Ordered for 10 account computer, hopefully its good enough

[Smoooth]

Right now I'm playing wow 5 accounts across 2 computers. I've decided to move up to 10 accounts and down to 1 computer. After hours and hours of research and looking for deals this is what I ordered.

ASUS M4N82 Deluxe Motherboard
AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz Socket AM3
16GB Samsung (4x4GB) DDR2 667 PC2-5300
Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 x2 2GB
Corsair 850W Power supply
Full size tower with good cooling
2x WD 640gb sata hard drives
DVD burner
mouse/keyboard

Total came out to just about $1500. The ram itself was $400 and that was a deal compared to other 16gb solutions. 800MHz ram would have been $500 and at least a 3 month wait or over a grand to get some right now. I'm hoping the 16gb of 667 MHz works good for me.

I've built 3 computers before and every single time SOMETHING went wrong. Maybe this will be the first it just all comes together.

I will post again when it is built and how it runs 10 wows. I cant wait.

[Starbuck_Jones]

I predict that it will fail all over itself on the cpu. OS +10 instances of wow I don't see 4 cores handling that to your satisfaction unless I googled the wrong cpu.

[DLoweinc]

i've got a pretty good system for 5 boxing and i hit 1.5GB per client of RAM usage after loading up Dalaran. You are going to be cutting it close with 16GB as I am with 8GB and 5 clients.


I think what is going to kill you is hard drives. I noticed a huge increase when I moved to SSD's.


Couldn't you put together an intel core i7 system for roughly the same money? I would think that the RAM throughput of that sytsem would be of a lot more benefit.


It will probably run, but you will need to turn the graphics settings down a lot.

I hope it runs though! for your sake

[Smoooth]

The CPU I got has been tested and rated very similar to the i7 920 which is the lower end version of the i7. I saw some review where the AMD runs crysis at high physics 1078x762 at 101 fps and the i7 at 110 fps.

I plan on running my main at full screen and detail. The 9 alts will probably be 800x600 max and low detail. If this setup can't handle it I still have the computer I use now that can either just run the main or take over some of the slaves.

How should I setup my wow folders? I was thinking just 2 folders, 1 on each drive.

[Otlecs]

I am [cutting it close] with 8GB and 5 clients
Really? Do you have a whole shed-load of (perhaps unnecessary) add-ons enabled for your drones?

I 5 box and use ~60% of the 8GB on my machine.


How should I setup my wow folders? I was thinking just 2 folders, 1 on each drive.
That's how I'd do it. My theory is that the main will most likey have one set of graphics settings, and the drones will have another.

Putting them on separate physical drives will probably maximise the effectiveness of the cache in each case.

That's my theory. I've never imperically tested it ;)

Give the sofa a good shake and see if you can find enough spare change for an SSD drive too. It made a visible (almost startling) difference to zoning and load times (including player textures when wandering around the lag pit known as Dalaran) for my drones.

As others have said, I reckon the CPU and disk I/O will be your bottleneck.

[zanthor]

http://dkpfiles.com/botbh/files/wow.jpg
5 clients, 1 machine.

I'm running 8GB of ram, a 3.0ghz phenom II clocked at 3.3ghz on air with no voltage tweaks at all, and an 8800gt/7600gt set of video cards.

Clock a 3.3 up and really wind it tight, use a better main board than I have and better video cards I can see it running 10 clients.

[Ualaa]

I'm running a Q6600, 8gb ddr 800mhz ram, 10k raptor HD (one wow install), HD4870 X2.

Basically in Dalaran with five clients at once..
If I mount up and use Pally Crusader Aura..
I will usually lose 1-2 toons between Krausus Landing and the Portals.

Up until Dalaran, I could 5-box anywhere.. BG's, Shatt, raids etc.
I'm smooth enough to play 5-box anywhere in the game, except Dalaran/Winterlag.

Not upgrading my system until next summer unfortunately.
Will go with some form of i7 by then.

Still, my specs aren't anything special as of now, and what is available on the market.
However, other then Dalaran/Winterlag, the game is very playable everywhere.
WoW doesn't push a computer too hard.

