4 boxing CPU usage question.

[xadmin]

I plan to 4 box World of Warcraft. My question is:

1. say if I run Windows XP SP3 and load 4 instances of the game, will Windows XP automatically allocate each core of the CPU for each game windows?

2. Is windows 7 better for multiboxing than Windows XP?

3. For multiboxing, the more cores the better right?

[Iru]

1. Kinda. It will certainly distribute the workload, although it may not be that explicit with CPU affinity

2. Yes, but mostly because it's a 64bit OS so you can use more memory, which is generally the initial limiter on multiboxing performance

3. yes, but only up to a certain point. WoW isn't designed for multi-core operations so it's not like te game itself behaves differently. It's more that the system has more resources to spread around. Other changes - more memory, SSD - are likely to give a bigger bang for the buck.

[Ualaa]

You can get 64-bit versions of XP, but there are some performance issues for gaming vs 64-bit versions of Vista or Win7.

As of a recent patch (3.3), Blizzard did something where wow will use more then two cores if they're available. The patch notes mentioned a config.wtf line which can be added to disable this behavior.

I personally have all physical cores assigned to each instance of warcraft. I've found when the logical cores (hyper threading) are unassigned, my performance is better then when they're on game clients too. But the gain is rather marginal.

Some like to put specific cores on different instances of the game, and that's a preference choice really.

I like to have all cores assigned to all instances, and then allow windows to manage the load.

[Tim]

Windows XP 64bit has terrible support from software, don't even touch it with a 10 foot pole. It is a hodge podge last ditch effort by Microsoft to capitalize on the 64bit branding when it was all the hype.

Just go for Windows 7, and before you consider upgrading your PC, know you can buy a good 5multibox PC for 700.

[xadmin]

Thanks for the reply guys.

1. How do you assign CPU affinity to each game window? Is this in Pwnboxer?

[Poyzon]

Originally Posted by xadmin

Thanks for the reply guys.

1. How do you assign CPU affinity to each game window? Is this in Pwnboxer?

Yes, this is configurable in Pwnboxer.

When you click on one of the boxes to configure a game, the Configure Game Settings dialog will open up. From here, you can Set CPU Affinity and specify any number of available CPUs for that game instance.

Here's the screenshot of it from the Pwnboxer web site.

[xadmin]

Originally Posted by Tim

Windows XP 64bit has terrible support from software, don't even touch it with a 10 foot pole. It is a hodge podge last ditch effort by Microsoft to capitalize on the 64bit branding when it was all the hype.

Just go for Windows 7, and before you consider upgrading your PC, know you can buy a good 5multibox PC for 700.

I currently use Windows XP since it is not a system hog. I currently use AthlonXP 5000+. If I switch to Windows 7, wouldn't it slow down my gaming since the operating system is a memory and CPU hog?

[xadmin]

Tim,

Why don't you use your SSD as a boot drive as well as a WoW game drive?

[Tim]

Originally Posted by xadmin

Tim,

Why don't you use your SSD as a boot drive as well as a WoW game drive?

SSD's slowdown and eventually fail if you do too many write cycles to them.

For my boot drive I have 2x300GB Velicoraptor 10,000RPM SE's in RAID, which is uber fast.

[Ualaa]

The lower quality SSD's have around 10,000 writes, and the higher quality around 100,000 writes.

The memory controller will theoretically write to whichever free sector of the SSD that has had the fewest writes. With the TRIM command (Win7 only), you can restore (and often increase beyond) an SSD to its factory speed, but (although not positive on this) I don't believe this changes the number of writes a given SSD can have.

The gen2 SSD's which are MLC drives, will probably last 8-10 years as a host drive for the OS. The much cheaper SLC drives which we use for gaming won't go nearly this long, but are much cheaper and as a gaming drive, just as good.