10 boxing on 1 computer. worth it?

[incendie22]

Has anyone tried this and have found it fun to doing so? Is it possible on 1 computer and with what setup?

[Nairi]

get a skull trail(or wait for intels I7 8Core cpu) motherboard and pop 2 quadcores and one beefy GTX280 or (4870X2 not sure if this crossfire thingy would work with windowed gaming unless they fixed it)...

[Turenn]

Worked well to 10 box on my Q6700 with a 9800GTX and 4gig of ram, I didn't do that much, just ran around abit it HFP testing it out, will do Kara if I get to 70 before the expansion. I had all the graphics set on low.

[not5150]

I 5 box on my skulltrail with no problems. CPU is around 10-15% in IF.

RAM is your biggest limitation and if you start swapping to hard drives, you'll be dead in the water. With 5 WoWs, I'm using around 2.5 - 3 GB of RAM. With 10, you would definitely go over 4 GB.

[algol]

Doing okay so far with just a dual core...albeit a very tweaked system. Oh, and 8GB of system RAM and 768 VRAM. But 60 FPS more or less stable on the main 1920x1200 screen with high textures etc (i.e. Vsync). The slaves are locked to a lower frame rate, but fill nearly that many pixels again between them. Woot?

Yeah, I should probably drop in a quad core eventually. Meh. I want new speakers first, I think.

But if only two cores can do five respectably, eight should be fine for ten - provided you have the memory, bandwidth, etc, and that whatever actual display constellation you want doesn't fry your vid card. But CPU power should not be the limiting factor. 2-3 sessions per core is fairly reasonable if you have appropriate settings and the rest of the system cooperates. Within limits...I don't know that I'd go for 20 even if you had 20 cores somehow. Stability tends to scale a bit worse than the number of instances of the program, so you're looking at over 20x the normal crash risk of a slightly crash-prone client then. Better to break up the boxen at some point below that. Five per machine is okay if it can handle it, ten is extreme but doable...but probably the limit.

Oh, and cost per client is probably somewhat below optimal once we start talking Skulltrail and so forth.

[not5150]

Yeah.. skulltrail is a frankenstein board. You should be able to get 10 machines on a decent single CPU quad-core.

[Xzin]

Getting 10 to *run* and getting 10 to be playable are different things. With a beefy enough set (pair? three?) of video cards, a quad core, about 8 gigs of ram and 2 - 3 SSD drives, this could be quite playable. As snappy and responsive as 10 dedicated boxes? Probably not but pretty close as long as you cranked stuff down to reasonable settings and make a few compromises.

*muses over how this wasn't even remotely possible only two years ago*

[algol]

I would probably start with two video cards with 512MB+ memory each, but on a board with a third full PCI-E slot. My 8800GTX hasn't complained much yet of five clients, so that should be okay. But I do have an 8800GT I cannibalized which will probably find itself dedicated to handling the second screen when I have time to fiddle. It depends on what you want as far as screens. One (large) screen with two cards in SLI/Crossfire could be amusing.

Memory capacity, both system and video, is likely a very large part of why I'm getting away with this setup. But you can easily get 4x2GB DDR2 for under $200 these days. Weird stuff, that. 4GB modules are still much more, of course.

[Fef]

< Warning : thread necro ! >

I was bored waiting for the extended maintenance to be finished on my server, so I gave 10-boxing a try. Unfortunately I could not create more than 3 trial accounts, so I had to limit my experience to 10 WoW clients launched, but only 8 of them with a character loaded.

I set up a main window, and 9 small thumbnail views along the top and right side of the screen sides (24') . Thumbnails were limited to 10 fps, and main window limited to 40 fps. I ran the 8 characters to Stormwind, and I am happy to report that the FPS on the main window was still at 40. I could not try Dalaran, for obvious reasons. The small tests I did didn't seem to show more lag than when I am 5-boxing (I have a decent ADSL connection). I am confident two more accounts would not be an issue since both memory and processor usage always stayed under 45-50%.

My system is a Mac Pro with dual quad-core Nehalem processor, 12GB ram, a HD4870 video card, and a 60GB OCZ Vertex for Vista 64 and WoW. Playing WoW is the only thing that is done under Vista on this drive/machine, all the rest (obviously work related) is done under MacOS running from other drives.

Now I'm very tempted to create 5 new real accounts, transfer one of my two level 80 groups, and give 10 boxing a real try .... Expensive though.

Please tell me it's not worth it !

[Fef]

Thanks Fur, exactly what I needed to read ! :)

I'm mostly useless in PVP, so I would have aimed for PVE. But ok, I still have quite a lot of heroics to clear. It is not like I hit my limit yet with five, far from that.

[Smoooth]

Not to give you hope or anything but I just started 10 boxing on 1 computer and am loving it. I haven't raided yet as my #6-10 accounts still need a few levels for 80. I have no problems running around Dalaran or WG at peak times.

I have all kinds of 10 man pvp teams just waiting on 3.2 so I can figure out how the BG xp is going to work. So far I dont think there has been enough people in the less than 80 level ques on the PTR to get a game going to test it.