[DLoweinc]

I am [cutting it close] with 8GB and 5 clients
Really? Do you have a whole shed-load of (perhaps unnecessary) add-ons enabled for your drones?

I 5 box and use ~60% of the 8GB on my machine.



It is probably because I have my draw distance at max. I do have roughly 90MB of addons running per client, but that is somewhat insignificant.

Also one thing to note is that you should aim for a video card with as much RAM as possible in my opinion... I noticed a HUGE increase when I went from a 512MB card (ATI 4870) to a 1GB 4890. The disk IO of loading all the textures into the graphics card RAM from the dat files is probably what kills dalaran...



I will also agree with the poster above.. if I use crusader aura I lose a toon on follow, so I often don't use it. When I use my epic flying mounts I am almost guaranteed to lose one if I use crusader aura.

[Multibocks]

Thats why you make the paladin with crusader one of your followers, you wont lose anyone!

P.S. 8GB of ram for 5 clients?! Wow Im sitting much lower... I'll have to check but last time I looked it was maybe over 4GB.

[Coltimar]

Smooth, I can run 8 clients on a system one generation older than what you are building. I don't have any trouble. With the right setup, you should be fine. SSD is nice but you can accomplish a lot with having your clients on a separate RAID0 array. That's what I did.

[Smoooth]

Smooth, I can run 8 clients on a system one generation older than what you are building. I don't have any trouble. With the right setup, you should be fine. SSD is nice but you can accomplish a lot with having your clients on a separate RAID0 array. That's what I did.Great info, hope I can get mine running nice with just the plain sata drives. If not SSDs aren't that expensive. Could I go with a 32GB ssd for just 2 copies of wow or would I need to have the OS installed on it also to make it effective? I haven't been this excited in along time. It's like christmas as a kid. All of my packages are scheduled to arrive tomorrow. I've already downloaded Windows 7 so it will be ready.

[Fef]

Smooth, I can run 8 clients on a system one generation older than what you are building. I don't have any trouble. With the right setup, you should be fine. SSD is nice but you can accomplish a lot with having your clients on a separate RAID0 array. That's what I did.Great info, hope I can get mine running nice with just the plain sata drives. If not SSDs aren't that expensive. Could I go with a 32GB ssd for just 2 copies of wow or would I need to have the OS installed on it also to make it effective? I haven't been this excited in along time. It's like christmas as a kid. All of my packages are scheduled to arrive tomorrow. I've already downloaded Windows 7 so it will be ready.I have system and WoW (only one copy) running from on 64GB OCZ Vertex series drive. The system had 12GB of RAM. I runs absolutely smooth, even in Dalaran. Only porting to the inn at peak hour slows the frame-rate for a few second. Nothing disturbing at all. I have never seen more than 50-50% of my RAM used in Dalaran.

Edit : I forgot, disk drive can be an issue with SSD. I have 18GB free on mine, out of the 60.4 actually usable.

[Jezebel]

it doesnt matter how great a pc is, boxing on one pc is always inferior to running fewer clients on multiple pc's. thats just how it works.

save yourself some money, buy a $300-400 PC with an E5200 and 4 gigs of ram, triple box on 3 machines and use your current main PC as your primary toon. it will work out infinately better.

[Jezebel]

xxxxxxxxxxx

[Jezebel]

it doesnt matter how great a pc is, boxing on one pc is always inferior to running fewer clients on multiple pc's. thats just how it works. not only does running 10 clients on a single PC limit your ability to monitor your alts, it will significantly increase your random wow.exe errors and memory leakage.

save yourself a little money and a lot of frustration, buy a $300-400 PC with an E5200 and 4 gigs of ram, box 2x4 and 1x2 (with two tanks on your primary) with three machines. it will work out a lot better.

[zanthor]

it doesnt matter how great a pc is, boxing on one pc is always inferior to running fewer clients on multiple pc's. thats just how it works. not only does running 10 clients on a single PC limit your ability to monitor your alts, it will significantly increase your random wow.exe errors and memory leakage.

save yourself a little money and a lot of frustration, buy a $300-400 PC with an E5200 and 4 gigs of ram, box 2x4 and 1x2 (with two tanks on your primary) with three machines. it will work out a lot better.Dollar for Dollar I'll put a single system build up against any multi-system build you can find and get an equal or better multiboxing experience out of it.

