Cost estimate for getting back into 5 boxing

[Zub]

Hi all,

I used to 3-box before wrath, and stopped to spend more time and money on my baby daughter.. but the mb bug is catching with me again and i'm thinking of going 5 this time.. if I can afford it.
I'm not too concerned about the monthly subscription, but rather scared about the up-front costs.

Here's what i got:
- 1x 5-year old machine on winxp that can handle 2 WoWs reasonably if I don't go in Dalaran or Org.
- 1x wow account with 5 x 80 (solo levelled. shaman, paly, druid, priest, warrior), 3 x 70 (rogue, hunter, mage), 62 warlock and 58 Dk.
- 1x keyclone license
- Limited space in my office, so it would need to be on a single machine (but possibly 2 screens)
- ~300ms latency usually (i'm in Sydney) and ~400 if I don't pull the cable across the flat and use my wifi connection instead.
i'm mostly interested in PVE, i don't really care about PVP, or maybe some AVs sometimes.

What are the minimum Hardware requirements for boxing 5 toons on 1 machine?
From what i read around the forum, an i7 with windows 7 64bit and with ~6GB+ of ram should do the trick. but since i'm quite computer illiterate (as HW goes anyway) i'm not sure what that implies in terms of motherboard/bus/power/disk etc. Same question regarding the graphic card.

Question 1: Anyone got quotes for a machine that would work for me? (not too big on building it myself, but can try if much cheaper). What are the important stats to look for?

Currently i have all my 80s on 1 single account, so i would need to transfer 4 of them to different accounts ($25 x 4)
Question 2: Should those accounts be on the same Battle.net account? I guess not, because i can't see how you can log 5 times with the same email without booting 4 toons out of the game, so i guess we need 5 separate email addresses and battle.net accounts?

Question 3: my latency is pretty horrible (~300ms on a good day while solo play). Will that be a problem to m-box 5?
Are WTFast options legal and efficient?


with my current set of 80s, i'm planning of having
- TANK : Shaiah (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Shadow+Council&cn=Shaiah) 80 Prot warrior (ilevel ~190)
- HEAL : Soap (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Shadow+Council&cn=Soap) 80 Holy paladin (ilevel ~210)
- DPS1 : Ghur (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Shadow+Council&cn=Ghur) 80 Elemental Shaman (iLevel ~230)
- DPS2 : Ghør (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Shadow+Council&cn=Gh%C3%B8r) 80 Balance Druid (iLevel ~220)
- DPS3 : Cixi (http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Shadow+Council&cn=Cixi) 80 Shadow Priest (iLevel ~180)
With that group i believe i'd be able to jump directly in heroics (after a couple weeks of macros i bet :-)
my druid also has a reasonable tanking set and all toons have dps stuff, but i think the above makeup, if not optimum, is the one i would be most comfortable with.
I see a great combination of buffs, and very little gear clash (1xcloth, 1xleather, 1xmail, 1 heal plate, 1x tank plate)
Question 4: Any comments suggestions on class make up?

Question 5: any other cost, or stuff i forgot?

thanks for reading this long post, and thanks for any answers :-)
-Zub

[Zub]

I just checked my current machine at home and its a:
AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3500+ 2.21 GHz
2GB RAM
Windows XP Home
NVidia GeForce 9400GT

is that any good?

[Edit]
if i'm reading this (http://products.amd.com/en-us/DesktopCPUDetail.aspx?id=86&f1=&f2=&f3=&f4=&f5=&f6=&f7=&f8=&f9=&f10=&f11=&f12=) correctly, does it mean that my machine already supports 64-bit OS and i could update the OS to win7-64 and add a couple Gigs ram to see a major difference?

[Hivetyrant]

Yes, you could add slightly more ram, however for a machine that old, you will either find that the motherboard can't handle more than 4 itself, or you will realise how much large single DDR2 sticks cost and understand that it would be cheaper to upgrade your whole system. (Slight exageration, but you get the point)

The other problem you have is the CPU, which would be the bottleneck once you add more ram anyways.
While the Athlon AMD's are slightly different from Intel in teh way you measure clock speeds, the 2.26 is going to struggle when you throw more than 2 clients at it.