Sure a 10 man group in WSG may not be easy to win but it will definately be fun. I think I'm going to go try 10x resto druid and run around spamming wild growth and 10x moonfiring people. It's just about having fun for me. Maybe I'll fraps some stuff and hook you lol.

[Fef]

Maybe I'll fraps some stuff and hook you lol.Please do, I'd love to see that :)

[Multibocks]

Not to give you hope or anything but I just started 10 boxing on 1 computer and am loving it. I haven't raided yet as my #6-10 accounts still need a few levels for 80. I have no problems running around Dalaran or WG at peak times.

I have all kinds of 10 man pvp teams just waiting on 3.2 so I can figure out how the BG xp is going to work. So far I dont think there has been enough people in the less than 80 level ques on the PTR to get a game going to test it.

Sure a 10 man group in WSG may not be easy to win but it will definately be fun. I think I'm going to go try 10x resto druid and run around spamming wild growth and 10x moonfiring people. It's just about having fun for me. Maybe I'll fraps some stuff and hook you lol.

Do you use IS?

[Smoooth]

I use keyclone and hotkeynet. I'm waiting on HKN 2 to get a little further along before moving to that.

My current plan is to continue to level some locks to meet up with my lvl 70 druids. I think I will 6x afflic locks and 4x resto druids. I may add or subtract some druids depending on how much healing I end up needing. I kind of wish I could un-level my druids to get in the 60's bracket so I could play with em now.

I also have a theory of 10x disc/holy priests team with killing with swp, mind blast, and holy nova and living with massive circle of healing spam. I'm just waiting on 3.2 to level this team in BG's if it ends up working.

Yesterday I killed 2 80s flying by in HFP with my 9xlocks. Pretty hilarious, even with like 50% resists they get dotted up quick. I also insta gibbed a 65 hunter with death coils. I'm going to start running fraps in the background so when something might happen I can catch it.

[Tonuss]

Well, for any PC system builders, both AMD and Intel will have six-core processors in 2010. Intel's is planned to be socket-compatible with socket 1366 (the current Core i7 socket) and should be a drop-in replacement for most motherboards once the BIOS is updated. Not sure about AMD's chip, but they usually come in at a better price point than Intel. The Intel CPU will have Hyper-Threading, which means 12 logical cores. While HT is not the same as a real core, and while the previous version (in the Pentium 4) was badly implemented, HT on Core i7 gives about a 30% boost depending on the application(s).

For 10-boxing on a PC it might be the ideal way to go. Still not as good as dual-quad-core IMO, but probably less expensive by far.

[Crybabycry]

Here is my 10boxin setup on 1 pc:
http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=20681

[Pwnzor]

Yay! I found ma old pw! <3

[HPAVC]

Ten worked for me on 4 cores just fine, and on 8 cores now as i get ready to get a full 80 group together it seems fine, I would look into a killer nic before ssd (and likely avoid it), using an actualy directx soundcard, and defiantly windows7.

I don't have problems in major cities, only one character has the actual sound device and the 9 don't have any sound. I find removing the minimap from the slaves helpful.

Fwiw, i do have problems with people spamming all the slaves with tells and the them spamming the main character or party chat and blizzard logging me out. It seems very very easy to hit that limit with 10 guys. This might be a increased by wim, prat and or icon chat. Kudos for the haters figuring that out.

[jak3676]

I do have to wonder why the focus on putting it on on 1 box? I can appreciate the techno-phile interest in seeing if it can be done and just how much performance you can squeeze out of a PC.

But from a cost perspective, I'd think it's cheaper to just buy a 2nd box. (e.g. 2x 500watt PSU's are cheaper than 1x 1000watt PSU, 2x 12GB or RAM is cheaper than 1x 24GB of RAM (are there any mobo's that support 24GB of RAM?), 2x GTX 275's are cheaper than 1x GTX 295....)

If you're willing to dedicate ~$150 a month to WoW, maybe price isn't the focus. But I'd think that performance would be better on 2 boxes vs. 1 as well.

I just went through this same sort of cost/benifit comparison when I was setting myself up for 5x boxing. When I looked at the prices of buying a new i7 system vs buying an older Q6600 and off loading 1 or 2 instances to an even older Core 2 Duo system the 2 older sytems were cheaper and offered better performance.

[Thulos]

I do have to wonder why the focus on putting it on on 1 box? I can appreciate the techno-phile interest in seeing if it can be done and just how much performance you can squeeze out of a PC.


I dislike using multiple computers simply because I lose the ability to use picture in picture on all my clients. The only reason I do sacrifice this ability is to combat the dalaran lag of having 5 clients on one computer. As soon as I upgrade to an i7 i'm going back to one computer for this reason alone.

[Fef]

I do have to wonder why the focus on putting it on on 1 box?

Simple : WAF ! :)

My desk looks very clean with just one screen, one tower and a mac keyboard. If I remover the G13 and G9 (Replaced with the standard wireless Apple mouse), one would never thing a gamer lives there.