Anything you can do hardware software can do better now - it definitely wasn't always this way - but software has evolved in huge leaping strides in the past year while hardware is still pretty much within 10% of what it was capable of last year.

In no way does it limit your ability to monitor alts... I run 5 clients on one PC and can see whats going on with all 5 at any given time... even before I stepped up to three monitors this was true!

Random wow.exe errors are simply a sign of a poorly built system, bad ram, poor cooling, bad PSU or other hardware/software configuration errors - they exist in single box environments just as much as they do multi box environments. I can tell you with absolute certainty that I haven't had an error from wow.exe in 6 months. Those errors were directly attributed to carbonite, once I updated that mod they went away, before that it had been over a year since I had any wow errors, and again it was UI mods causing them.

If a wow memory leak exists it's going to happen on 1 client or 5 or 500...

[Otlecs]

it doesnt matter how great a pc is, boxing on one pc is always inferior to running fewer clients on multiple pc's
I moved from one WoW per machine across five machines to a single machine nearly two years ago now, and I have never looked back.

Noise, heat, cable mess, space, situational awareness with fewer screens... absolutely everything is better with a single machine than it was with multiple machines.


it will significantly increase your random wow.exe errors and memory leakage
Huh? I'll grant you that the effect of the inevitable memory leaks when WoW's running is magnified with more clients running, but "increase you random wow.exe errors"? Nah.

I'm not in a position to comment on the viability of ten WoW clients on a single machine, simply because I just haven't done it, but I'd take the single machine route over a multi-machine setup any time.

I really would.

And I've tried it both ways :)

[Fef]

One aspect is important to take into account when comparing one machine versus several smaller machines.

No, I'm not talking about electricity bill, I'm talking about WAF ! ;)

[Jezebel]

Anything you can do hardware software can do better now

theres no reason to assume that because you have multiple PC's that youre forced to use hardware. i have 5 PC's and i use a combination of hardware and software. each has its strengths and weakness'.

purely from a control point of view, a single PC can only accept one set of key and mouse inputs at a time. i frequently use G15 macros to control my basic tanking and dps macros while i switch to my secondary keyboard and actively play a priest or a CC toon.

and, yes, running any form of multimedia intensive application multiple times will create system and software issues, including errors and memory leaks, regardless how great hardware is.

multiple clients on one PC limits your options, not the other way around. i dont see the purpose of spending more money to buy a single machine, when he can spend less money and incorporate an extra machine into his existing setup and achieve a superior effect?

[Smoooth]

I got most of the stuff today but I'm still waiting on the ram and the dvd drive. They are supposed to be here tomorrow.

I set up all my accounts and started my first 10 team. My existing setup actually can handle 10 in the starter zone just fine. Unfortunately only 4 of my accounts are raf linked.

http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/3473/wowscrnshot070809174401.jpg
I'm starting to learn how to level 2 parties simultaneously. For kill quests I made a macro for a single alt in party 2 to start a smite. I tap it and then hit my normal dps macro. This causes party 2 to have the kill tapped and they get credit.

Collection quests will just plain be skipped for anything under 100% drop rate or more than 1. It may be hard to get enough quests in the level 40-58 range but I can alway just fill in levels with boosting. I couldn't stand collection quests when I was 5 boxing, no way am I going to do it x10.

