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i7 CPU: Assigning Separate Cores to Different Clients

PostPosted: Thu Feb 24, 2011 3:44 pm
by jacksj1
I have an i7-920.

Its showing up as having 8 cores in ISB, though it's 4 cores and 8 threads.


Should I ignore 'cores' 5-8 and balance my 5 clients across what are displayed as 1 - 4 ?


ie Should I set my clients to use

A)

Client 1 - Cores 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8
Client 2 - Cores 1,2
Client 3 - Cores 3,4
Client 4 - Cores 5,6
Client 5 - Cores 7,8

or

B)


Client 1 - Cores 1 ,2,3,4
Client 2 - Core 1
Client 3 - Core 2
Client 4 - Core 3
Client 5 - Core 4
And ignore cores 5 -8


Thanks in advance. :)

Re: Assigning Seperate Cores to Different Clients

PostPosted: Thu Feb 24, 2011 4:13 pm
by lax
The way i7 cores work is 1,3,5,7 are physical (real) cores and 2,4,6,8 are logical (fake) cores. My understanding is that for optimal performance, each fake core should be paired up with its corresponding physical core. And you should never assign only a fake core.

With 5 WoW instances on my i7, here is what I set mine to:
Slot 1: 1,2
Slot 2: 3,4
Slot 3: 5,6
Slot 4: 7,8
Slot 5: 5,7 (this one is assigned 2 physical cores)

This has served me well and is what I recommend to other i7 users. Enjoy :)

Re: i7 CPU: Assigning Seperate Cores to Different Clients

PostPosted: Thu Feb 24, 2011 4:34 pm
by jacksj1
Thanks lax.

Much appreciated ;)

Re: i7 CPU: Assigning Seperate Cores to Different Clients

PostPosted: Thu Feb 24, 2011 5:49 pm
by jacksj1
Rift wouldn't start when I made this setting.

Backed the change out and the character set still wouldn't work.


Had to remake character set, working fine again without cores set.

Re: i7 CPU: Assigning Seperate Cores to Different Clients

PostPosted: Fri Feb 25, 2011 11:23 am
by Amrathe
There is another thing you need to do in Rift to make it load balance onto another core.

In the rift.cfg for your characters located in C:\Users\<username>\appdata\local\RIFT (the files are virtualized, so you will see <Charactername>-rift.cfg) look for a setting called Main CPU Thread (it defaulted to 3 on my i7 920). Change that setting to a different core for each account (in my case I set it to maincputhread = 3 on one character and maincputhread = 5 on the other).

If you do that, you will have the primary thread for each account on a different cpu core. After making that change I went from core 3 tapped at 100% to core 3 and 5 tapped at about 80% each.

Re: i7 CPU: Assigning Seperate Cores to Different Clients

PostPosted: Sat Feb 26, 2011 11:23 am
by jacksj1
Thanks for that Amrathe, that's a massive help :)


N00b alert - I'm trying to edit the .cfg files using notepad and word but they won't overwrite the old file - instead they create a new (apparently text even though it's named .cfg) file with exactly the same name. I am changing the file save type from .txt to 'all file' and calling it .cfg


Is this something new with Win7 or am I doing something dumb ? I'm sure I used to edit .cfg files in the past without this problem.

Re: i7 CPU: Assigning Seperate Cores to Different Clients

PostPosted: Sat Feb 26, 2011 11:46 am
by lax
Use "Save As" in notepad, and at the bottom where it says "Save as type" it defaults to "Text documents (*.txt)" change that to "All files (*.*)". When "Text documents" is selected, it will append .txt to the filename. This is not new to windows 7. :)

Re: i7 CPU: Assigning Seperate Cores to Different Clients

PostPosted: Sat Feb 26, 2011 12:00 pm
by jacksj1
lax wrote:Use "Save As" in notepad, and at the bottom where it says "Save as type" it defaults to "Text documents (*.txt)" change that to "All files (*.*)". When "Text documents" is selected, it will append .txt to the filename. This is not new to windows 7. :)




Yes mate that's what I've been doing.

I am changing the file save type from .txt to 'all file' and calling it .cfg



Strange, I can't explain it.

Re: i7 CPU: Assigning Seperate Cores to Different Clients

PostPosted: Sat Feb 26, 2011 12:08 pm
by jacksj1
Selecting as follows :

Image

Different file saved (same name, appears to be a text file even though it's .cfg :

Image

Re: i7 CPU: Assigning Seperate Cores to Different Clients

PostPosted: Sat Feb 26, 2011 12:09 pm
by Amrathe
I had that problem with a different game.

I ended up taking ownership of the folder itself and then everything worked fined.