarely check those windows so it doesn't matter. I think the problem I was having with my primary display is that for some reason it would leave the 'view distance' setting at max. Turning it down allows the primary window to run at 40fps most of the time and the jitter is almost nonexistant now.

The alt windows probably run at 15 fps or so, I think I used keyclone to limit them to 20 fps or something like that. But like I said, I don't really bother with those windows (and between Jamba and the recent addition of binding a key to "interact with target" I almost never have to). I'm running relatively recent drivers for the Radeon cards (from 3-4 months ago? Maybe a bit more recent). But like I said above I'm also running 12GB of memory and a lot of striped arrays.

One change that may have made a difference is that instead of running 5 WoWs out of 5 directories, I'm now running the main account from one directory, and the other four are split between two directories. Each directory is on its own separate RAID partition. I may try moving the main account to the D drive (and away from the OS partition) and run the four alts out of a single directory on E, just to see if it provides any extra performance. But for the time being it works just fine (still in the old world, with a group of level 15s, two locks and three mages).

[Momo]

I use two monitors on 64bit Vista.
8gig of decent DDR2 ram.

One monitor is a 24", the other is a 19".

Brain account is run on the big monitor, pulls EASY 60+ fps. Graphics settings @ "Good" with shadows reduced.
All 4 drones occupy 25% of the 19" screen, splitting it into four. All of those screens run at 30fps limited via keyclone. Lower graphics settings.

It let me do it on the nvidia driver set and it lets me do it on the ATI driver set. They are somewhat different, and if anything, it appears that the
ATI set is much more efficient. In my opinion.

***All my accounts are symlinked to the one brain account data and interface files***

I was running a GTX 280 Graphics card, but that build just has too many stability issues. I just replaced it with an XfX HD4890 which are CHEAP, CHEAP, CHEAP.

That thing is nuts. Easy.

My rig eats wow for breakfast.