Getting back into WoW / Boxing, need hardware advice.

[spher0boom]

Hey Guys.

I took a break from WoW / multiboxing, but I’m hoping to get back into it again soon. I’m trying to plan out my hardware, and I’m hoping to get some advice on what my best options would be given the hardware I already have.

I originally boxed on 6 PCs each with a single dedicated monitor (3 Across by 2 high) using Multiplicity. I still have the monitors in that configuration, but have replaced the original 6 PCs with 4 new ones. I loved having all 5 clients full-screen with medium-to-high settings, but using 5 full-screens isn’t a requirement, I’d just really like to be able to use all of the slaves without having to minimize/maximize windows to do it.

Here is what I currently have for hardware:

Primary PC (Bottom 3 Monitors: 1680x1050, 1920x1200, 1680x1050)
- i7-2600K
- 32GB GSKIL F3-12800CL10Q-32GBZL
- Radeon HD 6870
- Intel 120GB SSD (Windows)
- Intel 80GB SSD (Mac OS X)
- 750 Watt (Corsair TX750 with 62A on a dedicated single +12V rail)

Secondary PC (Top Center Monitor: 1680x1050)
- i5-2500K
- 32GB GSKIL F3-12800CL10Q-32GBZL
- Radeon HD 4890
- Intel 250GB SSD
- 750 Watt (Corsair HX650 with 54A on a dedicated single +12V rail)

Tertiary PC 1 (Top Left Monitor: 1280x1024)
- i5-2500K
- 8GB Corsair PC3 12800
- Intel HD 3000
- 520 Watt (Corsair HX520HW with 3 x 18A +12V rails)

Tertiary PC 2 (Top Left Monitor: 1280x1024)
- i5-3750K
- 8GB Corsair PC3 12800
- Intel HD 4000
- 550 Watt (Corsair VX550 with 41A on a dedicated single +12V rail)

All 4 PCs are built on the Gigabyte Z68x-UD3H-B3 motherboard.

I also have the following video cards available:
- Radeon HD 4890
- 8800 GTS 640MB
- 8800 GTS 640MB
- 9600GT

I’m also more than willing to buy a new GTX 670 or 680 if it will accomplish what I’m looking for, as well as a wow-dedicated SSD.

Issues / Limitations:

(1) I’d prefer to 5-box with as few computers as possible (preferably 1) as the two tertiary PCs are currently dedicated to other tasks (video encoding, VMware, etc..).

(2) The physical setup of the PCs and the monitors limits my configuration. The secondary and tertiary PCs are in a different room connected by 50’ DVI cables. The distance requires I use DVI cables (VGA looks horrible) and the monitors have only a single DVI slot, so I’d have to add KVM/Monitor switches to use the DVI ports. The VGA ports are available and close to the main PC.

(3) I can go up to 4 monitors on my primary PC, but I don’t believe adding a second GPU to my primary PC is an option as the Gigabyte Z68x-UD3H-B3 motherboard has 1 16x and 1 8x 2.0 compliant slot, and if a second card is added the 16x slot runs at 8x, which I assume would hurt performance a lot more than it would help it?

(4) The Keyboard/Mouse control software I used in my old setup (Multiplicity) doesn't work well in multi-monitor setups, and is very awkward to use to navigate to the top left/right monitors, so it’s not ideal for fast reactions. I haven’t found a replacement that works well for gaming (mouse movement goes crazy when using Synergy and Share-Mouse), so a 1-PC or 2-PC solution using the bottom 3 and top center monitors (primary and secondary PCs only) would be best.

Here are my questions:

Everyone says that boxing 5 on a single PC is very doable with even a medium quality graphics card, especially if you use DX9. However I’m not sure if anyone is doing 5 large windows on a single PC with a single GPU, and I haven’t purchased the 670 yet to test. I saw a post from MiRai that said a 3/4GB card couldn’t do it in DX11. I saw a post from Ualaa saying he’s using running 4 slaves on a 1080x1920 secondary monitor (in portrait maybe?) in DX9, but I’m not sure what size they are.

