10 * 3440x1440 - hardware suggestions

[MadMilitia]

As the title suggests I'm pondering a 10 box upgrade to run recently-tiered raids on my own. I currently run a 5 man dungeon crew at 3440x1440. Slaves at 1, master at 7.

Here are my hardware specs:

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz, 4001 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB

OS Name Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
GPU: 1080 GTX Founders Edition: 8GB dedicated video memory.

What hardware recommendations would you make?

[Fat Tire]

Personally I would overclock to 4.6 and see if that gets you there. Dont see anything glaring that would hold back trying 10

[MadMilitia]

Personally I would overclock to 4.6 and see if that gets you there. Dont see anything glaring that would hold back trying 10


I can give it a go on some trials to see how it does. I'm afraid of firing up 5 more accounts and then finding I'm hardware bottlenecked. I guess the best test would be to fire up 5 trials on a new account and head to Dalaran.

[JohnGabriel]

I am running 10 no problems with an old computer. i7-4790K@4.0GHz with 32GB and 4GB GTX 980.

Only thing you want to run different is your resolution. Is that the UltraHD or something? I imagine that depends only on your graphic card?

[MadMilitia]

I am running 10 no problems with an old computer. i7-4790K@4.0GHz with 32GB and 4GB GTX 980.

Only thing you want to run different is your resolution. Is that the UltraHD or something? I imagine that depends only on your graphic card?

That's kinda it. I cherish my 3440x1440. I would really hate to drop the res for 5 more. Though I haven't put any effort into seeing how it scales down a couple notches. Gonna check that now.

[MadMilitia]

Getting back to this now I've pushed for lower res and it seems to be fine on 5 in town. I think I saw a 10-20FPS increase going with the lower ultra wide res. Gonna check out 10 here in a bit. Just some starter characters.

[MadMilitia]

Got up to 8 accounts in Dalaran. FPS dropped to 10-12 FPS at a peak hour. So I think my 10 boxing is put off. I wasn't even in 3440x1440. More like 2752x1152.

Seemed fine around 50FPS in open world though. This is with all slaves at 1 and main at 7 (gfx slider).

[JohnGabriel]

Got up to 8 accounts in Dalaran. FPS dropped to 10-12 FPS at a peak hour. So I think my 10 boxing is put off. I wasn't even in 3440x1440. More like 2752x1152.

Seemed fine around 50FPS in open world though. This is with all slaves at 1 and main at 7 (gfx slider).

New Dalaran slows down even solo players. I cant bring 5 there without constantly losing follow, stuttering, etc. Everyplace else is fine though, open world, dungeons, raids, lfr even.

[MadMilitia]

New Dalaran slows down even solo players. I cant bring 5 there without constantly losing follow, stuttering, etc. Everyplace else is fine though, open world, dungeons, raids, lfr even.


No concern about BFA? I know the Zandalari capital is supposed to be expansive. so maybe not as rough on GPUs as Dalaran is.

For my 5 box team I get about 32FPS in Dalaran. It's manageable. Yeah even at ultra wide.

[JohnGabriel]

Yes you're definitely going to need more than my old beast to do what you want. I guess its more of an example on no need to go overboard just to run 10.

Some tricks I use in Dalaran, click all portals one at a time, same with flight paths. Dismiss pets, and use dual-person mounts. But yes those are just bandaides and I may very well be needing a new computer in 4 months to do this in BfA.

[MiRai]

Got up to 8 accounts in Dalaran. FPS dropped to 10-12 FPS at a peak hour. So I think my 10 boxing is put off. I wasn't even in 3440x1440. More like 2752x1152.

Seemed fine around 50FPS in open world though. This is with all slaves at 1 and main at 7 (gfx slider).
You aren't going to be able 10-box at that resolution with 4GB of VRAM. I'll bet you're pushing the limit right now with only five game clients running.


New Dalaran slows down even solo players. I cant bring 5 there without constantly losing follow, stuttering, etc. Everyplace else is fine though, open world, dungeons, raids, lfr even.
Y'all need to upgrade your hardware. :) Here are some laps in Dalaran


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j97JejgrVY

[MadMilitia]

Yes you're definitely going to need more than my old beast to do what you want. I guess its more of an example on no need to go overboard just to run 10.

Some tricks I use in Dalaran, click all portals one at a time, same with flight paths. Dismiss pets, and use dual-person mounts. But yes those are just bandaides and I may very well be needing a new computer in 4 months to do this in BfA.


