This setup good for 5-boxing?

[Coke]

I just made a list on newegg on a PC I might get, should it work and be fine for 5 boxing?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131225
Intel 2 Core QuadQ9450 2.66ghz
EVGA 8800gts
8g (4x2g) RAM
WD 640gig HD
750 watt power supply (Corsair)
Thanks

[Gurblash]

That will 5box just fine.

[spannah]

Looks top notch. By the way, link is to MB only, not sure if you intended that way.

Only suggestion, is that you may want to consider 2 HD, one for OS, another for WoW installs, should give you a little bit of an edge in performance. But you should have no problems with what you have.

[Coke]

Yeah I mean it to be just the MB.

But I heard a higher GHz Duel Processor is better than a quad for gaming.
Is that true for multi-boxing as well?

[Drizzit]

8g (4x2g) RAM
What OS are you going to use. Regular XP and Vista will not see the 8g. It will only see 4g (well like 3.5g it will see). In order to see the 8g you will need to get the 64 edition.

I would also say 2 harddrives, try to get the 10000 WD raptors (i think it is call raptors). Then Raid0/Strip them. That is what i did and haven't come into any problems yet.

[Drizzit]

But I heard a higher GHz Duel Processor is better than a quad for gaming.
This is what a tech guy said at work too, that is why i went duel over quad. I am 5 boxing with duel and i am having NO PROBLEMS with it so far. Also try to get the new 45 processor over the 65. 1) It runs cooler and 2) it is usually cheaper.

[spannah]

Yeah I mean it to be just the MB.

But I heard a higher GHz Duel Processor is better than a quad for gaming.
Is that true for multi-boxing as well?Nope. I will take a stock 2.4 GHz Q6600 over a dual core 3.x GHz any day. The key here is parallel - you are running four or five of the same simultaneously, you want width (more cores) then depth (more speed). That is why when it comes to multi-boxing nothing beats 5 discreet computers.

[Coke]

Mkay. Alotta people say quad, alot say dual. Hmmm
I usually just use one WoW folder, I don't see why I would need more.
So I wouldn't need another HD.

[Coke]

Oh and I'm getting Vista 64 bit ofc.

[Drizzit]

So I wouldn't need another HD
The reason for 2 HD and Raid0/Strip them is because (If i am wrong please correct me) it takes the 2 HD and makes windows think there is 1 HD there. You might say why would i do that:
- Provides improved performance and additional storage
- This allows smaller sections of the entire chunk of data to be read off the drive in parallel, giving this type of arrangement huge bandwidth.

Copied from a site:

RAID 0 (striping):

This will "stripe" two or more hard drives together and treat them as one large volume. For example, two 250GB drives will RAID 0 to a single 500GB volume. Ten 250GB drives would show up on the desktop as a single volume with 2.5 terabytes of storage.

Advantage: Because a little of the data written is kept on each drive, performance of the stripe increases the more disks are added to it. Writing to 10 drives is roughly 10 times faster than writing to 1 drive. This is especially handy if you need large and fast volumes.

Disadvantage: Every drive has a limited life and each disk added adds another point of failure to the RAID. Every disk in a RAID 0 is critcal - losing any one of them means the entire RAID (and all of the data) is lost.

Despite the disadvantage, RAID 0 is used by those wanting the most performance out of two or more drives. Video/Audio editors commonly use RAID 0.

[Coke]

I might get the extra HD then =D

But duo or quad....hmm.

[spannah]

On the duo or quad questions let me give you an example here:

In one side of town you have Acme pizza place. You have two dudes working there . Each can make a pizza in about 2 minutes.

On the other side of town you have a second Acme pizza place. Here we have four dudes making pizza, but they a bit of slackers, so it takes them 3 minutes each to make the same pizza as in the first location.

Fact is, if you have an order for 4 pizzas, the slackers would be faster:

At first location, each dude has to make two pizzas which will take 4 minutes in total for all 4 pizzas.

At the second location, each dude only has to make one pizza, but with them all making pizzas at the same time it only takes 3 minutes for all 4 pizzas.

----------------------

Now, WoW came out almost 4 years ago, so the difference between a slower quad core versus a speedier dual core may not be much, with graphics settings turned down and minimal max FPS. Crank the graphic settings up and you will be likely to notice a difference.

Move to a game such as Age of Conan, and both processors are likely to choke on multi-boxing, however the quad processor probably wouldn't choke as much.

----------------------

A note on dual HDs, even if you don't use Raid 0, they are still a better option. Fact is as long as the computer is on, the Operating System is always doing something in the background and many of these tasks involve disk access. Putting WoW on a second drive will free up the first for OS tasks, and you will have the second HD for WoW access.

