Preparing to buy hardware, need some advice

So, I'm preparing to take the HUGE plunge and purchase 4 extra systems to play 4 extra accounts.

In the intrest of saving money, I'm wondering what are the minimum requirements to make wow run smoothly with no lag during mad AOE bombing runs.

Here's the hardware I'm looking at now.

Samsung 160G SATA drive - $50.99
GEForce 7600GT 256M PCI-X - $109.99
Mushkin DDR2 667 1Gig RAM - $96.99
Hanns 19 inch LCD (2ms response time) - $199.99

Combo Deal:
Asus mobo
AMD Athlon 64X2 3800+
Generic 400Watt Case
- $198.98



The Video card is where my real problem is. I've selected a Geforce 7600GT 256M, but I suspect that it is far overkill for what I need. Does anyone have any experience with some of the new Geforce Integrated 256Meg graphics cards? Does anyone have experience running WOW with an older graphics card (still has to be PCI-X) that might be cheaper and still offer appropriate lag-free gaming?

I am running one of my WoW clients on my ancient Sony Vaio PCG-V505CP notebook with an ATI mobility Radeon 9200 with 32MB of Video RAM. As you will agree, that is very very low spec.

Now, sometimes I get a bit of machine lag when riding on /follow but in most cases the minor speed increase of the Carrot-on-a-Stick on the following chars is enough to avoid that. In Outland, with the higher Polygon count, the 32MB graphics card is struggling hard.

It works, because Blizzard did intentionally keep the hardware requirements low. My recommendation: go for cheap over fast. You do not need the additional characters screens to look as beautiful as possible.

Any video chipset from the last two years that has 64MB or more video memory will do. Neither do you need 2ms response time, any generic TFT display should do the trick. If you feel like spending 4-5 times as much on displays and graphics cards as you would need to, go ahead, but it is not required. Likewise, you dont need to have more than a 20GB HDD for OS and Client and no expensive processor is needed either.

Hope this helps. For more info on the rig I am running see my first blog entry.

I play my second character on an old laptop I scavenged from work. It's a 1.8GHz Centrino w/ Intel integrated video using 64MB shared memory of 768MB total. I've got the graphics turned to the lowest settings and the sound turned off. I haven't really noticed lag, even in Outlands.

You don't need a killer rig to run WoW. Now, I've got something very similiar to what you're looking at on my main system, but I use that for more than just WoW. I've toyed with the idea of running my secondary WoW accounts on virtual machines, but haven't taken the time to set it up. Anyone out there using VMs to run their other accounts?

Excellent. Thanks for the replies.

I really don't have the option of turning the graphics all the way down, 'cause for this setup it's important that all the screens be running at 1280/1024.

I probably could save 5 or 10 dollars per system by dropping from 80 gigs to 20, but I'm not sure that's enough of a savings to justify completely gimping the computers for any other possible use.

In any case, thanks for the input, I still have about 2 weeks to convince the wife before I actually buy any of this stuff, so I'll keep looking and see how low I can land.

When reducing graphics settings its not only the resolution. There are a number of options that lighten the load considerably besides the resolution.

Steph is definitely right. There are plenty of options that you can turn down to keep your frame rate up. The best part is that you can get lower end 6000 series nVidia cards for relatively cheap, and with those you can run WoW without any problems.

If you make sure you're not doing any anti-aliasing, turn down your texture settings and draw distances you can run WoW without any problems.

My main box is an Athlon 2200+ (almost 5 years old now) with a GeForce 6500 and I'm running 1280x1024 with standard graphic options and getting 30fps in most places. I paid about $1000 for it back then, and I know you can get even more nowadays for less than that.

One of my boxes runs at 1280x1024 resolution and is running on a $300 computer. I bought a generic Frankenstein computer from Fry's on sale for $130, dropped in a 512MB stick of RAM and a Radeon 9600 PRO. While I don't get a killer frame rate, with sound and all the video settings on low (except resolution) it is definitely playable (probably 20fps or so).

Get a gig of memory, a decent processor and anything better than a 6600 GT will power your extra characters at 1280x1024 no problems. It's not the resolution thats the killer its the bells and whistles combined with the high resolution. I crank all of the settings save for terrain distance down on the Zins for maximum FPS - I mainly look at Xzin's screen anyway - which is a far beefier system and can handle max settings with nearly capped FPS. The biggest cause of latency is lack of memory and possibly a fragmented hard drive. Short of a DRAM based hard drive, defrag every so often and make sure the CPU and GPU is reasonably fast. Make sure to make every system identical if at all possible. It does not have to cost a ton to roll 4 more accounts but make sure you think about input and how you plan to set that up. Vetra makes the best keyboard broadcasters but they are not cheap - $199 a pop and you need 2. Go with monoprice.com for PS/2 cables - far cheaper there than anywhere else.

All told, you can add 4 extra computers for around $2k not counting the monitors or extra hardware - just the CPUs and have a rock solid platform that will not be obsolete come next expansion and will manage 50+ fps constantly.