So i'm sorry, but I wouldn't be trying to 5 box on that machine, it would be possible to get it working, but it would still require a bit of money and the performance would be pretty dissapointing.

That is just my crystal ball though, so someone with a similar setup might be able to give a better response :)

(Though I did run an AMD 4800 X2 system years ago and it wasn't even close to the performance of my last system (which barely ran 5))

[Zub]

was wondering if anyone had recommendations/quotes

[Jafula]

Answer to 1:
I 5 boxed with a Intel Q6600, 4GB Ram and a Nvidia 8800GT with 512MB Ram and 2 monitors on Vista 64bit. I could have one wow on a decent resolution and the other four on low resolution. This was for Burning Crusade. It ran fine (I guess Dalaran would be slow now...). So anything you buy thats better than that spec will be fine for your needs.

I would buy and use Windows 7 64bit; as it can utilise the full 4GB of addressable ram; don't use 32bit as you are losing memory to the video card.

Answer to 2:
You can have all 5 wow accounts under the same battle.net account. When you log in with your email address, you can choose which wow account to use. This is what I do (with 3 accounts).

Read this:

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=26163

You DON'T have a 30 day wait to transfer toons from one battle.net account to another, because they are all on the same account.

With an authenticator, you have to wait for the auth key to change 5 different times before all your toons are logged in. Each toon has to log in on a different key.

Answer to 3:
Living near the bottom of New Zealand and triple boxing - my latency is 202, 273 and 272. My household has had 5 wow's running on its connection with no problems.

I would be wary of WTFast.com just because your data is going through their proxy and you have no idea whether or not they are collecting your login packets and analysing them for your credentials... Obviously I don't use the service.

You might find the 5 wows all have about a 300 latency anyway and your pipe can handle the extra load.

Answer to 4:
Tank, Heal, DPSx3 ...

Answer to 5:
1) Get an authenticator. If you have a smart phone, use the software version.
2) Buy an ISBoxer/IS subscription and use it! Seriously, well worth it. If you need a name to use in the referrer field, 'jafula' should work :-). Keyclone author is nowhere to be seen on these forums and Lax is on every other day at least.
3) Install Jamba...
4 ) ???
5) Profit!

[Zub]

Thanks for your feedback jafula, very interesting.
(got an authenticator already :)

[Monk3yv]

Hello Zub,

First let me just say you make great posts and replies!

I too a considering the initial costs for transfering 4 accounts to a specified server, so I'm with you there.
I was looking around for the specs on my computer at home but can't find it, and I am out of the country.
I was able to 5 box relatively smoothly however, here is what I remember;

-Edit- Found an old xfire account with specs -Edit-

Manufacturer:
HP-Pavilion
Processor:
AMD Phenom(tm) 9500 Quad-Core Processor (4 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
Memory:
3582MB RAM
Hard Drive:
489 GB
Video Card:
NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS Factory Overclocked (Around $95.00 on sale at the time from Newegg.com, awesome site*)
Monitor:
HP w2408 Wide LCD Monitor
Sound Card:
Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)
Speakers/Headphones:
Razor Barracuda Surround Sound Headphones
Operating System:
Windows Vista™ Home Premium (6.0, Build 6001)
Using Keyclone.

I wish I could comment more but I'm also somewhat computer-speak illiterate. (Also apologize for my English)

As far as the battlenet account question,
I am not sure because I had 5 accounts made before the battlenet merger, But I have merged them all into one battlenet, and you can pick the seperate accounts from the log in screen.

Hope this helps! Goodluck!

[jinkobi]

Zub here's my system specs for my 2 year old machine. I'm able to 5 box just fine with my main on ultra and slaves on lowest. Maybe it'll give you a rough idea of how much power you want. Definitely go with a 64bit system so you can have more memory. I'd say 4 gigs is the minimum to 5 box anything more is just better performance.