Lets look at the pizza joint example:

At either place lets say the cashier, who also does paperwork and answers the phone, doesn't have his own desk, so he has to borrow a corner from the pizza making counter. Wouldn't it be better if this person had his own desk?

[Freddie]

I just made a list on newegg on a PC I might get, should it work and be fine for 5 boxing?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131225
Intel 2 Core QuadQ9450 2.66ghz
EVGA 8800gts
8g (4x2g) RAM
WD 640gig HD
750 watt power supply (Corsair)
Thanks
Definitely get a quad. Duo's may be better for playing a single game, but you're playing five games at a time.

The 8800GTS became obsolete yesterday when AMD released the HD4850. I would get that instead. I bought an 8800GTS myself last month, so I don't say this cheefully. :) You picked a good brand.

I just bought a Western Digital hard drive today myself, except I got the 750 GB model (AAKS) instead of the 640. At today's prices I think the 750 is the sweet spot. Newegg is selling it today with free shipping. Edit: My math was wrong, the 640 is cheaper per GB than the 750.

Corsair makes good power supplies (and you need a good one) but 750 watts is overkill for these components.

[Coke]

Okay, I'll get the extra HD, what is Raid 0 though?
I'm going with quad.

I also found this coolermaster case and it had a combo with a 1k watt powersupply, guess I should take that out then >.<

[Coke]

Would I need a mobo with PCI Express 2.0 slots for the 4850?
Or will PCI Express x 16 work?

[Freddie]

PCI-E 2.0 is forward and backward compatible with 1.x, so it should work. If you look at customer reviews on Newegg for various HD4850s, you might be able to find one that says, "I put this card in my XYZ motherboard and it works," and that would confirm it.

More news: Nvidia dropped the price of the 9800GTX to make it competitive with the HD4850 so that's another choice. But the HD4850 is already selling at a discount (Best Buy had some in stores yesterday at $150!) plus the HD4850 is probably going to get faster when its drivers mature, so I'd still go with the AMD.

[Coke]

Yeah I saw they had the 9800gtx for 199.99, do I need a AMD processor with the 4850?

[Freddie]

No.

[Coke]

Okay sweet, I found a combo deal with the 4850 and a good mobo, saved like 50 bucks too.
How big of a 2nd HD should I get to play the WoW's off of?

[Freddie]

I don't have all the WoW expansions so I don't know how much room it needs. You can see by right-clicking "properties" on your WoW install folder. Multiply by however many copies you're planning to install separately. Double that or even triple it to leave room for formatting losses, future expansions, etc.

Are you thinking of getting an unusually small drive? Most drives today are more than big enough.

[Freddie]

I also found this coolermaster case and it had a combo with a 1k watt powersupply, guess I should take that out then >.<
I just noticed that you said this above. 1000W is ludicrous for this computer. This system will draw a max of about 300 watts, maybe 350, at the wall socket when it's running full tilt. If I were building this for myself I'd buy a Seasonic 550 watt power supply.

The problem with buying a much bigger power supply than you need is that it runs inefficiently because you're drawing less power than it was designed to deliver. Power supplies reach their peak efficiencies only when they are delivering a certain number of watts, and 300 watts isn't nearly enough for the monster you've picked out.

[Freddie]

I tried to find some data about power requirements for this system but now I'm puzzled. AnandTech's test system with the HD4850 drew 227 watts at full load. That sounds like a 550 watt power supply will be plenty (even though your machine will have a second hard drive).

But that same system, in the same test, with two HD4850's in Crossfire drew 335 watts. and AnandTech noted that their 1000 watt power supply wasn't able to supply those 335 watts. Maybe it was because of the way the rails are split up on that power supply, I dunno. I don't know what to make of this.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3338&p=5

Edit: A bunch of comments at the end of that review suggest that the power supply must have been broken.

[Coke]

Okay, I got a 650 watt now.

I think 320 gigs will be enough.

Thanks :thumbsup:

[Coke]

Oh and, is it worth it to buy Vista or just DL it?

[Freddie]

Worth it how? If you do that, you're stealing. I've never used stolen software so I can't tell you what to expect.

[Coke]

Don't you need to verify the crap to get updates and such?

[Freddie]

Like I said, I always pay for my software, so I never have to worry about verifying anything. I can't tell you what will happen if you download stolen software because I've never done it.

If you don't mind my asking, why are you calling it crap? Windows is a stupendous technological achievement. It's the product of tens of thousands of extremely intelligent people who worked on it for dozens of years starting in the mid 1980s.

