Advice on a new rig

[heyaz]

15 boxing can get tricky on a single CPU box, depending on how you want your clients setup - resolution, background FPS requirement (reliable melee IWT needs 25fps+ background sustained, in my experience). I'm convinced at this point, without running your clients on what I call botter-mode (heavy dx9 config settings making the game look l ike minecraft) you just need dual xeons to make it "easy", otherwise you need to find a balance.

Now, My rig is just flawless with 10x:

3930k 6-core (between 4.2-4.6Ghz I've tried) // 2x Vertex 4 SSD Raid 0 // 64GB RAM // GTX 680 Classified 4GB

Somewhere around 12+ I noticed huge differences, and at 15x (and 16th client running bank alt, whatever) I really had to make compromises and do tweaking.

As mentioned above, WoW is extremely CPU intensive. One may think, with a better video card, one can run more clients at better settings - not usually the case. The more graphics settings you enable and the higher they are, the more CPU calculations WoW "must" do (they say), and some cause an exponential increase. As I recall in some technical posts, many graphics settings cause frames to need to be rendered (always with CPU involvement) many times over.

- Addons begin to get tricky as well as they engage the CPU quite a bit before a frame can be rendered. Things that parse the combat log and other real-time events can get especially bad (I had my main grinded to a halt recently due to a month old Skada log that hadn't been reset). Load/zone times out of an SSD or even RAM for that client were 10-30 seconds compared to the other clients not running it.

- Number of cores seem to be a big factor, maybe more so than clock rate. Once I exceeded logical cores (went over 12 clients) is when things got rough.

Now about tweaking:

- There is a lot of misinformation about RAM Drives and access speed, and block/file caching software (e.g. FancyCache, etc.). Most modern operating systems including Windows perform block level caching of recently used files automatically which I found differs very little over time (although I want to test more) than using a full RAM-disk or supplementary block/file level caching program, some of which appear to be complete snake oil (disabling Windows' os-level caching, then enabling its own to show their benchmarks).

- File access times, read/write speed, etc. is further misinterpreted by things like CrystalDiskMark (or whatever) that show you the speed of your disks - they disable the os-level caching entirely during this. Yes, their purpose is to show you how fast the disk actually is on its own, but it's synthetic - that SSD Raid 0 getting 1GB/sec compared to your mechanical drive at 200MB/sec, compared to your RAM drive at 9GB/sec - in the real world, you'll often see near RAM drive speeds in all cases (try moving/copying/reading a very large file twice and watch the difference on subsequent attempts once OS-level RAM caching kicks in.)... On the other hand, yes, SSD's are going to be better unless you've managed to get Windows to cache and hold all of WoW in RAM on its own prior to you using it. If you have the RAM you can put all of WoW into it and guarantee it's loaded out of there, but I suspect (although haven't fully tested) it may compete with the CPU's demands on RAM.

- There is a ton of misinformation about Windows tweaking out there. Say what you will, Linux/OSX/BSDish/whatever fanboys, but the Windows kernels especially around 7, 8, and 8.1 are very mature and exceedingly efficient, out of necessity (the amount of crap you're going to run on top of it, especially third party software MS doesn't control). Many tweaks hurt performance, do nothing (but disable useful features), or makes things unstable. Be that as it may, it is absolutely worth tweaking Windows at the os-level, but I'd start with Googling "bad windows tweaks" first, which led me to several articles explaining in depth what the tweaks (supposedly) do, why some are bad, useless, or outdated, and fortunately - information on what actually does work.

As far as better video cards, I don't know how they would help with pushing more clients than you have CPU to handle. My game looks decent (but doesn't have shadows or any shiny effects) and the GTX 680 maxes out at about 75% util... I can certainly get it to use 100% by increasing graphics settings only to have it crush my CPU.

I have a lot more notes over the past year, but that's the current state of 15 boxing as far as my setup. I'd afraid WoD may require me to use server-grade hardware to get multiple CPUs if I want to continue 15 boxing, or even 10.