New computer build

[Pycno]

Sly, The 980x gives much better value then earlier extreme branded cpu's but its still a complete waste for anyone wanting the most bang for their bucks. If this is a concern and you dont want to shell out on computers then dont buy one of these, when your computer becomes outdated you will not be able to afford an upgrade as you bought the extreme cpu =p

i7-920 will do just fine for five boxing but I would hold my breath and wait for the amd 6 core cpu. They could be worth waiting for and I think the prices on them will be about the same as the i7-920's

the 75% load thing in cities is with fps set at 60 on every toon (background and foreground), you can easily set the background fps to 30 or less and hardly notice the difference.

Ill see about adding pictures if I find the cable for my camera

[Pycno]

wouldn't mind pics after you have everything setup. always interested in how other boxers setup their systems. enjoy your nap btw

Pictures are up, and movie showing it actually working =P

Unboxing the hardware:


Everything set up:


Eyefinity 3x1 Landscape with bezel correction



Few things to note:
- the motherboard supported the cpu out of the box (had bios 0703 installed)
- 6gb ram was enough for now, I will probably need to increase the amount for next expansion
- The graphics card did not fit in the case, I had to cut away some harddrive-holders to get space for the gfx.
- The Proluma Deluxe Triple LCD stand is awesome in all ways
- I should have gotten another gfx card as I can only use half of this cards resources for multiboxing and this creates a bottleneck I should have foreseen.

Youtube link to Eyefinity 3x1 Landscape test (one character):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksytbgxcPcM

Youtube link to vid showing the multibox setup, finally made after all the requests Ive gotten to do it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7EzVy2F2q4

[Sajuuk]

Few things to note:
- the motherboard supported the cpu out of the box (had bios 0703 installed)
- 6gb ram was enough for now, I will probably need to increase the amount for next expansion
- The graphics card did not fit in the case, I had to cut away some harddrive-holders to get space for the gfx.
- The Proluma Deluxe Triple LCD stand is awesome in all ways
- I should have gotten another gfx card as I can only use half of this cards resources for multiboxing and this creates a bottleneck I should have foreseen.

I had no issues running five clients at eyefinity resolutions (with a 5850). Granted I did have to turn some settings (shadows obviously) down, but it ran like a champ with almost no issues.

Obligatory /point and /laugh at not having the GPU fit. Go get 12gb of RAM. I know with my old setup if I ran around dalaran enough I'd start going into my page file.

What monitors are you using/are you using an active DP adaptor? Did you have any issues with bezel compensation (I have some issues with my native DP monitors). Have you thought about running them in portrait mode?

[Noids]

980X definitely much better value than 965/975X was, 2 extra cores over what was basically a 920 with an unlocked muliplier.

Awesome looking setup mate and glad to see you are getting the performance you want from it.

I am quite disappointed in the way my setup performs to be honest. I have an overclocked 920 (3.6GHz) with a GTX295, 12GB ram and Raid 0 intel ssds. I run 5 clients on my single 2560x1600 monitor and in Dal my main hardly ever gets above 25-30fps. This is with all graphics maximised but shadows on the most basic setting. I added the optimisation settings Kate mentioned recently without seeing any real change in performance. I use ISBoxer and have all instances set to use 8 cores... Any ideas?

[Pycno]

Try disabling hyper threading and assign only 4 physical cores, some users report increased performance from doing this, and also remove the HDR patch if you downloaded and installed that.

Best solution is to just forget about Dalaran and accept the fact that all computers struggle there.

[Sajuuk]

I am quite disappointed in the way my setup performs to be honest. I have an overclocked 920 (3.6GHz) with a GTX295, 12GB ram and Raid 0 intel ssds. I run 5 clients on my single 2560x1600 monitor and in Dal my main hardly ever gets above 25-30fps. This is with all graphics maximised but shadows on the most basic setting. I added the optimisation settings Kate mentioned recently without seeing any real change in performance. I use ISBoxer and have all instances set to use 8 cores... Any ideas?

Split up graphics rendering between your GPU cores, they're there to be used!

Try disabling hyper threading and assign only 4 physical cores, some users report increased performance from doing this, and also remove the HDR patch if you downloaded and installed that.

Best solution is to just forget about Dalaran and accept the fact that all computers struggle there.

And what, gimp himself? He has six physical/twelve logical cores, man! I've done dalaran just fine with a 920 and a 9800GX2.

[Ualaa]

I get slightly better FPS, using all four physical cores on each warcraft client.
And not using the logical cores at all.

It wasn't really a huge difference, maybe an extra 5 FPS on average.

[Pycno]

I installed more ram and are running 12gigs at 7-8-7-20 1600mhz with xmp enabled and I havent run into any problems yet and it looks like the board supports it. Should have plenty of ram for Cataclysm now

Edit: Actually its unstable atm, will need to do some troubleshooting before I know if its compatible or not.

[Pycno]

From the looks of it I think my ram was actually overheating, it looks stable now compared to crashing within <1min earlier at much lower loads. The crash could be just a screen freeze, a reset or a never ending spam of "preparing to dump memory" messages on a blue screen. The ram-chips felt very warm to touch.

I opened up the pc case, set every fan in the computer to its max setting and aimed a room fan at the case as well to see if reduced temperature would help.

And it did, I logged in to Dalaran, hearthed to Grizzly Hills and ported back to Dalaran. Ram usage went up to 9,3gig ram. Ram usage is high as I am stresstesting and turned all gfx settings but shadows to max. But now Im wondering if 12gigs will be enough for Cataclysm lol..

This has been stable for 15 minutes now, looks like I just need to find a more practical way of keeping the chips cooler.
Ill try and test the ram at higher speeds also (running 1066mhz 9-9-9-24 now).

Update: Tested with faster settings and the same stress test as earlier, seems stable with the fastest xmp-profile (6x2gb sticks at 1600mhz 7-7-7-20). Im fairly sure my problem was caused by insufficient cooling, now I just need to find a more practical and permanent solution to cool the ram sticks and I will be ready for Cataclysm

[Pycno]

Stable at 1066mhz 8-8-8-24 timings with 6 sticks without drastic cooling measures. Ill run some benchmarks and see if there is a significant performance drop and try and get it stable at 1333mhz.

Most boards can support most ram when using only 2-3 slots but they are very picky when it comes to occupying all of the slots. Next time I buy something Ill get ram from the QVL