I’m wondering if anyone is running a single 4GB card with a 1920x1080 High/Ultra window and 4 slaves at 1024x768 or larger with medium settings across multiple monitors?


MiRai said he had some issues using 3 monitors as his performance was choppy, but that most people didn’t have this issue. However, I attempted to get back into boxing 4-5 months ago tried it, and I did have similar issues when opening the 3^rd client on the 3^rd monitor with the 6870. However, that’s a 1GB card (I did run them in DX9).

Is anyone running 5 full-screen sessions? If so what is your setup? I might consider upgrading my motherboard if I could do that.


MiRai posted that running different resolutions on your monitors caused significant performance issues for the 4xx and 5xx cards. I didn’t see any posts that specifically listed different resolutions, but saw many listing the same, though I certainly could have missed them.

Does this issue still exist for the 6xx cards?


If you had the equipment listed above available to you, and had the option of buying an additional 670/680 and Game-dedicated SSD, how would you configure this boxing setup if it were yours?

Thanks in advance for any advice!
- spher0boom

[RSM72]

You should try running it all off your primary PC. I'm currently 5-boxing on an overclocked i7 950 (@3.6Ghz) with 12GB of system memory. I got two 24" screens hooked to that box and have one client fullscreen and the other 4 on the second screen. 50% downsampled 1920x1200 is close enough to the resolution of your tertiary screens (1280x1024) I think you wont lose much here. I'm running all clients in DX11 with one client on high settings and the others on low-medium, the slaves capped at 20fps.

For the GPU you most likely want a non-SLI setup because SLI will give you only very low increase in performance but alot of problems and issues. My GTX 580 is already overkill for that setup since I'm running into CPU-limitations when LFR-ing rather that GPU-limits. I'd still replace that HD 6870 because WoW performs better on Nvidia cards and you want a card with 3-4GB of video memory for 5 clients.

Performance-wise its quiet good on a single box, fps on the main client is 25-40 in capitals. In 40-man BGs it dropped down to 20 in crowded areas but Blizzard solved that problem by removing /follow from BGs. In 25-man raids (LFR) it gets worse by dropping to 10-15 which is close to being unplayable (yet I still do good dps I just dont move). Problem here is the CPU (I see all cores close to 100%) not the GPU.

As for software - ISboxer supports multi-computer configurations I just cant comment anything about that because I never tried that (running of one box only). I think its recommended somewhere to run all clients at the same resolution when using ISboxer.

[MiRai]

(1) I’d prefer to 5-box with as few computers as possible (preferably 1)

This is what most people these days.

(3) I can go up to 4 monitors on my primary PC, but I don’t believe adding a second GPU to my primary PC is an option as the Gigabyte Z68x-UD3H-B3 motherboard has 1 16x and 1 8x 2.0 compliant slot, and if a second card is added the 16x slot runs at 8x, which I assume would hurt performance a lot more than it would help it?

It's highly doubtful you'll be able to saturate the PCIe lanes on 8x.

SLI 16x/16x VS 16x/8x - http://hardocp.com/article/2010/08/1...2#.UZ4ft7XVB8E

(4) The Keyboard/Mouse control software I used in my old setup (Multiplicity) doesn't work well in multi-monitor setups, and is very awkward to use to navigate to the top left/right monitors, so it’s not ideal for fast reactions. I haven’t found a replacement that works well for gaming (mouse movement goes crazy when using Synergy and Share-Mouse), so a 1-PC or 2-PC solution using the bottom 3 and top center monitors (primary and secondary PCs only) would be best.

I know nothing of Multiplicity. Most people use Input Director because it's free and seems to do everything that Multiplicity does (except centralize audio).

Everyone says that boxing 5 on a single PC is very doable with even a medium quality graphics card, especially if you use DX9. However I’m not sure if anyone is doing 5 large windows on a single PC with a single GPU, and I haven’t purchased the 670 yet to test.