[zanthor]

Anything you can do hardware software can do better nowtheres no reason to assume that because you have multiple PC's that youre forced to use hardware. i have 5 PC's and i use a combination of hardware and software. each has its strengths and weakness'.

purely from a control point of view, a single PC can only accept one set of key and mouse inputs at a time. i frequently use G15 macros to control my basic tanking and dps macros while i switch to my secondary keyboard and actively play a priest or a CC toon.
A single PC running IS/ISBoxer can utilize multiple input devices and I can in fact accomplish exactly what you are describing without bothering to use a 2nd keyboard.
and, yes, running any form of multimedia intensive application multiple times will create system and software issues, including errors and memory leaks, regardless how great hardware is.

multiple clients on one PC limits your options, not the other way around. i dont see the purpose of spending more money to buy a single machine, when he can spend less money and incorporate an extra machine into his existing setup and achieve a superior effect? I firmly believe that I can outmatch any hardware configuration for all but the hardest of the hard core boxers (aka: Sam/Prepared). Lax also has a new app he's been working on that I sincerely believe is going to rock the multiboxing world when it hits the streets... he's taken a lot of feedback from his users and I believe anything you could dream of accomplishing will be possible with this new app, and easy as heck to setup.

[Frappuccino]

I prefer soft-boxing because:
1. Usability standpoint outside of WoW - one beefy PC can play other games well, multiple monitors makes browsing /working what ever you might do really easy & fun. I plan to get into currency trading at some point and 3 monitors will really help with that. Huge monitor realestate is a great thing.
2. From the wow standpoint there's really nothing being lost if the PC's fast enough. FTL / keymap usage is far superior to anything traditional hardware boxing can produce. It's all fine and dandy not having to restrict your slave's FPS but if you can't easily switch to them and have the whole team assist them seemlessly, what's the point?


@OP, if you haven't purchased it yet, you might want to consider a dual-CPU mother board. 8 cores (16 virtual with hyperthreading) would be a lovely thing for 10 boxing.

[Smoooth]

1. Usability standpoint outside of WoW - one beefy PC can play other games well, multiple monitors makes browsing /working what ever you might do really easy & fun.
This is a big thing for me. There is no real reason to have 5+ computers other than for boxing. Also I don't really agree that more less powerful computers are cheaper than 1 powerful computer. Cases, lcds, video cards, power supplies all add up real quick when you are buying lots of them.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Intel® Core™ i7-950 (3.06GHz, 8MB L3 Cache)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium (English) Service Pack 1 64-bit
Copper base Heat Sink with aluminum fins
No Productivity software pre-installed
1Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis
6GB Tri-Channel DDR3 at 1066MHZ (3x2GB DIMM)
600GB Velociraptor Performance RAID 0 (2 x 300GB SATA-II, 10000 RPM HDDs)
nVidia GeForce GTX 285 1024MB
Single Drive: 16X CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) w/double layer write capability
No Monitor
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
No speakers (Speakers are required to hear audio from your system)
No Keyboard
No Mouse
No Floppy Drive
Aluminum with Clearcoat Chassis
Subtotal http://i.dell.com/images/global/general/spacer.gif $3,119


AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core 5000+
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Service Pack 1
No Productivity software pre-installed
1Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis
19 inch SE198WFP Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz- 2DIMMs
320GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
16x DVD+/-RW Drive
ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO 256MB
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
No speakers (Speakers are required to hear audio from your system)
Dell USB Keyboard and Dell Optical USB Mouse
No Floppy Drive Included
Subtotal http://i.dell.com/images/global/general/spacer.gif $559


This is my opinion, but with the quality of low end premade oem PC's, I would rather go with 2-5 lower end boxes than one high end box. The RAM on the gaming box is a bit light, but they wanted like $2k more to upgrade to 12gigs. Bah on that crap so aftermarket ram ftw and its going to increase the cost a couple hundred more. Also it does not include a display and it came to over $3k. Second box with a 19in widescreen lcd came in at $560. The bottom box with easily run 2 copies of wow and prolly can handle 4 if you pumped up the ram. It doesnt take much to play wow, however if your gameing library includes newer games other than WOW, then the cheap box will disapoint. However for under $1800 you can get 3 of them with nice displays and be up and 5 boxing. Thats about $1200 cheaper than it cost me to setup my systems 3.5 years ago, and this is much better hardware.

The top box you could prolly build your own for cheaper, But I dont think you could do the same with the bottom box. Also you can prolly get another 10-20% off on both if you dig around the tubes for some discount coupons.

[Otlecs]

I guess quite a few people missed the bit where he said he's made the decision to go with a single box and has already started using it (http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=214973#post214973) then...

