8 cores? noob question

[Lyonheart]

I set ISboxer to use only physical cores on my system. Every client is allowed to use every physical core. The hyperthreaded virtual cores are therefore not activated in ISboxer, but they remain active for the rest of system and can be used by other processes than WoW clients. That must globally help multi-boxing performances, I would think.

Sounds good, I'm guessing every other core listed is virtual? so 1-3-5-7 are the physical ones?

[MiRai]

Hyper-threading can hinder gaming... might want to do some tests with and without it. Everyone's system
is a little different.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

The primary problem with 4(8) core systems is that most folks don't realize there are only 4 physical cores. So what would happen is people would assign one game to cores 0/1, one to 2/3, one to 4/5, one to 6/7. This is incorrect as it only assigns one physical core to each game. So what you want to do with the 4(8) core i7 quads is assign games to two physical cores per game ONLY (for WoW, which only utilizes two cores per process). Leave the virtual cores for your OS to dynamically assign/load-balance.

See this thread for the layout of which cores are virtual and which aren't.
http://www.vindicatum.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=206

Short version of an i7 affinity mask (in decimal):
1(1v)2(2v)3(3v)4(4v) <-- cores
1(2)4(8)16(32)64(128) <-- mask values
1+4+16+64 = 85 (decimal; 0x55 hex)
good default affinity mask setting for WoW is 84 per this blue confirmation

So, unless something has changed, for multiboxing most games like WoW you want two physical cores per game instance distributed as evenly as possible across your game instances.

Example i7 (4+4 hyperthreaded) config:
Game 1 and/or 3 = 1+4 = 5
Game 2 and/or 4 = 16+64 = 80

Example Q6600 (4+0 non-hyperthreaded) config:
Game 1 and/or 3 = 1+2 = 3
Game 2 and/or 4 = 4+8 = 12