I would say that most people render each of their game clients at the resolution of their main client so that mouse broadcasting is 1:1. This really comes down to which software you'd be using because if you're going to be running something like Keyclone, then no matter what you do your game clients will render at the resolution they're shown on your monitor, whereas, if you use ISBoxer, then even though the game clients look scaled down, they're still rendering at the resolution you tell them to (by default -- this can be changed) so that mouse broadcasting accuracy is preserved.

This is on a person-to-person basis, though. It's hard to judge how a person truly has their clients set up via a screenshot unless they give a lot of details about it.

I saw a post from MiRai that said a 3/4GB card couldn’t do it in DX11.

...using the Ultra preset @ 1920x1080 x5. There are those that claim they can "run" their clients at Ultra @ 1920x1080 on 5x game clients using DX11, but everyone's definitions of "run" and "playable" are vastly different.

I saw a post from Ualaa saying he’s using running 4 slaves on a 1080x1920 secondary monitor (in portrait maybe?) in DX9, but I’m not sure what size they are.

Pretty sure he was rolling around with DX11 before he quit, but I could be wrong.

MiRai said he had some issues using 3 monitors as his performance was choppy, but that most people didn’t have this issue.

I can't imagine I said this recently? This sounds like something I said back when I was using a Q9550 and 2x GTX 260s... which was 2+ years ago.

MiRai posted that running different resolutions on your monitors caused significant performance issues for the 4xx and 5xx cards. I didn’t see any posts that specifically listed different resolutions, but saw many listing the same, though I certainly could have missed them. Does this issue still exist for the 6xx cards?

Significant performance issues? Are you talking about the issue where you run two monitors of different resolutions (monitor resolutions, not game resolutions) off of the same GPU, that GPU doesn't downclock?

If that's what you're asking, then that doesn't cause significant performance issues, but as far as I know, yes, the downclocking problem still exists; but if it really bothers you then you can manually change the P-State of each card through nVidia Inspector.

If you had the equipment listed above available to you, and had the option of buying an additional 670/680 and Game-dedicated SSD, how would you configure this boxing setup if it were yours?

Use the 2600K system and get a better GPU.

For the GPU you most likely want a non-SLI setup because SLI will give you only very low increase in performance but alot of problems and issues. My GTX 580 is already overkill for that setup since I'm running into CPU-limitations when LFR-ing rather that GPU-limits. I'd still replace that HD 6870 because WoW performs better on Nvidia cards and you want a card with 3-4GB of video memory for 5 clients.

This is something I've been meaning to address for awhile now because I've been running SLI for the last few months and the performance increase I'm seeing is amazing. I'm able to push video settings beyond what I normally would be able to using just a single card (or I would be forced to split the load between two GPUs on separate monitors).

Here's some quick proof I whipped up this morning: SLI VS NoSLI
(hover over the image, click the gear icon, and choose to view in full resolution if you want to see the full image)

I've become quite attached to that layout and running all five clients on a single monitor, so I don't have any 1920x1080 comparisons for anyone.

For anyone that looks at those comparison images, know that SLI has never been a proven technology while running multiple game clients and its results may vary greatly from setup to setup or from game to game. The images I've posted above aren't saying, "SLI is a must! Go out and spend more money now!" because if you happen to run out to the store and purchase a second (or third or fourth) video card to SLI together and it doesn't work as awesome as you thought it would, I'm not responsible.

[remanz]

all I have to say is stay a way from SLI or dual chip cards. Not worth the hassle. Not worth the heat. get GTX 780 now~

[spher0boom]

I know nothing of Multiplicity. Most people use Input Director because it's free and seems to do everything that Multiplicity does (except centralize audio).

I saw this in one of Ualaa's posts last night, and went looking for it after that. A couple of forum posts identified WoW users who reported that when clicking on secondary screens InputDirector was also still clicking on the primary screen, so I didn't end up trying it. If that isn't the case for most users I'll go give it a try if I end up using multiple PCs.

MiRai said he had some issues using 3 monitors as his performance was choppy, but that most people didn’t have this issue.

I can't imagine I said this recently? This sounds like something I said back when I was using a Q9550 and 2x GTX 260s... which was 2+ years ago.

