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

[Nitro]

I just dumped another $1000 of gear into my main box looking to improve the FPS for my 5 boxing in WoW

Previous Rig:

Q6700
Strike Extreme Mobo
4GB DDR2 RAM
8800 Ultra OC 768
Windows XP Pro
4x 150GB Raptor X

With this setup I played on two 20" NEC LCD2070VX Monitors in desktop span of 3200x1200 (main client 1600x1200, alts 800x600). I use keyclone to multiplex my commands and wow maximizer to setup my windows.

New Setup:

I added another Raptor Drive and installed Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit
It automatically found all the drivers I needed, very painless

I removed the 8800 Ultra and put in 2 x 9800gtx cards (on tomshardware benchmarks these cards are very very close in performance but the 9800s run alot cooler)
One monitor is connected to the first port of each card and I downloaded the latest drivers.

I installed 4GB more ram for a total of 8GB of ram, all identical match and model (Corsair XMS2DHX 2GB sticks DDR2). The system sees all the memory and its running well

Instead of wowmaximizer I used keyclones maximizer settings to lay out my clients

Turned off Aero, DWM was running my CPU's at 100%. After doing this my CPU usage dropped back to a normal 20% to 30%

Turned off UAC and Indexing for my drive.

End result:

Absolutely no gain, infact I think the gameplay is a little worse. Memory use never goes above 3.2GB so like someone previously said on these forums more than 4gb is not really needed to 5 box.

Can anyone think of any tweaks I may have missed that can make a major impact? The only thing left I can think to try is to use wowmaximizer for layout and see if that makes a chage.

[Khazrael]

Was there something that led you to believe your previous setup wasn't sufficient? Your OLD setup is probably a bit better then what I have now, and I feel I run pretty smooth with 5 instances going. While you're machine is definately stronger, it probably just didn't do anything for WoW specifically since it was probably fine to begin with. What kind of FPS did you get before?

[Nitro]

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.

[Gallo]

when 5 boxing on 1 PC, I think that no matter what your setup that its expected that Shatt is going to be hell on your PC. Those 5 clients getting 100% of the lag/video resources possible in the game, is rough. I am FINE everywhere in the game, except Shatt (havent been to Sunwell Isle yet).

[Nitro]

when 5 boxing on 1 PC, I think that no matter what your setup that its expected that Shatt is going to be hell on your PC. Those 5 clients getting 100% of the lag/video resources possible in the game, is rough. I am FINE everywhere in the game, except Shatt (havent been to Sunwell Isle yet).

Yea I understand that, I am just always looking for ways to improve my setup. I would have though a graphics card per monitor would have been a big improvement but I guess there is another bottleneck involved that I didnt forsee.

[Anahka]

My quad-core rig is handling 4 or 5 WoW's a LOT better then my very high-end but dual-core gaming rig. The dual-core is running at 100% most of the time. The quad around 30%.

[Gallo]

My quad-core rig is handling 4 or 5 WoW's a LOT better then my very high-end but dual-core gaming rig. The dual-core is running at 100% most of the time. The quad around 30%.

I never know what my quad is running at when I'm in shatt, because it lags out so bad that I can't get task manager up lol. I dont know if its a CPU bottleneck, GPU, or memory. Who knows.

[Maz]

I don't think the lag we suffer in Shatt has anything to do with the performance of our video cards.

Rather, as Shatt is so densely populated, there's a hit because of:

Increased network traffic (there's more going on that our clients need to be told about), and
Increased disk/bus activity (more people wearing a greater variety of clothes means more models and textures that need to be loaded off disk and into our video cards).

If your video card and memory weren't the bottleneck before the upgrade, upgrading them won't help.

Similarly, Vista 64 won't help you as WoW is a 32 bit app and Vista will run it in 32 bit mode (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOW64).

[Eteocles]

Try using wowmaximizer again instead of Keyclone's Maximizer; when I opened wow with maximizer via keyclone my comp lagged baaaaaaaaaaaaaaad. When I ran wows manually via desktop icon I run smooth as silk. I've mentioned this to him back when I first got it in Jan but I don't really know if it's an issue on his end or mine or if he can even do anything about it, but give it a shot :p

Try with a single 9800 too...never know what an sli/crossfire setup might do or they could be fighting over who gets to render what like spoiled kids, lol, and the sad part is I'm at least partially serious; Computers are very finicky, very strange things that NEVER follow logic in how they act. To solve issues like this you have to think outside the box even if it seems stupid or unlikely :p Oftentimes that unlikely bit is the most likely lol

[Khazrael]

when 5 boxing on 1 PC, I think that no matter what your setup that its expected that Shatt is going to be hell on your PC. Those 5 clients getting 100% of the lag/video resources possible in the game, is rough. I am FINE everywhere in the game, except Shatt (havent been to Sunwell Isle yet).

Yea I understand that, I am just always looking for ways to improve my setup. I would have though a graphics card per monitor would have been a big improvement but I guess there is another bottleneck involved that I didnt forsee.

You mentioned your fps actually went down. I'm using Vista as well (32 bit though) and when I tried to put my second card back in it killed my FPS. Try running off of one card and see if it does anything for you. I'm sure you don't want to have to do that after having bought two new cards to use, but it's at least worth it to see if that's having the same effect on you it did on me.

I'm not sure whats causing that, and I haven't really looked too hard into a fix for it either because my two graphics cards were cheapy's I bought before I even began multiboxing, so I didn't really care that I took one out. Let a friend have it as a hand-me-down.