Yeah the number of doodads in close proximity on the capitals for BFA might be better or worse than Dalaran which was never a good idea to begin with. No idea yet and that one is a major problem for me.

I thought about adding a mage if I did 10s and just visit capitals on 1 or 2 characters at a time. To ease the pain.I guess that's another way to do it.


You aren't going to be able 10-box at that resolution with 4GB of VRAM. I'll bet you're pushing the limit right now with only five game clients running.

That's what I was afraid of. If I wanted to do this right I think I need another 1080 running 5 more on another ultrawide monitor. The CPU seems fine with the load and I could upgrade memory while I'm in there.



Y'all need to upgrade your hardware. :) Here are some laps in Dalaran


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j97JejgrVY


Is this on a 1080 or a titan?

[MiRai]

Is this on a 1080 or a titan?
As per the overlay in the bottom left (which may be a little small on some displays), it is a 1080 Ti.

[Lyonheart]

As per the overlay in the bottom left (which may be a little small on some displays), it is a 1080 Ti.

I use a TI as well.. i only have 16gigs of pc ram though. But i dont get the kind of lag that makes you lose follow etc. 3440x1440 as well. The Ti 12gigs of ram helps so much.

[MadMilitia]

You aren't going to be able 10-box at that resolution with 4GB of VRAM. I'll bet you're pushing the limit right now with only five game clients running.


I missed mention of this but that card is a 1080 founders which is listed at 8GB of VRAM. So it's not bad. Main at 7 slaves at 1 in Dalaran comes to lower 30s when running through on 5. It can occasionally crunch to high 20s when running through a pack of players though. Outside of capital cities this feels hardened to me. At least going into the next expansion.

With the GPU prices dropping I may plug another 1080 in or a Ti and spin up another display for another 5 man team. Not sure if I want to do that yet though. Might wait until BFA has been out a while. I guess another option would be to make the slaves 1080p at 16:9 so it's less stress on the lone GPU. But then I lose broadcasting. So eh, pros and cons either way.

[MiRai]

I missed mention of this but that card is a 1080 founders which is listed at 8GB of VRAM.
Re-reading the thread, I've NFC why I replied with that. I must've had something else on my mind at the time, so I've 'lined out' that reply.

[MadMilitia]

Re-reading the thread, I've NFC why I replied with that. I must've had something else on my mind at the time, so I've 'lined out' that reply.


John mentioned his 980 so I'm guessing that's what it was.

Now that you're here.. :D

I did the upgrade to 10 accounts last night. I tinkered a bit and found that my CPU is maxed. Dialing down to 1920x1080 seems to have fixed all that.

[MadMilitia]

So after taking the plunge to 10 box on my current rig I've been thinking. It seems my bottleneck now is the CPU and not the GPU as we've discussed. I was considering adding a new machine to handle the 5 new accounts but then I saw this: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-BX80673I97900X-Core-i9-7900X-Processor/dp/B075XRYMDR?th=1

Pricey CPU but 18 cores? Would that be ideal for a 10+ box rig? Genuinely curious if anyone has gone this route and what benefits they saw.

[WOWBOX40]

So after taking the plunge to 10 box on my current rig I've been thinking. It seems my bottleneck now is the CPU and not the GPU as we've discussed. I was considering adding a new machine to handle the 5 new accounts but then I saw this: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-BX80673I97900X-Core-i9-7900X-Processor/dp/B075XRYMDR?th=1

Pricey CPU but 18 cores? Would that be ideal for a 10+ box rig? Genuinely curious if anyone has gone this route and what benefits they saw.


On one of my machines i run a older 6 core 12 threads, 980 ti, 64 gig ram: 10 games, all on low settings and 1080p.
It run well i think, but the fps can drop a bit at hectic times, though its playable no problem.

My grafiichcard isnt "maxed" out on its vram yet, but the cpu is at times.


With a much better cpu you will ofcourse have a lot more headroom. I currently have 2 cores assigned per game. I would imagine if you had 4, that would be ideal.



I had the same plan as you, but decided instead to go down the multiple computer route.

I have the one computer that runs 10.

I have 1 computer that runs only my "main" game, so i can run it at "settings 7" buttersmooth on its own 144 hz monitor.

For my other games i have 1 computer per 5 games.
(any older 6 core/12 threads, 32 gb ram and f.ex a 1060 6 gb vram card and two 60 hz 1080p monitor for each. This way, if you buy a vertical monitor stand for 2 monitors, you can have the "main game" of the 5 on the lower one and the other 4 on the above one, and you can switch between them, whenever you need to do some "5man playing" on that computer)

Its a major hassle to set it up... but i dont regret it, not now atleast.



