It has arrived!

[MultiMacBox23]

Hey guys, long time lurker, first time poster.

My new machine arrive this week, got one of the 2008 MacPro, the 2.8ghz xeon dual quad-cores, with the nvidia8800gt card in it, and waiting on my 4 sticks of 2gig fb-dimms to show up in the mail.

so far this thing rocks, with one client open with all graphics at maxed out settings 160fps @ 2560 x 1600 (30") , compared to my old machine (a PowerMac G5, dual 2.7ghz powerpc chips + ATI 800XT) which was clocking 30-ish fps @ 2560 x 1600 with settings all at lowest. on the old machine hooking up my other 23" dropped the fps by like 30%, so i removed it. on this new machine the second monitor doesnt effect performance so far.

i started to get frustrated at my old machine, running 5 clients on the 1 30" monitor, this new machine has put the excitement back into playing my shammy family again. i forgot how good the game could look with the graphics turned up, lol!

Now the only thing holding me back is all the disk access from the 5 clients. debating on 150gb raptor drive for the games/scratch disk, or hold out a little longer for the pricing to come down on the 64gb SSD flash drives. ?(

Whooo Hooo, back to loading my addons and macros!

-Ray

[Ellay]

Would like to hear how it works out with a faster hard drive access speed. Especially with 5 clients on the same pc.

[keyclone]

since you are going for performance, you might consider getting 4 small, cheap, fast drives and strip them... or not strip and just install your wows on the different drives. this would allow you to get more read heads into the action, pulling up the data files.

if you try it, please post your results.

good luck and welcome to the forums!

[MultiMacBox23]

may try the multiple hard drives, but from all of what i heard doing a RAID stripe is not the way to go for my machine. i didnt buy the hardware RAID/SAS card (which was like a $1,000 option YIKES 8| ), and the software raid leaves alot to be desired when raid-ing for performance reasons.

the SSD drives are very appealing because there are no spinning platers, or moving read/write heads. they offer slightly better throughput in data transfer, but HUGE improvements in random access times. but again, the 64gig SSD drive option in the macbook air is a $1000 option also. for that kind of money i can buy 4 1tb drives, and each WoW can have its own drive to load from, and i can have 4.5tb of storage, LOL.

Hmmmm, i have a few bestbuy gift cards that i need to use up. argh..... choices, choices.

[Xzin]

I wish my RAIDs would strip for me :(

They stripe pretty well though :)

You can get entry level RAID cards these days for nothing. Only the ultra high end ones are 1K+ The cheap ones are software RAID though (as are nearly all built in ones), so expect a CPU hit but honestly.... a quad core will not even break a sweat. Under 1% cpu load even with max HD throughput. I would be surprised to find a gaming motherboard without software RAID built in these days.

SSD would be nice but keep in mind they are faster to read but slower to write.

The only thing a faster hard drive will do is allow you to load faster when you zone in or out. Other than that, the advantage of a faster hard drive (or RAID array) is minimal and probably only something you would notice when A LOT of people are on screen (or moving in and out of the screen). If it is worth it to you then go for it. It would CERTAINLY make a huge difference when you take a ship, enter an instance, enter major towns, etc.

[warcrime]

quick question from someone not as versed in hardware. if you're going to run a HD for each client, are you really not running into bus/controller bottlenecks?

[MultiMacBox23]

Xzin: well if you have the RaptorX drives they have a see through window on the top, so you can se what she's got under those clothes. Oh yeah and for the Mac's RAID cards are hard to come by, there are one or two aftermarket ones for my machine, but they require special drivers/hacks/and you can't boot off of them. although, i will try running a system activity monitor while i have the 5 clients open and see how many cores are being untilized. checking in the wow config.WTF file and how the "SET processAffinityMask" setting works, i've found that wow maxes out at utilizing 4 cores. i need to see if OSX will distribute the multiple wows to use the 8 cores, or will i just have 4 core not doing anything. if there are unused cores, maybe a software raid (thats built into the operating system) would be benificial.

warcrime: the SATA-300 interface is fast enough that all 5 drives shouldnt choke it. a raptor maxes out in a sequential read at 87mbyte/sec, 4 drives technically would max it out if they were able to sustain the max speed at the same time, but in real world applications and the small random seek/reads that wow is doing 5 drives wouldnt come close to maxing it out. the thing that is killing me is instance loading/continent loading/busy cities, all the damn random reads all over the place, and the 5 different wows fighting over the hard drive. sounds like a chorus or machine guns going off in the computer case, LOL. the more and more i'm experimenting with different ways of installing WoW on the machine, the more and more KeyClone's suggestion of multiple drives so each WoW can have a separate drive is looking better and better. the read/write heads just cannot keep up with how much the WoW's are asking them to move.

suprising what 200bux can get you, hard drive wise. i remember spending 500 on a 20mb 5.25" scsi drive WAAAAY-back-when.