We're incredibly lucky -- all of us -- that something like Vista exists and we can use it.

[Coke]

I wasn't calling Vista crap, I couldn't think of the name for the thing you need to verify :pinch:

[Freddie]

When Microsoft's website says it's verifying, it's checking to see whether your copy of Windows is legitimate and also, I think, whether it was licensed to the machine it's installed on. But I'm not sure and I don't know if Microsoft has documented exactly what they check for.

[Coke]

Okay.
Any reason for me to get Vista over XP?
XP has a 64 bit version too, so I'm not sure.

[Freddie]

Right now it's hard to choose. Each choice has advantages and disadvantages. 64 bit Vista is the future. 32 bit XP is the past. If you want to optimize the box for five copies of WoW, the past probably still works slightly better (WoW is a 32 bit program so it probably runs very slightly faster on a 32 bit operating system). But the pc can't use more than approximately 3.5 gigs of ram with a 32 bit operating system and within the lifetime of the pc, you'll almost certainly want to add more. So if you don't get 64 bit Vista now, you'll probably switch over to it in a couple of years.

[Coke]

Isn't there a 64 bit XP?

[Freddie]

Yep. You've got four choices.

[Coke]

Hmm..I heard Vista is a RAM hog..any way to make it stop..erm..hogging?

[Freddie]

For the most part, this is a misunderstanding based on the fact that XP loads programs into memory and if there is memory left over, that memory isn't used for anything. It just goes to waste. This wasted memory shows up in Task Manager as "free memory."

Vista is smarter. Instead of letting memory go to waste, Vista uses it, but as soon as a program needs to use that extra memory, Vista turns it over to the program, just like XP. One of the things that Vista does with this memory is called SuperFetch. You can disable SuperFetch if you want. Since I don't play WoW, I can't tell you whether five WoWs would run faster on XP or on Vista with SuperFecth enabled or disabled. The only way to know is to test. There are probably people in this forum who have done that.

The 64 bit versions of both operating sytems use slightly more memory than the 32 bit versions because operating systems frequently store addresses in memory, and 64 bit addresses are twice the size of 32 bit ones. But this is outweighed by the fact that 32 bit operating systems can only use about 3.5 gigs of ram when a 512 MB video card is installed, and 64 bit operating systems can use much more than that.

[Motaghi]

I just set up my toons in Org today at prime time to test out lag 'n stuff, and here're the results: http://motaghi.dk/haigais.jpg

The main window has all graphic settings maxed + some extra macro commands to make WoW look even better. All the smaller windows have minimum settings and are locked at 10 fps. My FPS in Org never went below 25, and that was when I asked people around me to spam spells. I am always on 60 fps when I am running around in the world.

My PC:

E8400 (I set it to normal speed when I was testing this setup, but I usually run it at 4,6 Ghz)
2x2 GB RAM
8800 GT
And I am running it from 2 different folders of WoW, both on the same 7200RPM 16MB cache HDD, with no RAID whatsoever. I haven't experienced any lag spikes yet, and my WoW instances usually use just over 3GB of my RAM (I am running it on Vista x64 so I can use all my RAM), and have never used 100% of my RAM yet.

Since the system you've built is superior to mine, I see no reason as to why you shouldn't run it smoothly. :)

Edit: I forgot to mention that my main WoW instance uses both my CPU cores, while the other 4 are only affiliated with the 2nd core.

[Freddie]

Edit: I forgot to mention that my main WoW instance uses both my CPU cores, while the other 4 are only affiliated with the 2nd core.
Did you ever test this against all WoW's allowed to run on both cores?

[Motaghi]

Edit: I forgot to mention that my main WoW instance uses both my CPU cores, while the other 4 are only affiliated with the 2nd core.
Did you ever test this against all WoW's allowed to run on both cores?Yes. My main WoW instance would get an occasional lag spike if I was under heavy load (eg. a lot of people casting spells).

[Freddie]

Interesting, thanks.

[Coke]

I think I'll get Vista because XP is the past.
And it'll have 8gigs, so there's room to waste ;)
Total is like $1,700 with shipping ;(
I'll have to make people pay up ^^

[lans83]

vista is the way to go now. i've got an uncle that's a computer tech and builds servers for corporations and he advised me to get vista over any xp. plus, if you can spare an extra $100.00 usd, the following 780i mobo might be a better investment for the long run: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188024 this way, you'll have 3x pci-e x16 slots, two of which are 2.0 compatible for future video card upgrades that can handle 3-way sli, like the new 9800s and GX2s. just a thought tho.