[Smoooth]

I guess quite a few people missed the bit where he said he's made the decision to go with a single box and has already started using it ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&postID=214973#post214973') then...Well actually in that post I meant that I tried 10 accounts on my old setup of 2 computers.But you are correct that I have bought all the components to make a single computer.

Somehow the fedex guy ninja'd me and left a failed delivery notice on my door. I was waiting on my memory which is all I need to get the computer up and running. He must've parked down the street and snuck up and taped the notice to my door. I've been home all day long and no one knocked or rang my doorbell. I can go pick it up directly on my way to work tonight but this is another day I'm ending up waiting. I may throw a fit if any of those ram sticks don't work. I payed $10 to test each of them before shipping out but I have a feeling that's just a scam to get more money out of people and they probably don't even test them.

[Starbuck_Jones]

$10 more for it to be tested. Sounds like a surcharge for refurbished memory.

[Smoooth]

It was an optional charge to test it to "lower the chance of receiving DOA memory". It's a good thing if they actually do it. Some memory comes out of the factory bad. I just really didn't want to go through a whole RMA thing. I hate returning things. I'll usually just trash something and buy another rather than go through the trouble of returning it. Companies take my money within minutes of me buying something but it will take them weeks or months to give it back if they sold me something broken.

[Moorea]

purely from a control point of view, a single PC can only accept one set of key and mouse inputs at a time. i frequently use G15 macros to control my basic tanking and dps macros while i switch to my secondary keyboard and actively play a priest or a CC toon.

I hope this doesn't mean what it sounds like - ie that you're having your g15 play your tank for you unattended (even for a few seconds) - that'd be botting = tos violation = deserved ban hammer - hopefully I misinterpret what you meant ?

[Smoooth]

Damnit I'm an idiot. I should've knocked on wood when I was talking about RMAs. I bought ram that is registered which apparently means buffered aka FBDIMM. If anyone wants 16GB new samsung fbdimm ddr2 ram for cheaper than you can buy it send me a message. I'll have to pay a pretty big fee to return it.

I found some of the correct ram and ordered it along with a 64GB SSD. Finding this type of ram is really a hard thing to do. You really have to search for the fine print to make sure you aren't getting a kit or buffered ram. I actually considered getting a Intel server board and processor and using the ram I had but that would go over the budget I'm willing to spend.

[Owltoid]

Intel® Core™ i7-950 (3.06GHz, 8MB L3 Cache)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium (English) Service Pack 1 64-bit
Copper base Heat Sink with aluminum fins
No Productivity software pre-installed
1Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis
6GB Tri-Channel DDR3 at 1066MHZ (3x2GB DIMM)
600GB Velociraptor Performance RAID 0 (2 x 300GB SATA-II, 10000 RPM HDDs)
nVidia GeForce GTX 285 1024MB
Single Drive: 16X CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) w/double layer write capability
No Monitor
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
No speakers (Speakers are required to hear audio from your system)
No Keyboard
No Mouse
No Floppy Drive
Aluminum with Clearcoat Chassis
Subtotal http://i.dell.com/images/global/general/spacer.gif $3,119

This is seriously overpriced. You can have an i7 machine with 12 gigs of ram, SSD, and top video card fully assembled for under 2k.

www.buyxg.com

You can have an i7 920 machine with 12 gigs of ram, GTX250 video card, and SSD for around 1500 bucks. I'm sorry, but it's going to be tough to get 5 low-end machines that would keep up with that.

[Owltoid]

The following system is $1,466 (including assembly and shipping to CT) and has the following highlights:
i7 920
12G 1600MHz Corsair RAM
650W Corsair Power Supply
500GB Drive and a 64GB SSD
GTS250 Video Card

No, it doesn't have the best processor or video card available, but it will smoothly run 5 clients in Dalaran and is less than 1500 bucks fully assembled. The only thing it's missing is the OS and that's because I'd just put Windows 7 on it until the retail version is available. If you wanted a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 1792MB 16X PCI Express video card then the total would be $1,608 including everything.

