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Advice on upgrades for 5-box rig

Moderator: MiRai

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isa23

Posts: 9

Joined: Mon May 12, 2014 4:13 pm

Post Sun May 18, 2014 2:13 pm

Advice on upgrades for 5-box rig

Looking for advice on upgrades for my current system.

I built this pc 10/2010 and it used to run 5 instances of WoW, plus browser, Excel, other stuff in background with excellent performance. I stopped playing WoW a few months later and just resubbed after a 3-year no-WoW/ no boxing vacation. Performance with 1 client is great. 5 clients are ok-ish performance in instances, marginally playable in open world, unplayable in cities (even Dalaran/ Shattrath with very few people).

Here's what I'm running:
Mobo: ASUS Rampage III Extreme LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
    6x triple channel ram slots
    4x PCIE 2.0 x16 slots
CPU: Intel Core i7 930 2.80GHz (4 cores)
RAM: 6GB (3x2GB) Corsair Dominator 1600
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX470 Superclocked 1280 MB

I ran open hardware monitor and got 95%+ RAM Load with 5 clients. 55% with 1 client. GPU got up into the low 90%s at peak, but most of the time sat around 70-80% with 5 clients. CPU load was ~60% except during character load when it spiked into the 90s for a few seconds.

Also my system SSD is nearly full which can't be helping. I've ordered a bigger one (Samsung EVO 840 250GB), should be here tomorrow.

I don't want to rebuild or spend $1000 in upgrades right now. This box still does work stuff fine. I can get 12GB of triple channel ram for ~$135, which would be no problem. Upgrading the GPU seems like a big deal. From what I can tell they don't sell PCIE 2.0 cards that are as good as the one I have, so I guess I'm looking at a motherboard upgrade in order to get into a better graphics card, which would also trigger a new CPU purchase. If I'm wrong about the graphics card I'd be happy to hear it.

Any advice/ suggestions are appreciated. Thanks in advance!
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MiRai

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Joined: Fri Nov 20, 2009 3:30 pm

Post Sun May 18, 2014 6:32 pm

Re: Advice on upgrades for 5-box rig

isa23 wrote:Upgrading the GPU seems like a big deal. From what I can tell they don't sell PCIE 2.0 cards that are as good as the one I have, so I guess I'm looking at a motherboard upgrade in order to get into a better graphics card, which would also trigger a new CPU purchase. If I'm wrong about the graphics card I'd be happy to hear it.

Unless you're looking at older cards, I don't think manufacturers make PCIe 2.0 GPUs anymore and it's been a few years since they have. Any PCIe 3.0 card is backwards compatible though, you just won't be able get the full amount of performance out of it (assuming you can even saturate the PCIe lanes anyway).

isa23 wrote:I don't want to rebuild or spend $1000 in upgrades right now. This box still does work stuff fine. I can get 12GB of triple channel ram for ~$135, which would be no problem.

It really comes down to whether you want the machine to just be able to handle 'work stuff' or if you want it to be able to handle 'work stuff' and be able to multibox? There's not really a way to upgrade such old hardware without it being 'not worth it' in the long run.

CPU - Your only viable upgrade would be to a six-core 980X/990X CPU which is still going to run you at least $300 on eBay (likely the only place to buy one used), but it still won't keep up with today's quad-core CPUs -- Especially those with hyper-threading.

RAM - You could buy some RAM to help put a band-aid on part of the wound, but 18GB (assuming 3x2GB + 3x4GB) isn't going to carry over to a new build nicely because...

1) If you make the move to X79, which utilizes quad-channel RAM, you'll want to populate either four or eight DIMM slots with the same amount and type of RAM.

2) If you make the move to Z87/Z97, which utilizes dual-channel RAM, you'll want to populate either two or four DIMM slots with the same amount and type of RAM.

3) If you make the move to X99, which hasn't even been released yet, you won't even be able to use the same RAM because that chipset will utilize quad-channel DDR4 (which also hasn't been released yet). :)

GPU - You mention you're sitting around 70%-80% (and higher) in Outland/Northrend areas/instances/cities -- Both of which are old content with older, less-detailed textures. Once you hit Cataclysm stuff you're likely going to be feeling the heat, and when you make it to Pandaria I imagine the performance overall is going to be incredibly low. Now, I could be totally incorrect about Cataclysm/Pandaria since I don't have any multiboxing teams in those areas, but with each expansion Blizzard has only added more "stuff" to the game and increased the level of detail. Pandaria itself is a very beautiful and very detailed continent (IMO), and Draenor (the next expansion's world) is incredibly detailed from what I've seen, first-hand, so far.

On top of that, if your PSU is on the low-end side it may not be able to sufficiently power a modern day system, so there's also that to keep in mind. However, you didn't mention what level of video settings, which graphics API, or FPS you play at, so if you have room to turn stuff down then I'd recommend that over upgrading 4+ year old hardware with 4+ year old hardware just to gain a teeny bit of performance. I realize an entire new machine isn't always in the budget, but if you can hang on with shitty performance and start saving, then that's really the thing to do.
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isa23

Posts: 9

Joined: Mon May 12, 2014 4:13 pm

Post Sun May 18, 2014 6:47 pm

Re: Advice on upgrades for 5-box rig

Thanks MiRai, very helpful.

I agree on buying more triple channel RAM. Not a big outlay, but nothing that will carry over to a new build.

I didn't know that PCIE 3.0 was back-compatible, so that may be an option in terms of phasing into an upgrade. I could do a new build in a month or two, just got a vacation coming up in a week so this month is looking pretty spendy already.

My PSU is same age as the rest of the build, a Corsair CMPSU-1000W.

I'll have to check my video settings in-game. I know ISBoxer is set to 60FPS master/ 30 slaves.
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MiRai

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Post Mon May 19, 2014 2:00 pm

Re: Advice on upgrades for 5-box rig

isa23 wrote:I'll have to check my video settings in-game. I know ISBoxer is set to 60FPS master/ 30 slaves.

You could easily drop your background framerate to 15 FPS which would free up a total of 60 FPS (15 FPS x 4 background clients) that the GPU and CPU don't need to render, but if your RAM is maxed out you're still going to see those dips in performance when the game wants to put more information into RAM and it can't; in which case it pulls the information directly from the disk which is much slower than RAM.
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isa23

Posts: 9

Joined: Mon May 12, 2014 4:13 pm

Post Fri May 23, 2014 7:57 pm

Re: Advice on upgrades for 5-box rig

Here's my temporary fix, since I'm not interested in upgrading the whole box right now:

Upgraded vid card to a 2GB GTX760 $200
Upgraded RAM to 12GB $135
Cleaned up my system SSD
Set ISBoxer framerate to 60/15
Stepped down my WoW graphics to High+ on main and Low+ on slaves.

I'm able to 5-box in Cata instances and cities, and Pandaria instances (haven't tested open world running around in Pandaville). Performance is fine and should last me the rest of this expansion.

System resources are something like this now, with 5 WoW running:
RAM demand ~7GB
Video memory demand ~1.5GB
Video processing demand low
CPU demand (for a 1st generation i7 4 core) 80-90%, so this is my new limiting factor. I'll have to play with the graphics settings and see how high I can push them or I might overclock a little and see if that helps.

Anyhow, that's my results. Hope it's of use to someone.

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