Multiboxing and SLI

[MiRai]

I still run 4 monitors for the real estate tho =)

At this point I almost find it difficult to work w/o 4 monitors. Love the real estate.

I see. I'm using Hotkeynet, so won't have the option of assigning an instance to a specific card. I assume this way you can't PIP too?

I'll just stick to my dual monitors for now.

You can definitely still use the PiP swap but because you'd be swapping from a monitor using the secondary GPU to a monitor using the primary GPU you get the performance hit. Again, I'd love to test this on a motherboard with two x16 slots. But, I have a feeling I'll be buying a 30" for my main screen soon enough and I can just jam all 5 instances onto that main screen nice and easily.

[Ualaa]

A 30.5" is a nice amount of real estate for 5 boxing.
And its more then decent for dvd's too.

[Zappy]

I took this screenshot last season that includes my full desktop on a 30" monitor (2560x1600)



While you can definitely 5 box easily on it, you'll still want to PiP swap to do anything useful on your slaves.

[DrChaos]

I play 5 accounts on a single video card. I also use Windows XP Pro 64bit. I use the dual hdmi for my 2 monitors. I have 2 25inch I-Inc monitors and Ive never had a problem. I went and changed it to sli and it seemed not to be worth it. I went back to my original setup with one video card, 2 monitors, 5 accounts.

Today im setting up another comp to get some stress off my main comp video wise. New comp has windows 7 64bit on it. Should be fun. While I dont think I need to add another comp to my setup, I think in the end it will be worth it.

[eternaldrk]

Has anyone tried multi-boxing with a 2 or 3 monitor setup using a single 5970? Since those are essentially running SLI on the card, I was wondering if they experience the same performance issues other folks have had with 2 cards in SLI.

[Pycno]

eternaldrk, From my understanding you can disable the SLI on the card and get performance comparable to one single 5850, but I am not totally sure you can do this. For this reason my next gpu will probably be a 5870, I think it performs better then 5970 (in wow).

[Zappy]

I saw this in the latest nvidia drivers:

* Enhanced SLI support for Metro 2033, Supreme Commander 2, Unigine, and World of Warcraft

http://www.nvidia.com/object/win7_wi...7.13_whql.html

I seriously doubt it will help performance when multiboxing though.

[eternaldrk]

pycno, thanks for the reply. I was really hoping to hear from someone who has tried using a 5970 for WoW multi-boxing. Since I play quite I few other games, I really want a card or cards that can give me excellent performance across 3 monitors for most anything I might want to play. I'm still stuck overseas for another 2 months so I have some time to wait it out.

[Pycno]

eternaldrk, Im in the same situation but Ill be grabbing a 5870 instead. I dont think the extra performance from dual gpu setups is worth the increased chance of something going wrong, there is less problems with single gpu setups.

[Igg]

Has anyone tried multi-boxing with a 2 or 3 monitor setup using a single 5970? Since those are essentially running SLI on the card, I was wondering if they experience the same performance issues other folks have had with 2 cards in SLI.

That won't work, you're better off getting 2 separate 5870 and power the individual display that way and use IS boxer to tell which display/GPU to run which instance you want, trust me, I have 2 gtx 285, 2 5870 sitting around and that's the only way it will work ;p