The only thing i want to "improve", is cutting down from 10 to 5 on my one omputer and instead get 1 more pc to run 5, so i get rid of the small bottleneck on the pc thats currently playing 10 games.



it MIGHT be possible to smoothly play with the latest upcoming amd 32 core cpu and if you have a 32 vram gfx card, 128 gb ram etc. But its going to cost a fair bit i would imagine.
Currently i have my doubt about it, ive thought about getting one to play 3 battlenets on (24 games). I fear that it will hit cpu bottleneck. In the end, it doesnt have enough to run the total amount of games i wish for anyway (more than 24) . So much for the "1 pc for everything".



If you do some searching around and even buy a lot used, you will be able to create many good machines for max 5 games on each, and you never have to worry about bottlenecks.
Not to mention, you will not have to worry at all about getting proper watercooling, as any decent big air cooler and/or "closed loop liquid cpu cooler" will work like a charm. Wave goodbye to those boring maintanance times.

Though, as i mentioned, warning.. it will take a long time to setup ;)




If you are not in any hurry, and have some funds good to go, i probably would wait til we get reviews of the new amd 32 core. It could be the one to get for "up to 24 games". Fingers crossed.
I wonder what the 32 gb gfx card will cost though haha


Found the nvidia one here...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13004/nvidia-limited-edition-32gb-titan-v-ceo-edition

[MadMilitia]

Hey WB40,

I've been building PCs since I was 19. About 20 years ago! So no stranger to the day-long approach of hardware and software setup. I didn't know AMD was coming out with a 32 core processor. Thanks for the heads up. Though I imagine the clock speeds aren't as good as the intel variants. I'll have to read up on it.

I will probably go the new machine route as it's the path of least resistance. Either way looks like a completely new system. Things are fine at 1920x1080 but I don't want to go into BFA like this. So a new machine is probably a week or two out. Then I'll have my head in isboxer multiple PC guides.

[WOWBOX40]

As i said..setting up multiple computers isnt easy...and you wont be able to press a switch to bring up a certain toons gamewindow up on your main monitor (if its running on a completely different pc), "just like that". This is a major downside. So you most likly have to adjust monitor and maybe also keyboard and mouse on the fly, if need be, like if you are doing raids where you have to custom move a spesific character. You will also find the "FTL" system a challenge to setup.. Not to mention it only works up to max 24 characters. This is the reason i decided to ditch that system altogether and created a good old custom system with buttons to assign /focus nameoftoon, /follow focus and /assist focus macros.

Sidenote:
There are extremly few desks that are big enough to have 6++ monitors, keyboards etc on. Your best bet is to buy 2 sturdy items with lots of shelfs or drawers in them, then add a custum thick woodplate you can lay on top of them, acting as the main deskspace. It should ideally be able to carry 150 kg+.

There could also be the added problem that you run out of poweroutlets and that the fuses you have start to blow, due to all the computers and added items. So you might need a visit from an electrician to hook up more cables etc. And if you have a oldschool internet connection you might need to upgrade it to fiber...or get another dsl line. Check the current fuse on the powerline and figure out in advance how much watts you are able to use. Lots to spend money on.. hehe

[MadMilitia]

As i said..setting up multiple computers isnt easy...and you wont be able to press a switch to bring up a certain toons gamewindow up on your main monitor (if its running on a completely different pc), "just like that". This is a major downside. So you most likly have to adjust monitor and maybe also keyboard and mouse on the fly, if need be, like if you are doing raids where you have to custom move a spesific character. You will also find the "FTL" system a challenge to setup.. Not to mention it only works up to max 24 characters. This is the reason i decided to ditch that system altogether and created a good old custom system with buttons to assign /focus nameoftoon, /follow focus and /assist focus macros.

Sidenote:
There are extremly few desks that are big enough to have 6++ monitors, keyboards etc on. Your best bet is to buy 2 sturdy items with lots of shelfs or drawers in them, then add a custum thick woodplate you can lay on top of them, acting as the main deskspace. It should ideally be able to carry 150 kg+.

