Advice on upgrading

I've been tri-boxing on two computers for a month, and today I started two additional trial accounts to try five-boxing. I have my main on one computer, and the rest on another. The alts are on 800*600, no sound, all video settings on lowest possible.

The second pc is perfectly fine for two alts, but running four instances of WoW is a bit laggy. Or rather choppy video, and occasionally thrashing hard drive. I have only tried running around the starting area so far, and the lag didn't actually cause any problems, but I fear things will get worse when I get to more populated areas. I wonder if I can get by with an upgrade, or should I get a brand new computer? Or four new computers? :D

If upgrading, what parts should I focus on?

Mobo: ASUS A8N-E nForce4 Ultra
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 "venice" 3000+ (1800 MHz)
RAM: 2 Gb (4 * 512 Mb Corsair Value select)
Graphics: Club3D Nvidia GeForce 6600GT pci-express 128 Mb
Monitor settings: 1600*1200 pixels

Well, the good news is that you probably don't need to upgrade your monitor. :-D

The bad news is that you are not gonna be able to effectively run 3 or 4 characters on that machine.
Ideally you want to upgrade your Motherboard, CPU, RAM, Graphics Card.

For running 4 characters on that machinem you'll probably want a Quad core processor (Intel Core 2 Q6600) Around 4GB PC6400 RAM, 512MB 8800GT.

You''ll probably need to upgrade the power supply as well.

Its not cheap but it'll perform, which is whats important.

CPU and RAM first as those are givens. You can get away with a Q6850 dual core CPU but will need 3-4GB of RAM. The video card I don't think will be a problem. WoW isn't a heavy graphics stressor, so you should be OK with that as long as you keep your settings detuned.

Thanks for the input. Maybe I should start with mobo, cpu and memory as soon as I can afford. :)

I have my old team of three characters at level ~55 and a new team of four at level ~10, so until they converge, I wont have to run more than three wows on this computer.

Two wows is actually quite pleasant. Everything loads instantly and never any lag. Maybe I should just find a similar second hand computer with a monitor. :thumbsup: