Returning boxer with a question

Hi thank you for reading.....i have looked around the forums and it seems like my 3 1/2 year old computer is not up to snuff as far as 5-boxing would go now. I have a dual core 3.2 gig computer with 4gb of RAM (which i am upgrading to 8). The computer also has dual video cards that were (at the time) very close to the best available. I am at work and cannot remember them but maybe nvidia 8800's? Also i was on 32-bit vista that I am upgrading to 64 bit Windows 7.

When i did 5-box i would have some lag in Stormwind but for the most part be pretty good elsewhere.... AV was usually ok as well. Also i dont really know the requirements but i used keyclone in the past and would be using ISboxer now.

Is it a pipe dream for me to think I can 5-box again with my upgrades?

I appreciate your help as my computer knowledge is like that of a 40 year old who likes to drink

Pipe dream? ...no. Undesirable? Yes. Those 8800's are about 5 years old (if not more) and they came with 768MB of video RAM max (may have been a 1GB version but it was super rare). With those old cards you'll be forced to use DX9 and running 5 clients will take at least 500MB on the lowest of low video settings.

I have no idea what type of frame rates you can expect to get running 5 clients on an 8800 but you can't take advantage of SLI. If you had 2 monitors you could attach one video card to each monitor to try and help with GPU load but, that dual-core CPU is going to limit you the most. I'm going to guess it's going to be seeing 65%+ load in an empty zone (that's just a guess).

I hate to say it but, I doubt you'll be able to walk through a major city or do a large scale battleground with all 5 clients at the same time using your current setup. If we were back in WotLK it'd be different but, Cataclysm brought an upgrade to the game engine/textures and MoP will probably do the same.

Thanks for responding, i was able to run dungeons and do AV pretty well in Wrath. Could you recommend a relatively cheap upgrade for the video cards I want to say the power supply was 600w? Or would it just not be worth it and maybe I should focus on 3 boxing?

3 boxing would probably be a much better alternative until you could afford a better machine. I hate to be the guy that comes in here to say "You can't do that" but, I'm not going to lie and say that 5-boxing on a dual-core machine and a 5 year old video card is going to be anything exciting. ;)

Like I said, I don't exactly know what type of frame rates you would get out of a machine like that in Cataclysm but, really your best bet is to just try it out for yourself. I'll assume you have at least one active WoW account so, go create 4 trial accounts and see what the result is when you stroll through a major city.

Some people can handle playing WoW at 20FPS and don't mind entering major cities with only 2 or 3 characters at a time (out of a full group of 5), however, I am not one of those people and I would just not multibox until I could afford an upgrade.

Your CPU is the major limiting factor so, you would need a new CPU which would require a new motherboard. At that point you'd be limited by the GPU then.

Creating a few trial accounts is a good idea to see where i will be at.

Thanks for your time