Also I have ALL my accounts on 1 Battlenet account. It allows you to use just 1 authenticator to cover all your accounts. You can indeed log in all your accounts without being booted- you're provided a dropdown menu and your WOW games are seperated by whatever name you give them. Such as WOW1, WOW2, etc...



Video card is an Nvidia GTX 285 1 gig.
Operating System: Windows Vista™ Home Premium (6.0, Build 6002) Service Pack 2 (6002.vistasp2_gdr.100218-0019)
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8200 @ 2.66GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
6 gigs of DDR ram installed but you know 32bit so only 4 is utilized.

[Zub]

cheers!

[mikekim]

here is the spec of my main machine that I originally used for 5 boxing (before Running on Multiple machines) i have since upgraded the GFX to a HD5850 and added an SSD, but it used to run 60fps for the main and 30-40 for each slave

screen pic of my original setup (back in the day when I used to use Keyclone & PiP)

http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/7223/multibox.jpg

Coolermaster Stacker 832 Tower Case
Enermax Galaxy EGX850EWL 850W Modular PSU
4x Akasa AK-191-SM Smoke Ultra Quiet 120mm Fan
Zalman ZM-MFC1 Plus Black Multi Fan Controller

Intel Q6600 G0 2.4Ghz Core 2 Quad CPU
Asus Striker Extreme nForce 680 (Socket 775) DDR2 Motherboard
OCZ 8GB (4x2GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz Reaper HPC Dual Channel DDR2 4-4-4-15
XFX GTX260 896mb Graphics Card
Samsung SM-245B 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor (1,920 x 1,200)

Western Digital Raptor 150Gb SATA, 10,000 rpm, 16MB Cache
Western Digital Caviar Blue 250GB SATA-II 16MB Cache
2x Pioneer DVR212BK 18x DVD±R/±RW (Black) SATA
5x Akasa Serial ATA 45cm Silver Data Cable

Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard
Logitech G5 Laser Mouse SSeries Steelpad 5L Gaming Mat
Creative labs XFi Xtream Fatality Pro
Creative Labs 5.1 Speakers
Running Windows Vista Ultimate 64Bit

[Zub]

thanks.

I've been trying 3box again on my machine (my normal account and 2 of my old BC accounts, on wotlk 10day trial)

Latency was not a problem indeed. It was over ~300ms on a single wow, but didn't change at all with the wows loaded. remained 300ms

I went around Org/UC and silvermoon, no problem, then jumped on the Zep from org to borean tundra, and all WoWs crashed during the load screen.
After a few attemps (the toons where all on the zep going back and forth) i managed to get them all in Borean tundra, one by one.
But as soon as I have more than 2 intances of wow open in northred, they crash.
I get an error message about memory allocation. I guess 2GB doesn't cut it for 3wows (even though they only take about 500-600mb in mem it seems)

now i just need to win the lotto to upgrade all this..

[Zub]

I might be able to get my hands on a cheap deal:

- Q8300 Quad core
- 4GB RAM
- Win7 - 64
- nVidia GT 320 1GB video card

how would that work with 5 wows? any idea?

[Jafula]

That should work; it's more grunty than my box that I 5 boxed on.

[Monk3yv]

Yeah Zub that should work fine, probably better than what I had when I started.

Use full potential of the 4 cores by splitting them up for your different WoW.exe's and you are good to go imo.
(I'm probably preaching to the choir but hey doesn't hurt)

[Tonuss]

1- No quotes, but if money is a concern, skip the Core i7 and look into an AMD Phenom CPU. They have four-core and six-core processors at much lower prices than their Intel counterparts. A quick price check on NewEgg says that a Core i5-750 (quad core, 2.66GHz) costs about $195 and a Phenom II X6 1055T (six core, 2.8GHz) costs about $200.

Eh, so maybe the price advantage isn't what I thought it was.

Just as important, get a good video card. I believe that you can get an ATI Radeon 5770 for around $150-180 or a 5850 for around $300-330. Both can handle multiple WOW clients without a problem.

As a reference point: I 5-box on a Core i7-920 (2.66GHz) with 12GB memory and a Radeon 5850 attached to a 1920x1200 screen. I have dual 5850s connected to one monitor each, but I often run all five WOWs on one monitor. No problems at all with this setup. As a bonus, it runs a single WOW at full resolution and with all graphics effects at max smoothly, only slowing a bit in Dalaran when it is crowded.

2- You can log in to multiple WOW accounts with a single battlenet email login. It will simply ask you to specify which account to use after you enter your battlenet email and password. It will only log you out if you specify the same WOW account twice, otherwise you'll be fine.

3- Moderately high latency isn't as bad in PVE as it is in PVP. My latency on my current server runs from 150-250ms. But the server I first multiboxed on typically had latencies of 220-330ms. Aside from a slight lag when switching targets, this was never a problem for me. I imagine that for PVP, a half-second lag on target switching would be pretty disastrous.

4- I'll leave this to others, I almost never run instances, I usually just do outdoors questing and level toons mostly for professions and because I'm not entirely sane.

5- See above re:video card. Also for hard drives- I run five accounts off of five hard drives, but that's a bit extreme and probably not the most efficient way to go. Dual SSDs (primary character on one, secondary characters on the other) and a shared folder for the secondary characters might be faster and perhaps even reduce the lag between the party members.

[Teal]

I have a pretty basic setup and have no issues boxing 5 accounts

[Zub]

Thanks all for your feedback.

Seems however that i got an even cheaper solution: my GF's computer is more recent and can handle 3 wow nicely (maybe more, need to test - bloody tuesday maintenance!)

it's performance mark (http://www.passmark.com/products/pt.htm)is double that of my own machine, which should be able to handle 2 wows ok. (3 wows crash only in Northrend)

so all in all, 3 wows on one machine, and 2 wows on the second
Now i need to find a cheap way to pass the keys from one to the other, .. either a second Keyclone licence, or some other way. i don't think i can afford ISBoxer subscription though. I'm stretching as it is..



Planned costs
- cross machine MB tool - $???
- upgrading 2 accounts from BC to WOTLk - 2x $40
- upgrading 2 accounts from vanilla to WOTLK - 2x ($30 + $40)
- moving 4 toons from main account to slaves accounts - 4x $25
Total = $320+

i might be able to use the scroll of resurection on some, so that might save me a couple months play here and there.
any thing else to think of?

[Jafula]

Now i need to find a cheap way to pass the keys from one to the other, .. either a second Keyclone licence, or some other way. i don't think i can afford ISBoxer subscription though. I'm stretching as it is..


HotKeyNet - its a winner, I used it for the longest time, until I was lured away by ISBoxer.

http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=16177

http://www.hotkeynet.com/wow/wow-sample-four-on-two.html

http://www.hotkeynet.com/wow/wow-quick-start.html

[Zub]

awesome, was looking into that in the wiki
cheers

[Lemartes]

I currently 5 Box on a Duo Core Intel with 8 Gigs of ram. Dalaran is horrible in peak times but instances are pretty good.

I'm in the middle of an upgrade though. Going to AMD Hex Core with 8 Gigs ram. It was pretty cheap too.

AM3 MB - I spent 210 for the 890fx but you could go cheaper - like 150.
Memory - 8GB A-Data DDR3 2000 ram. Was 119 per 4 Gig kit. I bought 2. These were the cheapest ram i could find.
I bought an expensive power supply (Antec Truepower 1000) and mid class video card as well (HD5770). 210+180. you could go cheaper on the power supply.

All thats left is the CPU in 2 weeks which is 220 bucks for the slower Hex Core. I can't wait.

So for under a grand you can build a decent 5 boxing machine.

[jinkobi]

Now i need to find a cheap way to pass the keys from one to the other, .. either a second Keyclone licence, or some other way. i don't think i can afford ISBoxer subscription though. I'm stretching as it is..



Do yourself a favor brother and just get ISboxer. 10$ for 3 months is nothing for what it brings to the table.

[Owltoid]

....

[jinkobi]

If you don't already have the new Vanilla accounts, then there is a thread floating around mentioning Battle Chests are currently $20.

