5x WoW and Vista 64

[Bollwerk]

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.

Strange. I have a GTX 280 and have not had a single problem. It handles both my single player raiding and quad boxing without breaking a sweat. Maybe you got a lemon?

[Momo]

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.

Strange. I have a GTX 280 and have not had a single problem. It handles both my single player raiding and quad boxing without breaking a sweat. Maybe you got a lemon?

Yep, I got a lemon.

It still works OK, but would just crash the graphics drivers repeatedly. A lot of the early ones had issues with overheating. I just got a dud methinks....

[bryce]

if you go to vista64, you'll be able to put more memory on your box. i've got 8gb on my vista64 quad core box... and loving it.

btw, i was talking with someone today that was tired of 'playing games' with performance issues and took advice i gave him about 2 months ago. he upgraded to the i7 and got 12g of memory (i didn't suggest that much, but it wasn't much more so he went for it). he called today to tell me how thrilled he has been with his new machine. he's got it running 4 screens (2x 22" portrait mode, 1x 30" and 1x 36") and 5-boxing on it, no problem. he says all the screen are extremely smooth (i'm not sure of the video card... it has 4 dvi outputs, 2g of memory and i believe its an nvidia board)

btw, if you do get the quad or i7 chip, make sure to set your cpu affinity correctly and set the maxfpsbk and maxfps fields for each command

i7 is not for gamers right now. You can get the same performance with a cheaper quad or a E8400. I've done some tests with a friend whose got a i7 and he's pissed off because I have a faster, more stable system than he does. I'm running my E8400 @ almost 4.24ghz while his is at around 4.1ghz. He's only got 4gb of RAM opposed to my 12gb of RAM as well. Let me see if I can find that article on how i7's suck for gaming.

@ OP: I had no issues with 5x WoW copies, keyclone, or anything else on Vista Ultimate x64. Runs perfectly and it's actually just as fast as XP, but with DX10 and more stable I think. That is, after you trim the services, etc down.

Needless to say Windows 7 x64 is going to be awesome. I'm running it on a quad boot right now and have had no issues with anything from this site to multibox on. I even F@H while playing graphic intensive games using the GPU2 client.

[Tonuss]

i7 is not for gamers right now.

Core i7 works about as well for games as the less-expensive Core-2 Quad CPUs, so it's not as cost-efficient. I would not say that it isn't for gamers, but I would not blame a person who bought a less-expensive CPU platform for gaming. I think your friend would see a big improvement with more RAM. Go from 4GB to 8GB and he should be good.

[Reglar]

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

A bit off the original poster's message, but I was intrigued by the assigned pairings. I've tried both affinity to 2 cores and no-affinity (I run a i7 920 at 4.0Ghz), and honestly the no-affinity solution seemed to be running better, but perhaps I got lucky. Has anyone done imperical tests of the 2 options? I'd hate to be gimping my setup by mistake.