New to multi boxing, and wondering how many instances of wow I could get away with

How did my post end up ahead of the thread starter? Did someone update the server's clock to a new timezone? (hehe)

Assume this response should follow Hachoo at number 9:



I would never be playing like this normally, but I'm away next week on business and have to make due with whatever I can do with my work laptop so I tried to minimize the followers and even turn the main graphics down to lowest settings and manged to run all 5 guys.

I have a Core2 Duo laptop at 2Ghz with 4gig ram and a 128meg nvidia 8400M GS (yes, the fatally flawed one) running vista x64 business. Native screen is at 1920x1200.

Main is at 1520x1140 with 4 followers on the right at 400x300 each.

I set the followers all to fps of 5 and the main to fps of 25, and even with this the memory is at about 2.8 gig used and the cpu when I'm in an empty area is at about 65% average total. (Set affinity for 3 of the little ones to cpu1, and the main plus one little one on cpu0)

With the exception of seeing lag in populated areas, it's not too bad, but only for PvE - this is far too sluggish for PvP. Also, keyclone's PiP feature comes in very handy for maintaining the alts - since it's almost impossible to do things like adding macros on a 400x300 window.

So lucky me, I get to go on the road for a week with nothing to do at night but level myself some additional RaF sets. ;)

Right now I'm dual boxing, my machine is on vista (yuck) 2.4 GHZ duo core, 4 gigs of ram with a 512 meg Nvidea card. I have zero lag issues running two accounts, will I have any additional issues moving to 3 accounts?

Thanks for any help you can offer with this.

Dual core 2.4ghz? maybe.
4gigs ram? maybe.
512 megs nvidia? what? that tells me nothing.
you need to also set your fps, resolutions, etc.
a third instance of wow would be taxing it.

what you might want to do is make a trial account and use it as a third. check how well all three works with follow, spell casting, trading, quest gathering, looting, and most importantly, switching between the three screens. if all those tihngs are ok to your liking... then sure, it works. if not, you might want to adjust some of the settings.

why not start trial accounts and find out for yourself

If you optimize everything right you should be able to get away with 5. Vista is far from optimized compared to XP but if you have 64bit Vista and 4GB of ram with the rest of your specs you'll probably be OK.

I'm running XP32, 3GB of RAM, 2.2GHz AMD X2 overclocked to 2.53GHz, 512MB 9800GT and I am running 5 copies of WoW with the main window at 1280x960, alts at 800x600, 2x FSAA on the main window 45fps or so. One of the main keys is to symlink your data/cache directories from your clones to the main, that helps a ton.

Can you elaborate on that? didnt quite understand what you are doing here.

Quote:

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One of the main keys is to symlink your data/cache directories from your clones to the main, that helps a ton.

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i was able to get away with running 5x accounts on one comp

my setup:

1900xtx, 2.4 core2duo, geil ram at 4-4-4-12, dfi mobo w/ 1600 fsb (obviously not running at that speed though)

screen setup:

monitor1: 1 full screen /console maxfps 100 maximizes all settings

monitor2: 4 256x 427 /console maxfps (15-20) all running macro to minimize wow past default settings

i was running 40 fps on main screen and 15 on the others.

i made premades on test realm and hit 15-20 fps on all so doable but not fun

forgot to mention that i have 2 gigs of ram running XP pro, i would close the explorer.exe task but leave everything else up. I could watch a movie and search the web on the other 2/3 of the other screen

With XP you really need 3GB of memory to do 4-5 copies. The good news is you can get 2GB of Pc6400 memory for $12.99 at Newegg now (after mail in rebate, free shipping, search for OCZ PC6400).

As far as symlinking the data/cache folders, search the forums for a program called winbolic link - there should be instructions on what to do as well as a download location. This is for XP. For Vista you can do it inside the regular OS functions but I'm not sure how as i've never used (and have no desire to use) Vista.