Zero(?) City Lag - 5 Clients One PC - Your Specs?

[Umbaalo]

So that's my problem. I'm sporting 2 4870x2 and lately the frame loss has been pissing me off. I have a 920 @ 3.6 Ghz and 12 GB RAM. I was considering upgrading the whole rig. I don't like to spend money on piece meal upgrades. I usually wait for a new chipset and gpu worth upgrading to.... Maybe I should try a new GPU

Edit: I'm pretty new to changing gpus from ATI to nVidia. Is it as simple as install new card and driver or is it more complicated than that? I'm looking to do SLI 580s

Hope you are going to be running other games instead of just WoW if you are serious about setting up SLI. WoW doesn't benefit from SLi, actually there is a decrease in performance. This is also true with some other games as well. Don't remember for certain where I read this information, but more than likely it was from anandtech.com

Don't get me wrong, its amazing for games that gain from having it...but a brutal waste of money if just using for WoW (especially the gtx 580 cards!).


PS: I've had issues in the past with ATI drivers, I'm putting my faith into nvidia this time around. Best of luck with whichever route you decide to take!

[katsurahama]

Having just upgraded from 4gb of ram to 8gb, i can tell you that alone will make a huge difference. Four is not enough anymore for five instances of wow.

[Ualaa]

I notice a FPS drop in Stormwind, near both of the auction house/banks.

Flying above the city, with 310% flyers I have not yet lost follow.
But the following toons drop enough behind that Grid shows them as out of range.

I'm running:
i7, 920 (stock)
12GB DDR3, 1600mhz
Patriot Torq SSD
GTX 275 Video


Slaves run on rather low settings, medium view distance.
Master runs on slightly higher video settings and maximum view distance.

[Bollwerk]

FWIW, I just upgraded my PC and it made a HUGE difference in Stormwind.

No change - 30" monitor, 8GB RAM

Old PC:
Q6600 (stock speed)
Nvidia GTX 280

New PC:
i5-2500K (stock speed, but may OC after burn in period)
Nvidia GTX 570

On the old PC, I had ALL toons on lowest graphics settings, but with the lead toon on "good" draw distance. With these settings, I would stutter flying over crowded parts of SW and some toons would break follow.

On the new PC, I haven't yet seen how far I can crank up the settings, but so far I have set the draw distance to "ultra" on all 5 and I had ZERO stutter flying over SW now. Framerates stay capped (60 lead, 15 slaves) and task manager shows all cores at around 50-60% utilization. (Old PC had all 4 cores pegged at 100% all the time with 5 toons, regardless of location)

[dancook]

thanks for the info, i'll look forward to the upgrade!

[thefunk]

Can I ask rezident experts for actual difference between I5 and I7? Is the difference really like broadband Vs dialup or more like 1.000000001 > 1?

[MiRai]

Can I ask rezident experts for actual difference between I5 and I7? Is the difference really like broadband Vs dialup or more like 1.000000001 > 1?

You may have to be a little more specific since there are multiple versions of i5 and i7, even more now that Sandy Bridge has
been released. I'm sure Intel had no idea they would confuse people who don't constantly keep up with the technology world.

Probably best to start a new thread too as it might get lost in here.

[Noids]

I'm running an i920 with 12GB Ram Raid 0 Intel SSDs and a GTX 580.

I recently had a stick of RAM die which reduced me to 8GB. I have windows 7 64. I have always disabled paging with this level of RAM and never had an issue with 5 clients, normally sitting around 8GB. I had forgotten about the disabled pagefile but after about an hour of play yesterday I received an unpleasant reminder as 4 out of 5 clients exploded and the 5th stalled.

I ordered some more RAM but ir was going to take a few days to arrive so I enabled the pagefile again. Even with the SSDs when I hit the wall a couple of hours later again I found some major lag again.

Moral of the story is buy plenty of RAM. I can't really contemplate how low your graphics settings and resolution must be to get 5 clients playable with only 4GB. This alone would probably be enough of an upgrade to solve a lot of your issues I reckon.

[dancook]

I'm running an i920 with 12GB Ram Raid 0 Intel SSDs and a GTX 580.

I recently had a stick of RAM die which reduced me to 8GB. I have windows 7 64. I have always disabled paging with this level of RAM and never had an issue with 5 clients, normally sitting around 8GB. I had forgotten about the disabled pagefile but after about an hour of play yesterday I received an unpleasant reminder as 4 out of 5 clients exploded and the 5th stalled.

I ordered some more RAM but ir was going to take a few days to arrive so I enabled the pagefile again. Even with the SSDs when I hit the wall a couple of hours later again I found some major lag again.

Moral of the story is buy plenty of RAM. I can't really contemplate how low your graphics settings and resolution must be to get 5 clients playable with only 4GB. This alone would probably be enough of an upgrade to solve a lot of your issues I reckon.

I just stick the slaves on 'fair' and the main on the option before 'ultra', it's not good in stormwind - but dungeons are fine.

[Bollwerk]

As for the i5 vs i7 ...
If you are comparing the 2500k to the 2600k, they are almost identical in gaming benchmarks. AFAIK, the biggest difference between i5 and i7 is Hyperthreading, which has been repeatedly shown to make no difference in gaming, or even make it worse.
IMHO, the 2600k is not worth the extra $100 if all you do is play games.

P.S. Yes, I realize that the 2600K also has slightly more cache and slightly higher stock clock speed.