Mon Dec 20, 2010 10:52 pm by mustangcobra
Well I came here to this board to ask a question after beating my head on a wall, but as a first time poster when i saw this I thought I bet I could really answer some of those questions your having, here are my specs for my machine (very similar):
Intel Xeon X3220 (think Q6600 same thing) clocked @3400 Mhz (4 core)
8 Gig Ram
Win 7 x64
I recently moved from a 260gtx and noticed a big improvement in keyclone boxing, I recently switched is ISBoxer, and new to it, but I can tell ya that moving from a 260gtx Nvidia to a ATI 5870 was a big improvement, you can see similar gains from going to a Nvidia 470 or the new 570. The reason I feel this is very close to your situation is I didn't see what video card you use, but possibly you can upgrade the video card if that is the bottleneck,,,
going forward, I also have noticed when I'm running around Org, (used to be DAL where I had the problem) that I'm maxing out all 4 cores on my CPU, its the same chip you have just a server version (xeon), same specs. To get rid of that bottleneck I'm going to a I7, now any i7 should make quite a improvement over the q6600 (core 2 era) but I'm choosing to go with the i7-970 6 core, they are really cheap on ebay right now ($600) compared to on say newegg ($879). When my new parts arrive if the price range is out of reach for some here one test I'm gonna do is disable 2 of the cores in the bios so it runs like a 4 core and see if I see a big improvement. If so we'd know if just going to a 4 core i7 would do, but I can tell ya one thing, I'm totally maxed out on this chip that is the same as a Q6600 and I'm even overclocking it from 2.4 Ghz to 3.4 Ghz. One thing you can do is run task manager in the background and when you are having problems see if you maxing out your cpu cycles. What is a really big hit for multiple copies of wow despite what version of boxing you do is that it can be very CPU intensive.
You can help by turning graphics down on the slaves toons (as you have done) but if thats not enough short of an upgrade the only thing I can think of is to make sure you have "instant swap" turned off (if you are using ISBoxer), that is located under Window Layouts, then you toon names, then under the Main region switcher.
If you want others to chime in for some more ideas let us know what your video card you are running is also.
One reason you are seeing the SSD not helping so much in this particular situation is the SSD although they can greatly help loading times and situations where fast I/O rates are needed (which is great for wow especially when running multiple copies) it can't help so much to improve an issue if its like my issue where I'm just plain maxing out CPU cycles. I even have a 23 Hard drive Raid (450mbps transfers) and it didn't help these situations. Hope this is of some hope for ya, upgrading Video card helped alot for me and next going with CPU swap. I'll post here when I get it and try it out but its gonna be a week before it gets here and got it goin.