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Question - ISBoxer CPU Strategy?? (1 Viewer)

Joined
Jan 14, 2014
RedCents
60¢
When boxing a full team of 6 or more what option should I select for this?
I normally select Round-robin Balancing but i'm not sure if that's the best option for boxing 6 or even a 12 character team. I figured you guys would know best :)
My current CPU is an Intel 7700k 4.2 GHz

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I've had good luck with round-robin. Honestly with your CPU power you might not notice much impact from choosing any of the strats. I would however make sure that you have 8 lines in each of your character eqclient files that look like:

CPUAffinity0=-1 CPUAffinity1=-1 CPUAffinity2=-1 CPUAffinity3=-1 CPUAffinity4=-1 CPUAffinity5=-1 CPUAffinity6=-1 CPUAffinity7=-1

This is so that the game itself doesn't try to allocate cores on it's own.
 
Thanks for the response, I should set them all to "1"?
Is this for when i run 6 instances or EQ or for 12?

@Sum1 steered you correctly, set them to -1. And the number of lines in the INI file has to do with how many CPU cores you have. Your i7-7700k CPU has 4 hyperthreaded cores which counts as 8 cores. Hence there are 8 lines required. The "-1" instructs EQ to skip doing any core allocation duties. That's because you've got ISBoxer doing that for you. If you didn't have ISBoxer then your Windows OS would figure it out on it's own.
 
Ok got it, so Mine should look like Sum1's example, no matter how many instances of EQ are running. Thank all much appreciated.
Next item, RAM, I currently have Corsair 16GB of 2133 MHz DDR4 and i notice it is topping out around 95% when i play 12 characters, is this normal or is the better RAM i should consider?
 
That's normal, every instance of EQ will use roughly 800k-1M of memory plus your baseline usage from system + other programs. My 8 GB systems runs 6 toons at 85% usage.

However there are some memory programs (Moo Window Menu+ or Memory Cleaner) you can use to squeeze the EQ instance memory usage down. On my Windows 7 machine they're a big help, on my Win10 machine less so. Also some other tips on EQ CPU and memory in this older thread.
 
Ok got it, so Mine should look like Sum1's example, no matter how many instances of EQ are running. Thank all much appreciated.
Next item, RAM, I currently have Corsair 16GB of 2133 MHz DDR4 and i notice it is topping out around 95% when i play 12 characters, is this normal or is the better RAM i should consider?

There's nothing wrong with using memory. And the quality of the RAM is not a factor. What matters is how many things have to get loaded into memory. If you are able play successfully like this I wouldn't change a thing. Now if you wanted to add 4 more characters you'd adjust the in-game graphics options to use less memory. The methods to do that have been documented in numerous places. I notice on my own set of characters that while they start out using about 1GB of RAM each they will gradually over time use less and less memory. After a few hours in one zone their memory usage will frequently be less than 0.5GB each.
 
I was reading a thread on DBG earlier today and I realized I gave bad info above...

The CPUAffinityX line numbers the actual EQ instances NOT the available cores on your CPU like I said earlier!

So if you are 12 boxing you need 12 lines in your eqclient.ini file numbered 0 thru 11. Since you are using ISBoxer you would still want to set all 12 lines to the "-1" setting. And to really complicate things since ISBoxer creates a custom eqclient.ini file for each of your named characters you would need to edit every one of those files. Those files are the ones in your Everquest folder that are of the form "eqclient-CharName.ini".

CPUAffinity0=-1 CPUAffinity1=-1 CPUAffinity2=-1 CPUAffinity3=-1 CPUAffinity4=-1 CPUAffinity5=-1 CPUAffinity6=-1 CPUAffinity7=-1 CPUAffinity8=-1 CPUAffinity9=-1 CPUAffinity10=-1 CPUAffinity11=-1
 
In my opinion you dont even need cpu affinity. Im currently boxing 18 chars at only 37% usage with no cpu affinity even set. Replacing eqclient.ini will resolve any and all lag issues caused from cpu/gpu. Not mention using cpu affinity in game then using round robin will be conflicting each other. Both file and program are forcing changes to the cpu which would conflict with each other causing possibly more lag. Just replace the eqclient.ini with the rof2 eqclient that can be downloaded here on site.
 
Thanks for the update guys, How are you only using 37% running 18 toons?
unless your CPU is just better which is possible. Running 12 toons my CPU is bouncing between 80% and 95%
Im not lagging just using a lot of CPU power :)
 
Probably because a lot of us are using MQ2EQWIRE which makes a dramatic difference in CPU and GPU usage. For example I had 18 up the other day and noticed I was at 95% usage. Realized EQWIRE wasnt loaded and it dropped down to 36% usage. One of the best chunks of money I've spent and thanks @eqmule for giving us a wonderful tool (and the many other things you do for this community)!
 
Probably because a lot of us are using MQ2EQWIRE which makes a dramatic difference in CPU and GPU usage. For example I had 18 up the other day and noticed I was at 95% usage. Realized EQWIRE wasnt loaded and it dropped down to 36% usage. One of the best chunks of money I've spent and thanks @eqmule for giving us a wonderful tool (and the many other things you do for this community)!

Amen to this! (I still use ISBoxer / Innerspace for the ability to tile my alts on a 2nd monitor and for the key repeater!)
 
the best Cpu strategy is No CPU strategy. If you have an up to date version of windows- and I mean only windows 8 or 10- then you have the best CPU thread management you could possibly have. Just let windows manage it- I do this in conjunction with Mq2FPS and its the best.
 
Probably because a lot of us are using MQ2EQWIRE which makes a dramatic difference in CPU and GPU usage. For example I had 18 up the other day and noticed I was at 95% usage. Realized EQWIRE wasnt loaded and it dropped down to 36% usage. One of the best chunks of money I've spent and thanks @eqmule for giving us a wonderful tool (and the many other things you do for this community)!

This Mq2EqWire looks good, im gonna try this. I'm not suffering on performance, but it doesnt hurt to lower cpu usage on things I can barely see while they are in the background.
 
The best thing you can do is disable all cpu balancing in ISBoxer (select charset, select each slot, unselect the assigned cpu), delete your existing eqclient inis, set your EQAffinity to -1 in your virtualized eqclient.ini (which I'm going to post sometime in the next week or two with the V1 of optimize, unload mq2fps, unload mq2viewport, load mq2eqwire, and then run optimize.
 
Question - ISBoxer CPU Strategy??

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