Enough for 5-box?

[Shigan5]

Ok so i've dual boxed before and everything and i'm pretty good with hardware but ive seen mixed reviews and statements everywhere on this forum regarding running 5 instances of WoW on one machine. Some say you need uber hardware others say not very much. Ive done the math on the system requirements and it seems like I'll fall short. But I thought I would get some feedback first.

Current Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ (Not OverClocked)
4gb Ram
EVGa Geforce 9600gt SSC to 740mhz 512mb VRam
22" widescreen monitor (Suggestions for resolutions in Maximiser would be awesome, will potentially get a second monitor at some point)

[Djarid]

it is better than my system and I 5-box just fine.

I have athlon x2 4600+
4Gb
X1950XT
24"

One thing thing though... size does matter and if you are going to use PiP, the 22" will force you to lose some extra screen realestate (if you want to maintain aspect ratios) as 1050 does not divide by 4 to a whole number.

[Shigan5]

Oh I should've mentioned im running Vista Ultimate. Lol. I really need to upgrade to 64 bit though as im still running 32 and i hate only being able to use 3.5gb or my ram ;(

[Djarid]

he he my Mobo only supports 2.8Gb so I am shafted either way.

BTW don't go to 64 bit with only 4Gb of RAM Vista will reserve more for the increase memory space of 64 bit apps and you will actually have less available RAM than 32 bit version. There is a good article about it on Tom's Hardware.

And I am not even going to get started on the shabby 64bit driver scene

[Shigan5]

very true, and ill look up that article, but anyways tyvm for the feedback, and ill run a stresstest tonight with two instances.

Running one wow i currently get 45FPS ( i have the 45fps max cap still enabled, i never remember to turn it off after running keyclone) running max settings at 1680x1050. I get these results everywhere, including a fully populated shattrath. (Though I am on a Low pop server)

Do you play on lowest settings for your wows? And do you use two monitors or one?

[Djarid]

I have 3 monitors, but 2 of them are on a crappy HD2400 pro so are used for browsing, TS etc.

all 5 instances are on 1x 24" running off a Radeon X1950XT. My setup is 1 big wow @ 1538x1200 and 4 smaller ones stacked vertically on the RH side @ 384x300. This gives them all the same aspect ratio and PiP switching is very quick 1/5th second max.

I run my main WoW from C: and the other four from D:
I have optimised performance on D: by having one full wow installation (copied from the one on C:) lets call it WoW2
I then copied everything from WoW2 to WoW3,WoW4 and WoW5 EXCEPT the Data and Patches folders
I then linked the data folder from wow2 to the other installations using junction (on vista use mlink - search the forums for instructions)
I think I could get better performance again if all of them were on the same disk. (more caching)

I do get some slow downs in cities but only while loading textures (Al'Akir is a busy server) once it has stuttered a few times though it improves again. out in the wilds and in instances it flies with 30+FPS on my main. The small clone windows help kept overhead to a minimu