I believe the post was at least 18 months old. I wasn't really sure how much things changed over time, so I included it just in case it was still an issue. This is probably a result of me searching rather than systematically going back through the posts.

Significant performance issues? Are you talking about the issue where you run two monitors of different resolutions (monitor resolutions, not game resolutions) off of the same GPU, that GPU doesn't downclock?

If that's what you're asking, then that doesn't cause significant performance issues, but as far as I know, yes, the downclocking problem still exists; but if it really bothers you then you can manually change the P-State of each card through nVidia Inspector.

Yes, I'm talking about 2 different monitor resolutions off the same GPU. I'm not sure what the problem was, it wasn't identified in the post, I believe you were still looking in to it. I don't know what the P-State is ... I'll do some research, thanks!

Use the 2600K system and get a better GPU.

Done. GTX 670 will be here tomorrow.

It's highly doubtful you'll be able to saturate the PCIe lanes on 8x.

SLI 16x/16x VS 16x/8x - http://hardocp.com/article/2010/08/1...2#.UZ4ft7XVB8E

This one is a 16x/16x to 16x/8x comparison, whereas I would end up 8x/8x. However, the article you found referenced a follow-up in the conclusion with a 16x/16x to 8x/8x comparison here:

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/.../#.UZ7YV7WyB8E

In our evaluation last week, we tested at x16/x16 and x16/x8 and found that there were miniscule differences at 2560x1600 and 5760x1200 resolutions. However, in this week’s evaluation testing at x8/x8 and x16/x16, we see that having both video cards at x8 does somewhat impact performance, but only at the higher 5760x1200 Eyefinity/NV Surround resolution.

It seems that at 2560x1600, even with 4X AA, there was absolutely no difference between x16/x16 and x8/x8. This is good news if you game at x8/x8 on a single display configuration at 2560x1600 and below. You simply are not missing anything, and moving up to x16/x8 or x16/x16 will yield no performance improvements or gameplay differences, even on the fastest GTX 480 SLI.

At x8/x8 we didn’t find that it hurt our gameplay experience or caused us to change any in-game settings. All it did was cause around a 7% (at most) difference in the average framerate on one game, BF2.

Therefore, as we look into the future of gaming, if a game is more shader heavy, it will probably have less affect with PCIe bandwidth, but if a game uses insanely high texture sizes and AA settings, PCIe bandwidth may be a concern as we move into multiple display gaming configurations. And surely we are going to be seeing games with larger textures with the widespread adoption of multi-display gaming.

So that's good news for a lot of people. However, I wasn't really looking to do SLI, I wanted to add more full-screen monitors, not necessarily increase the performance of my primary screen. I had actually looked for some articles a while back, but I got discouraged quickly and stopped looking. I'm not sure where I was looking last time, because the answers I'm getting this time about single card 16x vs 8x performance say there is only about a 3% difference, so I'm encouraged to throw in a card and do some experimenting. I'm really hoping this works and doesn't impact performance because I would love to be able to use all 6 monitors. I used to be able to do this on the Z68x-UD3H-B3 using the on-board video, but once I moved up to 32GB it performed horribly and I had to stop.

This is something I've been meaning to address for awhile now because I've been running SLI for the last few months and the performance increase I'm seeing is amazing. I'm able to push video settings beyond what I normally would be able to using just a single card (or I would be forced to split the load between two GPUs on separate monitors).

I only have a 24" primary monitor, so my intent was to split the load. I'd rather sacrifice slave size/quality and have a large primary window with very high or ultra settings. Given my 8x/8x restriction an eyefinity display or something similar doesn't seem like it would perform well given the articles referenced above. My Preference would be to have two 23" 1080p monitors in portrait mode on either side of my primary and do 4 x 1080x810 windows for he slaves, but i'd have to buy 3 new monitors and end up limiting myself to 4 instead of 6 given my space, which doesn't work well with the other tasks the computers perform.

I have the extra 8800GTS cards. Would one of them come close to supporting two 1280x1024 WoW sessions on medium settings? I'd be happy with 4 1280x1024 windowed slaves. If not, what would be the minimum card I should look at as a secondary if I attempt go this route?