There could also be the added problem that you run out of poweroutlets and that the fuses you have start to blow, due to all the computers and added items. So you might need a visit from an electrician to hook up more cables etc. And if you have a oldschool internet connection you might need to upgrade it to fiber...or get another dsl line. Check the current fuse on the powerline and figure out in advance how much watts you are able to use. Lots to spend money on.. hehe


Yeah I think someone here told me about this years ago. That's what puts me off about running multiple PCs. If I can get them running fine on one then I'll do that.

As far as desk space: I have an uplift 72x30x48 L-shaped desk. So real estate isn't an issue.

[WOWBOX40]

Most of the desks you can buy support a lot less rhan you might think. If you study their instructions closely usually they max support 40 kg or so at the back...right where you ideally want the monitorstand. It can take maybe 80 kg at the very center...but thats just marketing bs, thats useless if you plan to use it as a computerdesk. If you dont have any choice but to use the desk, you can buy or get custom made height adjustable bars, which you can place at the very back, under the monitorstand, to prevent them from crashing down on the floor. Also, it might take the amount of kilo you need, but rarely does the liftmotor accept the same amount. So usually you can wave goodbye to the "lift" feature.

[MadMilitia]

Most of the desks you can buy support a lot less rhan you might think. If you study their instructions closely usually they max support 40 kg or so at the back...right where you ideally want the monitorstand. It can take maybe 80 kg at the very center...but thats just marketing bs, thats useless if you plan to use it as a computerdesk. If you dont have any choice but to use the desk, you can buy or get custom made height adjustable bars, which you can place at the very back, under the monitorstand, to prevent them from crashing down on the floor. Also, it might take the amount of kilo you need, but rarely does the liftmotor accept the same amount. So usually you can wave goodbye to the "lift" feature.


I keep my towers on the floor because well, they are floor towers as labeled.

I have only two monitors on my 72x30. One 1440p widescreen and a small 1920x1080 for isboxer and some other things. I'm not really keen on expanding the monitor layout. Most likely I'm going with the beefier floor tower. So no extra weight on my desktop.

[CMKCot]

its not texture, geometry or effects that will kill you and the RAM and CPU usage are fine, its the frame buffer what gets you. your VGA has to pump out some ludicrous amounts of pixels. and VGAs were never designed with multiboxing as a reasonable use case.

i have a similar client setup (21:9 1440p) and 5x wows make my 1080 OCd pump about 25millon pixels a frame, 10 would be about 50m... those numbers are just unreasonable, and even a 1080ti will struggle to keep up. (4k is "only" 8m pixels) this pixel count wont magically appear on your screen, its rendered using the
VRAM as storage, my current 5 screens at 3440*1440 use up about 4gigvram as framebuffer with another 3 for assets.

It will be cheaper, and more reasonable when you think of future proofing your setup, to offload 5 of the clients to a second PC.

you could try lowering the render quality, but the impact I've seen is negligible.



when i upgraded to 1440p i noticed some REALLY poor performance, not consistent with my estimations... eventually i narrowed it down to turbo boost 3.0 being stupid, and to VideoFX. after correcting TB3.0 byt killing it at the BIOS, i changed my weakauras/vfx setup to use only one source per slave and went from 40isk fps tops up to a steady 60. maybe check that if your setup relies heavily on vfx.

[MadMilitia]

its not texture, geometry or effects that will kill you and the RAM and CPU usage are fine, its the frame buffer what gets you. your VGA has to pump out some ludicrous amounts of pixels. and VGAs were never designed with multiboxing as a reasonable use case.

i have a similar client setup (21:9 1440p) and 5x wows make my 1080 OCd pump about 25millon pixels a frame, 10 would be about 50m... those numbers are just unreasonable, and even a 1080ti will struggle to keep up. (4k is "only" 8m pixels) this pixel count wont magically appear on your screen, its rendered using the
VRAM as storage, my current 5 screens at 3440*1440 use up about 4gigvram as framebuffer with another 3 for assets.

It will be cheaper, and more reasonable when you think of future proofing your setup, to offload 5 of the clients to a second PC.

you could try lowering the render quality, but the impact I've seen is negligible.



when i upgraded to 1440p i noticed some REALLY poor performance, not consistent with my estimations... eventually i narrowed it down to turbo boost 3.0 being stupid, and to VideoFX. after correcting TB3.0 byt killing it at the BIOS, i changed my weakauras/vfx setup to use only one source per slave and went from 40isk fps tops up to a steady 60. maybe check that if your setup relies heavily on vfx.

Thanks for the advice. I just ordered a 1080TI (should be here tomorrow) for now to offset some of the load on my existing 1080. Going to see how that goes and then if I need more CPU I'll go for that.

