Old PC for boxing

[Cheesepile]

Right now I'm using a bit of a poor man's setup... I have a newer pc for my main (dual core intel 2.5ghz, 4gb ram) but it's a slimline case... the power supply and onboard video suck so bad I can't run more than one instance of wow at a time. The case is so small I'd have to find a low profile video card + power supply that could power 5x wow plus not cause heating issues.

For my slaves x4 I use an old celeron 3.2ghz with 4mb of ram and a geforce 7600gs. Yep its old. This sad box has treated me well until my toons hit Dalaran the other day. Now things aren't looking so great any more. Lag gets so bad that usually one of the clients will lock up.

I feel like I got soooo close to 80 with this setup, and have already put in enough money this spring on xpacks, etc. I have EVERYTHING turned down to minimum on my slave box + no sound. Is this machine past its time or could I upgrade maybe the vid card or ram and salvage it?

I really don't want to shelf my toons for a couple months while I save up for a new machine. If I could spend 100-200 and just get 15fps on my slaves I would be happy.

Any thoughts?

[mikekim]

buy a cheap larger case 30-40, and the best gfx card that will fit you mobo, with the money left over in your budget

[tbone4298]

Other than maybe travel to Wintergrasp and daily quests you shouldn't have much need to head to Dalaran with the instant dungeon porting. Have you tried limiting your FPS on your slave machine? I run 5 clients on a pc I made over two years ago. All of my wow instances have /console maxfpsbk 8 and /console maxfps 30 to limit the strain on the system. Unless you plan on doing arena (which I wouldn't recommend with a slow setup) you shouldn't need high fps on the slaves. Your eyes aren't concentrating on them anyways as you're probably staring at the main's screen 90% of the time and just glancing over periodically.

The best bang for your buck imo would be to get the computers maxed on ram for the mobo/os. Limit the fps on the slaves also. If that doesn't work you could always just run the slaves through Dal one or two at a time, log those ones out to the character select screen and repeat with the others. Would take you a few extra minutes to do stuff in Dal but would be a way to keep the current setup 'til you eventually do get a better machine.

[Cheesepile]

Good advice. Are there any other ways (outside of the options given in wow) to reduce performance? I don't need any pretty details at all on the slaves...

[Cheesepile]

So no matter how many ways I try to tweak this older machine it eventually starts to lag. I login to wow (4 clients at once) and my fps is very tolerable. However over time, it dips to 1-2 fps and is unplayable. Running through Dal or Org speeds up the process, and moving back to a less populated area doesn't alleviate the problem. A reboot fixes the problem, so I'm not so sure its an overheating issue (if it was wouldn't I have low fps almost immediately after reboot?). Here are a few remaining questions I have...

1) Perhaps 2Gb is just insufficient RAM for 4 clients? Is it possible to wipe currently unused RAM at set intervals to avoid having to reboot every 30mins? Would this even be practical?

2) My GEForce 7600GS is pretty dated. But is my gfx card even the bottleneck? Would buying a new card possibly rememdy the issue?

3) My newer pc leaves me few options. If I were to upgrade to a low profile Raedon 4550 (which would fit in my case) would that be enough to power 4 clients on a machine with 4gb RAM and a dual core 2.5ghz intel?

To get anything more powerful my newer PC would require a new case / power supply, mobo and gfx card (the HP mobo uses a proprietary connector for the power supply and doesn't conform to a standard form factor)... buying a new pc altogether would be just as cost effective.

Any comments or input would be greatly appreciated!

[Drommon]

buy a cheap larger case 30-40, and the best gfx card that will fit you mobo, with the money left over in your budget

This ^

Then use the dual core for the slaves and the celeron for the main.

You can use the task manager to watch cpu and memory usage and find the real culprit. WoW is cpu intensive not gpu. Set all of your graphics settings to lowest amount and reduce resolutions.

[Drommon]

So no matter how many ways I try to tweak this older machine it eventually starts to lag. I login to wow (4 clients at once) and my fps is very tolerable. However over time, it dips to 1-2 fps and is unplayable. Running through Dal or Org speeds up the process, and moving back to a less populated area doesn't alleviate the problem. A reboot fixes the problem, so I'm not so sure its an overheating issue (if it was wouldn't I have low fps almost immediately after reboot?). Here are a few remaining questions I have...

1) Perhaps 2Gb is just insufficient RAM for 4 clients? Is it possible to wipe currently unused RAM at set intervals to avoid having to reboot every 30mins? Would this even be practical?

2) My GEForce 7600GS is pretty dated. But is my gfx card even the bottleneck? Would buying a new card possibly rememdy the issue?

3) My newer pc leaves me few options. If I were to upgrade to a low profile Raedon 4550 (which would fit in my case) would that be enough to power 4 clients on a machine with 4gb RAM and a dual core 2.5ghz intel?

To get anything more powerful my newer PC would require a new case / power supply, mobo and gfx card (the HP mobo uses a proprietary connector for the power supply and doesn't conform to a standard form factor)... buying a new pc altogether would be just as cost effective.

Any comments or input would be greatly appreciated!

Your original post mentioned 4mb for the celeron machine to which I thought was 4gb. Yes, add 1-2gb more if the mobo and OS can have it.

[Cheesepile]

I ended up finding a vid card small enough to fit in my case (low profile ati 4350) and that draws little power, so i can box 5 on my main pc using keyclone. isboxer's 5xfullscreen rendering seems to be too much for this machine still.

so i can now bring my team to 80 doesn't look like i'll be able to make the switch to isboxer, but at least i have something to work with now. thanks for the above replies!

-cheesepile