From www.buyxg.com:


*BASE_PRICE: [+799]
CAS: Thermaltake Element T Mid-Tower 420W Case [+31]
CS_FAN: Default case fans
CASUPGRADE: NONE
CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-920 2.66 GHz 8M L3 Cache LGA1366
CD: (Special Price)LG 20X DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW DRIVE DUAL LAYER (BLACK COLOR)
CD2: NONE
CABLE: None
FLASHMEDIA: INTERNAL 12in1 Flash Media Reader/Writer (BLACK COLOR)
FA_HDD: None
FREEBIE_CU: FREE! 4GB USB 2.0 Portable Flash Drive
FAN: Thermaltake Big Typhoon VX Gaming CPU Cooling Fan (Excellent Overclocking + Silent Proof 16dBA) [+45]
FLOPPY: NONE
HDD: Single Hard Drive (500GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 16MB Cache 7200RPM HDD)
HDD2: 64 GB Ritek RiDATA 2.5 inch SATA Gaming MLC Solid State Disk (Nearly Instant Data Access Technology) [+153]
IEEE_CARD: NONE
KEYBOARD: Logitech Deluxe 250 USB Keyboard (Black Color)
MOUSE: XtremeGear Optical USB 3 Buttons Gaming Mouse
MODEM: NONE
MONITOR: NONE
MONITOR2: NONE
MOTHERBOARD: Asus P6T SE Intel X58 Chipset CrossFireX Mainboard Triple-Channel DDR3/1600 SATA RAID w/ eSATA,GbLAN,USB2.0,IEEE1394a,&7.1Audio
MEMORY: 12GB (2GBx6) DDR3/1600MHz Triple Channel Memory Module [+238] (Corsair or Major Brand)
NETWORK: Onboard Gigabit LAN Network
OS: NONE - FORMAT HARD DRIVE ONLY
PRINTER: None
PRINTER_CABLE: None
PRO_WIRING: None
POWERSUPPLY: 650 Watts Power Supplies [+101] (Corsair CMPSU-650TX - Quad SLI Ready)
RUSH: NO; READY TO SHIP IN 5~10 BUSINESS DAYS
SERVICE: Standard Warranty: 1-Year Limited Warranty Plus Life-Time Technical Support
SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO
SPEAKERS: 600Watts PMPO Subwoofer Stereo Speakers
TEMP: NONE
TVRC: None
USB: Built-in USB 2.0 Ports
USBHD: NONE
VIDEOCAMERA: NONE
VIDEO: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 1GB 16X PCI Express [+34]
VIDEO2: None
VIDEO3: None
WNC: NONE
_PRICE: (+1401)

[Moorea]

I wouldn't buy a new pc with a GTS 250 which is essentially a rebadged 9800GT - I think the minimum to get is the 260 - on the other hand I don't think you need 1600Mhz ram

[Smoooth]

I finally got it built today and installed Win 7 on the 64gb SSD. I figured the 64gb would be big enough for the OS and 2x wow folders. I totally forgot that you need as much free drive space as you have memory so I ended up with only enough room for 1 wow folder. I put the folder that runs all 9 alts on the ssd and put the main folder on a sata hdd.

With "ultra" settings with only the main wow up I was able to run through Dalaran at around 30 fps. It was only using the 1st and 2nd core though. I'm not sure if its possible to run on all 4. That frame rate was kind of disappointing. It was stable at 60 fps anywhere else I went.

Then I loaded up all 10 wows and set cpu affinity to main on 1 and 3 of alts on each of the others. Sent summons to all of them from Dalaran and put them all on follow. None of them dropped while running around but it looked like it was real close to happening. The frame rate was kind of finicky at around 10-15 fps. This was using ultra on the main and low on the alts.

Odd thing is that I was only using 7 GB or ram while doing this. I figured it would be much higher. The CPU is the low point as some have guessed. It was running at near 100%

Overall I'm satisfied with how it runs. I can deal with some low frame rates in places like dalaran or wintergrasp. Everywhere else it runs very smooth.

If anyone is contemplating making a system for 10+ box I suggest 2 CPUs and 12gb ram which should do it.