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Hello,
I would like to start getting a setup to run 5 copies of WoW on one machine and control it with Keyclone.
What are the known hardware configurations that would work for this?
Currently, I'm dual-boxing with this setup:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Toledo 2000MHz
A8N32-SLI_Dlx Motherboard
2x eVGA 256-P2-N516 Geforce 7800 GT (SLi)
OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered
Do you think my setup would work with 5 boxes or is it time to upgrade?
Thanks!
For my above setup, running 3 instances of WoW at 800x600, brought my CPU usage between 60-70%.
I'll get 2 more trial accounts and see how it goes.
I'm still curious on other people's hardware selection.
I've seen folks here 5 boxing on a single PC with a quad core. I'm not sure how well a dual core would handle 5 though. But with trial accounts, it's easy to test yourself. =)
You can 5 box on dual core but you'll be able to display 3 at most and other 2 minimized. At 3 my cpus hover around 98%.. I can display more windows but then it gets choppy. I usually have 3 minimized and 2 visible .. with cpus at around 50-70% depending if you're in major city or somewhere less populated. I'm running amd fx60/gf8800gtx/4gb.
I tested with a 5 boxes, and displaying all 5. The main window at 800x600, the rest at around 400x300 (resized it manually) and it topped off the cpu. Ironforge was choppy (obviously). Outside was pretty smooth.Quote:
Originally Posted by Bena
I'll do some more tests, so far it looks like it should handle it fine. I only plan on having 1 shown and 4 minimized.
I *might* get another 2gb of memory, and maybe upgrade the cpu. Just need to check the motherboard to see what the limits are. :D
p4 3.0ghz processor with hyper threading.
3g of ram
256mb graphics card
Runs 5 wows just fine, with some of them resized to be smaller so I can see them all. I do get choppy in populated areas at times though. Even works when my virus scanner does its weekly. CPU is usually in the 90s when I check, and I usually have about .8-.9gb of free ram.
I am currently doing this on a machine very similar to yours. I run 2 monitors and only ever have two accounts on display at any one time. The other three are minimised. CPU usage is usually about 70-80%. If I have all windows open the cores start to operate at 100% and things get very choppy. The screen refresh rates are at about 20-30 per second but drop to 10-11 when all accounts are displayed. One problem I do have is that characters on /follow will often get left behind whilst I am travelling. As a hunter I have found that my characters can keep up if the four followers have 'Aspect of the Cheetah' active and the lead character runs at normal speed. I also have a problem of losing followers when moving on mounts. I dont have an effective remedy for this (Animal Handler doesn't provide enough of a speed increase). it seems that my problems are a combination of lag 600-700ms and low screen refresh rates. I think that you should have no problem if you can maintain a screen refresh rate on each of your WoW copies opened at or above 25-30 per second. I will probably struggle with my current setup for another month or so and then go for a quad core CPU and motherboard.
WoW is NOT CPU limited. It is GPU limited. It also has very light video requirements, especially if the game is minimized or fairly small in settings (resolution does have an impact but less than one might expect). With a few gigs of ram and depending on how much FPS loss you are willing to accept, it is possible to run 5 on a single dual core system with a decent video card in what most would consider a "playable" state. I have not researched this in depth because, well, I have separate machines but as hardware gets cheaper and cheaper, I don't see why you could not run 5 WoWs on a single computer without much difficulty and the right software. You are still going to have a few limitations of course but nothing too bad and most of which (but not all) can be worked around or minimized. But I will leave that to others to fully explore and report on.
For more on my thoughts about why I personally hardware box, see:
http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums2/viewtopic.php?t=621
Quote:
I use 10 computers to play 10 accounts for the following reasons:
1) Reaction time - 10 computers have no bottlenecks running a single application, with full access to the bus, memory and hard drive.
2) Hardware only - Dedicated hardware is going to work or not. Synergy slows down for me at times, I don't like the concept of AHK nor do I like its inability to select a single window (?) nor do I want to script it. With hardware, you set it up and forget it and it works 100% of the time. With synergy, when one screen is loading (even on a quad core machine), it refuses to switch out to another client and there are all sorts of odd effects of software when the machine gets bogged down.
3) KVM friendly. I want to press 1 button and be able to direct my main keyboard and mouse to a single machine and KNOW for a fact that that machine and ONLY that machine is getting input. This is important when I type passwords, etc - but also for spell casts, etc. AHK and the like, I think, can do something similar - but I have no interest in setting that up - due to its somewhat scriptability and software limitations (cannot run 10 WoWs at 60 fps on a single PC).
4) Video card, memory, hard drive, CPU bottlenecks. Once you start to load up more and more copies of WoW, your machine starts to get pulled in different directions. The hard drive starts to need to load a TON of data when you zone. The CPU will get maxxed out and the way video cards function makes it such that running more than 1 port per card will slow down those WoWs to a crawl.