The setup will be 3x3440x1440 (tank and healers on 1080ti for grid and click bars) 7x1920x1080 (DPS on 1080). Maybe for now that will be enough.

[WOWBOX40]

By the way.. if you fancy, a small workaround regarding not having the ability to hotswap a toon from the other pc on the monitor you play most on...is to have that spesific character on your main pc instead. Just something to keep in mind.

F.ex

Pc 1
Main toon
Toon 2
Toon 3
Toon 4
Toon 5
Toon 6 (the main from pc nr 2)
Toon 7 (the main from pc nr 3)

Pc nr 2
Toon 2
Toon 3
Toon 4
Toon 5

Pc nr 3
Toon 2
Toon 3
Toon 4
Toon 5


This way you can lead whenever you want from pc 1. You will need to have the extra resources to play 2 more accounts on your main pc though, in this random example.

[WOWBOX40]

Well... the "one pc setup to rule them all" dream of running the upcoming 32 core amd cpu, 128 gb+ of ram etc,
and a 32 gb gfx card took a small dive... lets just say its cheaper to run multiple pcs.

Check out what this shop wants for the 32 gb gfx card ;)

https://www.komplett.no/product/1018365/datautstyr/pc-komponenter/skjermkort/pny-quadro-gv100-32gb#technical-details

(14k us dollars)

[Toned]

So what are we 10 boxing? I mess around with 10boxing every expansion for early raid trash farming BOEs and some boss fights.
The emerald nightmare first dragon with 10 pallies for example was access to easy gear to push mythic+.

[WOWBOX40]

Im farming 20 man mythic raids with 20 characters. The more toons you have the higher chance of boe loot. Its not easy, but having atleast 7+ healers spamming the main tank as you run around collecting mobs and kiting works ;)

Im not farming now, just waiting for bfa raids to come out.

When im not farming raids, im doing stand still gold farming with more than 20 characters ;)

(it is worth mentioning that i made a copy of my profile in isboxer, for when i want to farm with 20 characters: the characters from 21 and above (the ones that are doing the standstill farming), arent using the normal keybind then, instead, "all" of the keybinds from my main character, is re-keyed / re-mapped to a couple of macroes on the farming characters. This way im able to "maximaize" and do both things at the same time).

[MadMilitia]

So what are we 10 boxing? I mess around with 10boxing every expansion for early raid trash farming BOEs and some boss fights.
The emerald nightmare first dragon with 10 pallies for example was access to easy gear to push mythic+.


Personally I stood up a second 5 man team to do previous tier raids. Something that's still impossible for a 5 man team regardless of how well you play.


Well... the "one pc setup to rule them all" dream of running the upcoming 32 core amd cpu, 128 gb+ of ram etc, and a 32 gb gfx card took a small dive... lets just say its cheaper to run multiple pcs.

Check out what this shop wants for the 32 gb gfx card ;)

https://www.komplett.no/product/1018365/datautstyr/pc-komponenter/skjermkort/pny-quadro-gv100-32gb#technical-details

(14k us dollars)

Hm?

https://www.amazon.com/AMD-FirePro-W9100-Graphics-card/dp/B01GHS2D08

I'm not sure how well a 32GB card handles performance. This GPU talk while my CPU is choking. Seems the one PC to rule them all is going to be a $6k+ machine and water cooled at that.

[JohnGabriel]

You mentioned you had up to 8 running in dalaran so 8 boxing seems a good option for you. You'll be able to run them all from the same b.net which is a plus and its also the minimum number of people to get guild credit for raid kills.

Stand still farming would suffer from missing two, but you'd be able to complete current content.

[WOWBOX40]

If your pc and wallet is up for it, try add 2 more characters (1 from a new battlenet account each): this way you will be able to get mounts and also flying in the upcoming bfa. So if you one day decide to increase your team and maybe add another pc or two, you are up to speed, so to speak.

And you will have flying etc unlocked up to 24 characters :)

And in offtimes...when you are really bored, take the two characters only and complete flying in wod and legion hehe, while ofc standstillfarming on your other toons at the same time :)

*Wod is easy enough.
*Legion is ok, except the loooong repgrind at the end. A little bit day by day doing mostly those world quests.


Alternativ random example:

Run 2 x 4 mans

1 bn 1
2 bn 1
3 bn 1
4 bn 1

5 bn 1
6 bn 1
7 bn 2
8 bn 3