Also, I think ISBoxer is on an per computer basis, so it would be $20 for 3 months. Well worth it IMO, but I imagine the OP and I are in a very different financial position

Pretty sure keyclone is the one you have to buy multiple licenses per machine. ISboxer covers multiple PC's for just one subscription. Making it that much more the value!

Really is worth every penny and then some.

[Owltoid]

Ah, sorry for the misinformation :) That could help in my decision to 10-box in the future (not sure why $10 every three months would factor into the thousands needed for a new machine, subscription costs, and game cost, but I digress)

[Zub]

Got me a machine that can do 5 wows :-)
Haven't tried Northrend yet (just did 5 trial gnome mages) but the CPUs never went above 40% and still had about a GB of memory left. Should be ok for starters
(turns out my gf had a better PC than expected :-)
Which means i can stay with my single keyclone license for now.
ISBOXER 10$ for 3 months is indeed not bad, thought it was $36. but that for a year. I'll check it if/when I reach KC's limitations

with 5 online (10 pigtails :-) the latency increased to ~450, but that was still on WiFi, so if push comes to shove i'll just plug in the cable.

So now I'm in the final phase of upgrading accounts and moving toons.
currently 1 wotlk account, 2 BC and 2 to be bought. Unfortunately the deal from NewEgg only works for the USA, and i'm in Australia.
I really don't need the software, just the license key really. Any good websites to upgrade online (cheaper than the Wow account website) ?

Stupid me, i've added the "free WOTLK 10 day trial' to my BC accounts and now i can't use the scroll of resurrection :(

[Zub]

well, managed to fnid myself some -25% deals so now have 3 fully upgraded accounts, and the keys/CDs for 2 more in my bag as we speak.
Ended up with 2xbattlechests at ~30USD and 2xWOLTK at ~30USD as well. Not as good as newegg, but much better than the online upgrades by blizzard (19.90+29.90+39.90 USD)

Going to RAF those last 2 accounts (B->D, C->E) and do all the char transfers today and I should be doing my first 5-man solo instance tonight. Yay weekend :-)

been working on macros the last few days (on my solo account) and the 3 dps (shaman/druid/spriest) have a combined solo-mob dps of ~8k, ~11k on packs. Hopefully i'll manage the rotations :-)

/excited

[Owltoid]

If you're using ISBoxer you'll most likely want to do the macros inside there, instead of in WoW. The handling of toon swapping in/out and FTL makes it a breeze.

[Zub]

i'm using keyclone atm. Work well for what i need it to do :-)
well, after 2 hours of macroing, i went through UK and Nexus (normal) without any problem.
Then again, with 4x 80 and a 70 you wouldnt expect any problems :-)

[HiRO]

The cost I'd be wary of is 5 battlechests for 20$, wolk 5x29.99 (if stays the same price) cata 5x50. 500 is a hefty price, but if your not totally itching just yet (which I doubt, probably day dream about It like indid when I "quit") but consider waiting till they maybe release a wow,bc,wotlk battle chest. But ...I haven't heard if that will exists or not.

[Zub]

Too late, i invested last week :p
i'm very late in the expansion and I have lots to do with the slaves in WOTLK still.
When cata hits i think i'll only upgrade 1 account (the tank) and solo play that one and continue on wotlk content with the group.
then, as time and finances permit i'll upgrade the rest.
Got a second baby arriving early October anyway, so i'll probably be AWOL / MIA for a while

[Nisch]

if it hasn't been mentioned yet, try to get an SSD. I have an OK system, but it was made stellar with just the addition of the SSD. My loading times went from minutes to seconds.

[Ualaa]

I would suggest five different battle net accounts, one per warcraft account. That way, you can log in on all accounts at once, with a single authenticator code.

Basically your choice is everything on one battle.net account, which makes account management much easier (via drop down box) or everyone on its own battle.net account, which makes logging into the game much easier. I personally log into the game much more frequently then I manage my account details... so would rather have speed/ease when logging in (daily usually), then the account management (bi-monthly, maybe).