I would say that most people render each of their game clients at the resolution of their main client so that mouse broadcasting is 1:1. This really comes down to which software you'd be using because if you're going to be running something like Keyclone, then no matter what you do your game clients will render at the resolution they're shown on your monitor, whereas, if you use ISBoxer, then even though the game clients look scaled down, they're still rendering at the resolution you tell them to (by default -- this can be changed) so that mouse broadcasting accuracy is preserved.

This is on a person-to-person basis, though. It's hard to judge how a person truly has their clients set up via a screenshot unless they give a lot of details about it.

It never really occurred to me to use the single monitor for all clients. I recently upgraded to the 24" and am still getting used to it. I'll have to give it a try and see how it works.

The mouse broadcasting thing is actually something I completely forgot about. I used to use Octopus and HotKeyNet, which did relative movements, so my screens never had to be the same resolution. This time around I was going to try ISBoxer since everyone here seems to love it. I have a lot of learning to do around ISBoxer, but I see several forum member have put together nice guides, so I have a good place to start . Does ISBoxer offer any 'relative' mouse broadcasting capabilities if I chose to not use the same resolution on all clients?

Thank-you very much for your advice/input!

-spher0boom

[spher0boom]

all I have to say is stay a way from SLI or dual chip cards. Not worth the hassle. Not worth the heat. get GTX 780 now~

I read MiRai's post too late ... I had already ordered a new GTX-670 since all the posts on the forum indicated the same things, so we'll see how it goes. Lots of places (including Tom's and Ualaa's posts) indicated it was a great 'bang for the buck' card, and could easily be clocked up to the 680 speeds.

Thanks!

[spher0boom]

You should try running it all off your primary PC. I'm currently 5-boxing on an overclocked i7 950 (@3.6Ghz) with 12GB of system memory. I got two 24" screens hooked to that box and have one client fullscreen and the other 4 on the second screen. 50% downsampled 1920x1200 is close enough to the resolution of your tertiary screens (1280x1024) I think you wont lose much here. I'm running all clients in DX11 with one client on high settings and the others on low-medium, the slaves capped at 20fps.

This is very encouraging, thanks!

For the GPU you most likely want a non-SLI setup because SLI will give you only very low increase in performance but alot of problems and issues. My GTX 580 is already overkill for that setup since I'm running into CPU-limitations when LFR-ing rather that GPU-limits. I'd still replace that HD 6870 because WoW performs better on Nvidia cards and you want a card with 3-4GB of video memory for 5 clients.

I ordered a 670, so this is also very encouraging!

Performance-wise its quiet good on a single box, fps on the main client is 25-40 in capitals. In 40-man BGs it dropped down to 20 in crowded areas but Blizzard solved that problem by removing /follow from BGs. In 25-man raids (LFR) it gets worse by dropping to 10-15 which is close to being unplayable (yet I still do good dps I just dont move). Problem here is the CPU (I see all cores close to 100%) not the GPU.

Well, this part worries me a bit. I was hoping to keep 30+fps on the main worst case. Perhaps if I add a second GPU for two fo teh screens I can alleviate this issue.

As for software - ISboxer supports multi-computer configurations I just cant comment anything about that because I never tried that (running of one box only). I think its recommended somewhere to run all clients at the same resolution when using ISboxer.

I've never used it before, but it's on my list this time to try.

Thanks for the encouraging feedback!

[RSM72]

Well, this part worries me a bit. I was hoping to keep 30+fps on the main worst case. Perhaps if I add a second GPU for two fo teh screens I can alleviate this issue.

WoW is very cpu-intensive that is the main problem performance-wise. Without a six- or eight-core cpu you wont come close to any limit of your 670.

[MiRai]

I saw this in one of Ualaa's posts last night, and went looking for it after that. A couple of forum posts identified WoW users who reported that when clicking on secondary screens InputDirector was also still clicking on the primary screen, so I didn't end up trying it. If that isn't the case for most users I'll go give it a try if I end up using multiple PCs.

