WoW Multiboxing and CPU cache question

I’m looking to upgrade my CPU to handle 5-boxing. I currently have an old Core2Duo E6300 (1.83GHz Dual-Core). I can handle triple boxing all right, but that pretty much pegs out my CPU.

So I started looking at upgrades. I’m hoping to keep my existing motherboard, but that does limit me to the Core2Duo/Core2Quad lineup – no i7 ?.

I’d like to be able to bring 5 toons through Dalaran without coming to a screeching halt. I know the old recommendation was that you needed about 1.5 GHz for your main, 1 GHz per slave and at least 500MHz for the OS. (i.e. a dual-core 2GHz CPU would cap out at 3-boxing, 1.5+1+1+.5 = 4).

But I think that was before WOLK and Vista came out. Now I think it’s looking more like double that. That would put a good 5-box set-up requiring 3+2+2+2+2+1 = 12GHz of processing power if we want to Raid and WG with them all. Sound about right?

Without getting into the low power CPU’s – I see 6 quad-cores on Newegg that I can run.

Q8200 – 2.33GHz, 4MB L2 Cache - $160
Q6600 – 2.4GHz, 2x4MB L2 Cache - $200
Q8300 – 2.50GHz, 4MB L2 Cache - $170
Q8400 – 2.66GHz, 4MB L2 Cache - $170
Q9400 – 2.66GHz, 6MB L2 Cache - $190
Q9550 – 2.83GHz, 12MB L2 Cache - $220
Q9650 – 3.00GHz, 12MB L2 Cache - $320

The price jump from Q9550 to Q9650 seems pretty steep. For that matter, is it worth $50 to go from a Q8400 to the Q9550? I’ll probably try to OC any of them at least a little bit, so I’m mainly looking at a difference in the amount of L2 cache and I have no idea how cache intensive WoW is.

Thoughts?

Q9550 imo, it's what the Q6600 used to be; highest frequency before the price jump.

This is next on my list after a new vid card. (Soon I'll be able to rebuilt my old rig from my retired parts, remove the OC and give it to my wife )

I'm not sure the max overclock on a Q9550 but if you are just upgrading your CPU at this point, not your motherboard, might not be worthwhile buying the most expensive CPU, I'm running my Q6600 at just under 3.0ghz and can 5 box fine with slave gfx on minimum, get 30-40 fps in dalaran.

From what I've seen in the forums hyperthreading on the i7 seems to be hurting not helping wow performance.

WoW is also a RAM sponge, imo you should run 6gigs minimum for 5 boxing. I run 8gig and upgrading from 4-8 gigs was like day and night running in Dala and doing WG.