5-boxing on my rig dies in Orgrimmar. [Thanks for nothing shadows]

[Powerwar]

Probably it's more a problem of your rig than the game settings.

As long as I see you are running server kind of CPUs and Ram. Probably your motherboard is also suited more for server usage rather than gaming.

After retiring my old video processing cluster I tested wow multibox performance with lots of possible rigs. Found that 800 MHz RAM makes a big difference for wow, same as the CPU. A Q9650 @3Ghz will perform much better than a quad xeon 5405 @ 2Ghz like the one you have. In fact, I tested it with practically the same rig as you except the GPU.

The motherboard makes the difference between a viable and unviable rig, at least it did in my case. A typical server motherboard will be unable to run properly when you land in dalaran unless you are sitting on some really expensive mobo. A gamer one would work ok in most of the cases. For example, the Dell server mobos I tried weren't unable to handle dalaran x 5. Tyan ones worked relatively ok, but I don't think a 1k euro mobo is acceptable for a gaming rig.
If you have an Asus Striker motherboard around, just try it and you will see the difference even maintaining all the rest of the rig components.

The problem with the motherboards is that even if your GPU is PCIE at 16X, if the motherboard cannot adress properly that speed then it will downgrade performance alot. Server oriented mobos are more kind to handle a 10 GBit nic or some RAID controller than an insane GPU.
Also make sure your PSU can give enough power to your GPU or it will start running in low performance mode. Most dells tend to come with crappy PSU.

As for raw GPU performance, the Asus ENGTX275 is beter than the BFG. I use both instead of the nvidia tesla processors and the asus one has about 15% faster forformance. Not sure if it affects wow, but I have an asus GPU on my gaming rig.

[Khemikal]

The problem I see with your hardware setup is your processors. While you do have 8 physical cores, they are running at 2.0GHz stock. Even if you spread your clients across all cores, its still fairly slow. A single quad core running at 3.0+ will be better. Its simply a case of WoW not scaling passed more than 2 cores. If it could scale to all 8 cores, then things would be completely different.

[coglistings]

I witnessed similar issues on a friends pc with dual xeons. I say chuck the dual proc setup and overclock an i7instead. Id be interested in what your core activity was reported as in taskm

[agrikk]

It turned out that shadows fixed it and I'm now running all five on my 8-core just fine with combined processor utilization hovering at about 45% in Orgrimmar with no more hitching or slideshows. I also just found a GPU widget so I'll be collecting stats on my GPU load and memory use.

I won't be chucking the 8-core setup because I use this machine for audio/video production. It was never designed to be a gaming rig, but since I had the horsepower and the video card, I decided why not

The problem with the motherboards is that even if your GPU is PCIE at 16X, if the motherboard cannot adress properly that speed then it will downgrade performance alot. Server oriented mobos are more kind to handle a 10 GBit nic or some RAID controller than an insane GPU.

Huh? Where did you get this information, because it doesn't make sense. While I understand that gaming motherboards garner higher performance scores because of their overclockability, I don't see how a dual-cpu capable motherboard will somehow have its GPU PCIe lanes running slower to somehow make room for disk or network I/O.

[lans83]

Here's a screenshot of my Main's settings. Slaves are all set to the same but have "View Distance" down all the way, and "Projected Textures" turned off. Pay no attention to the "Resolution". I have Keyclone override that using PiP. Make sure you keep "Hardware Cursor" checked on all your toons, cause this, as I have found, will cripple FPS on all of them if not used.
Another thing I've done is went into my desktop settings and manually turned off V-Sync and Antialiasing to help with FPS. It did a little, but not much. Depends on your hardware you have. Dalaran, AV, and pretty much anywhere that has high level traffic will hinder your performance. I set my Hearth to the Argent Tournament grounds instead of Dal. Still stutters there sometimes, depends on the time of day, but not as bad as Dal.

[coglistings]

It turned out that shadows fixed it and I'm now running all five on my 8-core just fine with combined processor utilization hovering at about 45% in Orgrimmar with no more hitching or slideshows. I also just found a GPU widget so I'll be collecting stats on my GPU load and memory use.

I won't be chucking the 8-core setup because I use this machine for audio/video production. It was never designed to be a gaming rig, but since I had the horsepower and the video card, I decided why not





Huh? Where did you get this information, because it doesn't make sense. While I understand that gaming motherboards garner higher performance scores because of their overclockability, I don't see how a dual-cpu capable motherboard will somehow have its GPU PCIe lanes running slower to somehow make room for disk or network I/O.

While you are right to call him out on a ten gige setup serverboards aren't necessarily designed with kickass graphics specs. I ave another bee to throw in your bonnet as well serverboards don't really have speed test programs outthere to keep the brands honest either. The wprime test is the only test we found where the dual xeon board did well. I don't know if youhave a friend with five additional accounts you can borrow but the rig should slideshow after the eighth instance of wow topoint where toons in darl are randomly left behind. I asked how the core activity spread was because in our test with tenclients running arround on a weekend saw the first proc fully utalized but the second proc with vcores not utalized at all and rcores around 50 to 75 percent utalization.

Your setup is probably great for autocad and visual effects rendering. But for the cost 2 x i7's is cheaper setup for ten boxing

[Fursphere]

Unless you're a hardware boxer (1 Client per PC - so 5 PCs total), shadows are a no no. I only run them on my main PC - all 4 alt PCs have them turned off.

[jstanthr]

mine done the same thing until i upgraded the psu, may sound crazy, but in my 15years of pc building ive found that the psu is the one thing in a system you don't wanna skimp on, id say your dell may have a 450w or close to that psu, imo a 600w would be more suited to the task

[agrikk]

I've heard about power supply issues and about poor quality PSUs gimping the performance on PCIe cards. But in this case, the PSU is 875w and after disabling shadows things are rock solid.

I played for several hours the other night, playing 5-boxes on my T5400 and performance was rock solid in Orgrimmar and elsewhere.

Thanks everyone for your help on this. Nice to see my 8-core DAW isn't totally worthless as a gaming machine.

[lightstriker]

Leatrix GFX
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...eatrixGfx.html

This addon that can reduce the graphic further than the game options. It can even reduce the framerate down to 5 when WoW is not the top most window. It doesnt affect the UI or text in the game; which is good. i installed it on my slaves and my main's framerate almost triple.

I am on a Mac so I dont know how it works with the PiP on some of the Windows software.