Not entirely sure on that. I know a lot of people use Input Director with ISBoxer (Synergy has shown to cause issues) when using two different computers to play. I only multibox on one machine, but I've had ID installed for years so I can use both of my machines at once. I can't say that I've heard of many ID issues as of lately.

Yes, I'm talking about 2 different monitor resolutions off the same GPU. I'm not sure what the problem was, it wasn't identified in the post, I believe you were still looking in to it. I don't know what the P-State is ... I'll do some research, thanks!

P-States are power states. Multiple monitors of different resolutions (or refresh rates) or having your cards in SLI will cause the main GPU to not downclock to its idle state. You can force it to downclock via third-party tools like nVidia Inspector, but if you don't remember to turn it back up when you begin to play you're going to realize very quickly that something is wrong. Years ago I was manually forcing power states on my cards so that they'd be idle when I wasn't playing games... that lasted about a week before I got tired of continuously forgetting to turn it back to its normal state and having my games load up at 3 FPS.

r9tJQBs.png

My Preference would be to have two 23" 1080p monitors in portrait mode on either side of my primary and do 4 x 1080x810 windows for he slaves, but i'd have to buy 3 new monitors and end up limiting myself to 4 instead of 6 given my space, which doesn't work well with the other tasks the computers perform.

1080x810 seems like an odd aspect ratio (1.33), you would get better visual quality on those screens if you tried to keep the AR as close to your main client's resolution as you can (1920/1080 = 1.78). Not to mention, if you ever felt like disabling ISBoxer's instant swapping and wanted the mouse cursors in each window to sorta line up, then the AR would need to be close to identical on each screen.

I have the extra 8800GTS cards. Would one of them come close to supporting two 1280x1024 WoW sessions on medium settings? I'd be happy with 4 1280x1024 windowed slaves. If not, what would be the minimum card I should look at as a secondary if I attempt go this route?

I think you need to just get your new GPU and see how it handles five clients @ 1920x1080 and then go from there.

The mouse broadcasting thing is actually something I completely forgot about. I used to use Octopus and HotKeyNet, which did relative movements, so my screens never had to be the same resolution. This time around I was going to try ISBoxer since everyone here seems to love it. I have a lot of learning to do around ISBoxer, but I see several forum member have put together nice guides, so I have a good place to start . Does ISBoxer offer any 'relative' mouse broadcasting capabilities if I chose to not use the same resolution on all clients?

Yes, you can disable instant swapping and scale your mouse cursor to fit to the windows.

[spher0boom]

1080x810 seems like an odd aspect ratio (1.33), you would get better visual quality on those screens if you tried to keep the AR as close to your main client's resolution as you can (1920/1080 = 1.78). Not to mention, if you ever felt like disabling ISBoxer's instant swapping and wanted the mouse cursors in each window to sorta line up, then the AR would need to be close to identical on each screen.

I didn't think about that ... I'll scale them to the same aspect ratio. I'm using 16:10 (1920x1200) so I'll get a little extra vertical space out of it any way.

I think you need to just get your new GPU and see how it handles five clients @ 1920x1080 and then go from there.

Well, Amazon delivered me a used card today instead of the new one I purchased. I'm a little hesitant to install it and play with it while waiting for the new one to arrive since I don't know if it was returned because it was defective. I'm not very happy about this since I had planned on trying it tonight

My 6870 couldn't do a single 1920x1200 session with all ultra settings without it being 'jerky' when I ran. In the human starting area I was only getting 45fps.

This site (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html) lists the passmark ratings, and the 670 is rated at 5,349 compared to the 6870's 2,555 rating, so I'm hoping for a vast improvement. The 680 was only rated at 5,682, which is why I didn't grab it ... seems like a small improvement for $100.

Yes, you can disable instant swapping and scale your mouse cursor to fit to the windows.

I started going through the ISBoxer tutorials last night after I posed. You did a very nice job on them, and make the settings easy to understand, so thank you. My 7-day trial was activated today so I can play with it tonight no matter which card I have installed.

Thanks!