Hardware for 4 more toons on the cheap.

I'm debating going with 2 boxes with 2 accounts each, or 4 boxes with one account each.

The issue? money.

I already have a primary box capable of running my main account, and i'm debating which setup would be cheaper for 4 additional accounts.

I have around 400$ to spend on hardware.

I was thinking of using microatx optiplex boxes, but i'm not sure how their internal video will handle WoW. Do you really care how good the "slave" video is? (I'm thinking of doing a cheap kvm for the slaves and controlling them via synergy or something like that) I assume you don't really pay attention to the slaves unless one of them dies, etc.

I was thinking 4 of these. Or maybe 2 with better video cards added?

I plan on doing PvE with some existing friends, and maybe a little PvP (but I don't expect to win, I suck at PvP as it is now, so underhanded ambushes, etc.)

I also want to get away with the lowest amount of extra power draw that I can, the circuits in my apartment are terrible.

However 4 hardware boxes sounds like it would make sending commands to the slaves easier than 2 windows per box.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, even ones saying "you won't be able to do what you're doing because xyz". Examples of poor setups or things tried and failed would also be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks :)

Hey, I asked if you were around in IRC and you were idle, so I'll reply here :_D

IMO If you'd be better off going with 2 boxes if they can support the 2 wows decently. Tune down the fps, its not that crucial (to me anyway) how many fps my clones are pushing so long as they don't lag out. If they can't support 2 wows easily, go the 4 box route. I use 4 clients, 2 of which are sub 2.0 ghz machines with ~64mb AGP cards. I don't have any problems with each running a single session. 4 of those Dells should do you fine if you wanted to go the 4 machine way. The thing I like about 4 machines is you don't have a lot of loading lag waiting for each instance to load up.