I think I just wasted $1000 on upgrades (Vista64, 8GB Ram, Dual 9800gtx)

[Khazrael]

The only "waste" I see is buying Vista.

Haters . I actually rather like Vista to be honest.

[Code]

Just out of curiosity, what is the typical memory usage for add ons on your main + clones? Certainly you're not running Auctioneer / ItemDB / other large add ons on your clones?

How do you have your affinity configured? I've found that I get the best framerates by dividing up the work as much as I can.
WoW Instance / Affinity
A / 0 1 3 4
B / 0 1
C / 1 2
D / 2 3
E / 3 0
Although you've said your cores are each running between 20-30%, so this might not be the issue. By default Windows won't allocate your last two cores, so if you're not manually configuring them you could get a slight performance increase.

Also, have you tried closing your pr0n vidz while playing? This will really kill your FPS, as well as your concentration (>. .)>

[Kaynin]

I have one computer in my house with Vista. (wife's laptop). My brother also has vista on his new laptop. Not a day goes by that at least one of us says "I hate this thing".

That, and the constant: "Are you sure?" "Are you sure?" "Are you sure?" "Are you sure?" is enough to make anyone go crazy.

And yes, I hate it.

You can turn of the Are you sure thingy.

[Blubber]

It is my personal opinion that running 5 different instances of wow, from 5 different installs on 5 different disks is a total waste of both disk space, and money. If you look at how operating systems go about caching on-disk data in memory, I'd say running all instances of a single install is your best bet. So you might want to try that.

I'd say, with your setup, neither CPU power nor graphics power should pose a problem. The more likely culprit would be either disk caching, or maybe the pci bus speed. Or, maybe network traffic, but that doesn't sound very likely tbh, as a bottleneck there would result in you seeing shadows, instead of getting low fps in cities (at least that's what I think).

[Khazrael]

It is my personal opinion that running 5 different instances of wow, from 5 different installs on 5 different disks is a total waste of both disk space, and money. If you look at how operating systems go about caching on-disk data in memory, I'd say running all instances of a single install is your best bet. So you might want to try that.

Junctioning/Symbolic Links is win. It basically achieves this on a single drive, while allowing you to have multiple configurations.

[Maz]

You can turn of the Are you sure thingy.

Are you sure?

[Basilikos]

The only "waste" I see is buying Vista.

Well, I'm not too sure about that. If you're running multiple monitors, Vista is the way to go. Otherwise, just for gaming, no. That, and Vista Ultimate is totally unneeded for anything remotely related to multiboxing, so yeah, there's the real waste.

[ilikemages]

I run a shitty dual core 2 gb ram radeon gfx card computer (ran my dad about 1k)

when i use 3x wow i get the following:
out of city - 40 fps each
in city - 15 fps (shat included) with slight tearing and lag

4x wow:
out of city - 25
in city - 8-10 with tearing

it's playable, atleast for what i want to do at the moment.

i have a extra computer at home i'm going to be using to run 2 of them over the summer so it should be alot smoother.

TBH having 60fps is a little much, the game runs perfectly fine at around 30.

[Gallo]

You can turn of the Are you sure thingy.

Are you sure?

Haha I almost fell for this. I was thinking "Yeah, I definite sure that you can turn that off.... oh wait" lol.

[Speedbump]

Under my old system after several hours of play if i went to a very crowded sunwell isle sometimes i would see some tearing, my card getting too hot I imagine. Out in the wild my fps on my main 1600x1200 client would generaly be 25-45 so it was pretty nice, in OGR and Shat it would drop to around 15-20.

Basically I was hoping to up my in city fps by another 5-10 fps and get cooler running video cards so i didnt burn up the ultra eventualy.

I am not running 5 on my main system like you are, but i do run 3 at 1600x1200 on a 8800GTX. I have the focus window set to a max of 90 and the two back windows at 25. In most areas the fps remains at the max. In the past i would on a rare occasion have an issue with texture ripping, eventually leading to a massive crash due to ground no longer being rendered and dropping to 2 fps. A fire totem would usually be the culprit for starting the meltdown. I always assumed it was a heat issue as well and had considered getting the 9800. There was a long time between occurrences so i couldn't really test it either.

The Sunwell release changed everything... Being on the Isle for more than an hour doing dailies would regularly cause the meltdown. So I loaded up the nVidia tools and started monitoring and adjusting settings. My card was not overheating... with fan speed at 100% it never went above 60C, even while it was in meltdown mode. I tried throttling and other things to make it stable but had no luck. However, if i only loaded 2 clients, I could not repeat the problem.

If you are still experiencing something similar to this with that setup? Could it be a memory issue with the cards?