5) Eye candy/information density - I want to be able to run WoW at 1600x1280 or 1280x1024. Not 800x600 with minimal settings. This helps increase the amount of information I have available on screen (which allows me to monitor health, castings, etc) and also gives me a clearer view of the battlefield in PvP. Running lots of small WoWs will get you playing but will hinder your overall view of things greatly.
6) Latency - Try loading one copy of WoW. Zone into an instance. how fast does it load? Then load 5 copies of WoW and zone in. How quickly does it load? With 5 computers it would load as fast as 1. With 5 copies of WoW on a single machine - it will load really slowly. Multiple computers eliminates this latency. Also, if your computer needs to do something CPU intensive, like say a background application, your entire setup does not slow to a crawl.
7) Redundancy - Yes, more systems means more can go wrong but the chances that one machine will crash or blue screen is the same (or less due to less resources being used) as a single machine running your entire team. If your one box locks up, your entire setup goes down. With my setup, if one box goes down, I only lose 10% of my team.
8) Ease of setup - Ok, well my setup is complicated. But I know that each character has a dedicated box that I can direct input to. And I can do it in hardware, so each port of the multicaster goes to a dedicated machine that is running ONLY that character. So troubleshooting is easier (assuming its all well labeled) and the physical setup is easier to direct inputs to (or modify those inputs). Say I want to send data to the warlock team - I hit the button to cast warlock spell 1. Then I can modify that in hardware (instantly) with another button press and then it sends the cast spell command to just the mage team. One more modifier and it sends the same command to both. This is trickier to do in software and due to network latency, software glitches (memory leaks, errors, unknown interactions, etc) it is likely to be off or fail in some situations while the hardware simply sends the command and the box responds.
9) Framerates - When things get REALLY hectic (large scale PvP) your framerates suffer. They suffer the most when the system is taxed. When you are running 5 copies of WoW, you are taxing the hell out of your GPU all the time. So when it needs to ramp it up - you have no extra reserves and frame rates suffer. With 5 or 10 dedicated boxes, you have plenty of reserve "horsepower" such that when you need the extra FPS - it is there immediately with no graphics lag.
10) 3rd party programs - With hardware only and 10 computers, you are not running the (low) risk of violating the EULA. AHK is.... a bit of a gray area as it is. Hardware is undetectable (mostly) and is what I see to be a creative use of game mechanics rather than a scriptable setup that could be used to automate gameplay.
11) Other little items - you are running 4 WoWs minimized. So they aren't actually being on screen. If you had them running, your FPS would be nearly 0. So, you can't even see what is going on. I need to be able to know at a glance which character is where- did any get sapped or fall behind? Your setup cannot do that. I can quickly jump every single characters controls to another character and keep playing by looking at their screen.
There are more reasons but these are ones that I see to be some of the more important ones for me. I built my setup entirely to PvP - so your or others goals or objectives may be different than mine but I still feel like playing with 4 WoWs minimized is hobbling yourself too much.
The reason why you can do that is due to the fact that WoW uses very little CPU, especially if it is not rendering anything. When you start rendering the game (or multiple games) - your performance will quickly suffer. Especially if you try to span multiple ports of the same video card, or run multiple copies on the same card. WoW is mostly GPU limited.
WoW is GPU limited, but I still see a framerate boost from setting processor affinity. I run 2 wow's on a laptop, and setting one window to use cpu0 and the other to use cpu1 boosts my framerate. This does not contradict your "WoW is NOT CPU limited" statement, but helps ensure that the cpus work optimally. This helps somewhat with what you describe under #4. Zoning times will still be slow due to the lonely harddrive working overtime.
Many are suggesting quad-core solutions. Initially I thought this might be a good idea, to keep framerates ok even with 4 visible wow's on one screen. But I don't really know how quad-core processors work. I'm guessing the architecture (and the way the OS uses the cpu) is the same as a dual-core? If indeed so it would perform pretty much as a dual-core system. But memory and GPU would already suffer too much with 4 windows onscreen for it to work well.
One interesting area is SLI cards and gfx card drivers. I'm on thin ice here but if you got 1 card to render the top part of the screen and the other to render the lower part...
I havent tested much, but when I get home I'll test with multiple wows on my main computer, which happens to have a 7950GX2 SLI card.
I'm currently testing out my computer.
AMD 6000 X2 WINDSOR (2MB Cache) BOXED
ASUS M2A-VM HDMI
RAM: 3GB DDR2 PC800
EVGA e-GeForce 8600GT Superclocked 256MB
can handle 5 WoW sessions on two TFTs (horizontal span) and is still playable
Most quad cores these days are simply two dual cores stuck together.
SLI will probably be a problem still - the drivers *sigh* still are not very good.
If you horizontal span or play on a single HUGE (think 24 or 30" screen) you will have FAR better fps than if you play on dual view, which is practically unplayable with 5 open WoWs, even on 8800GTXs.