My First Time Be Gentle...

Hello everyone,

Im rather excited at the prospect of starting to multibox, Basically my "GOAL" and i use the term loosely is to have 24 accounts running over 6 PC's. I have the 24 accounts all ready to go codes and all i just ned to get the basis of my systems set up.

My Budget is $200/month for the Server (Dedicated or Virtual) and as for the computers i have put aside about $1000 for the 6 computers.

Now i have a few basic questions:
1. What sort of hardware would i require for the 6 pc's (Bare Minimum Specs / Reccomended Specs - I have 6 x 22" Monitors already if that helps)

2. What would be better for me a dedicated or virtual server mabey pros and con's of each if thats not asking to much

3. Of the Dedicated / Virtual servers what specs would i be looking at on that aswell, My budget is close to $200/month for and australian based server.

4. I would be looking at the idea of getting static IP's for each seperate wow account running on the machines.

To anyone who does look at this and respond i would like to thank you for taking the time to help me any other information you could pass onto me would be most appreciated.

i'm sure some tech gurus will answer shortly.
I don't know much about computers myself, but i'm curious as to what you intend to do with 24 accounts?

I haven't looked at VM ware or virtual machine in a while, but back then, they did not support the use of directx. That kinda killed using virtual machines to play games on. But, things may be different now.

I don't see a reason to buy/rent static ip addresses. That's what a router is for.

$1000 for 6 pc's? I'm not aware of any systems you can buy for $165 and run 4 copies of WOW on.

I don't have enough information to speculate what you mean by renting a server for $200 a month or its purpose. Your wow subs will be $360 a month alone. Your budget just seems a bit weird to me. You basically need a big enough internet pipe to handle the up and down stream from that many clients and whatever amount of hardware you want to use to run it.

Hey yeah sorry i mean to say $4000 is my PC budget and the $200 a month was a conservative guess at the cost for a dedicated server to host the 24 connections as any australian internet would die trying to host that many wow copies.

as for my reason for wanting it more than anything to do old content alone BWL AQ 40 etc etc up to Black Temple. Also for running around the place just smoking allaince in pvp.

Also a cheap alternative to buying game time cards is to buy RAF subs from sites that charge $8/month (im guessing they use the RAF bonus for powerleveling and selling there accounts but what they do with it is up to them)

Well you're looking at running one copy of wow per account, so you want 24 accounts? thats 24 Serial numbers for Classic, Burning Crusade, Lich King, and Cataclysm.

For the computer, I'm sure a decent i7 2600k unlocked hyperthreaded processor might do, but I'd look at the i7 990 Processor series. Then get yourself at least 24 Gig of ram. Video you probably want to soup it up with at least two SLI Nvidia Card with 1.5 Gig at least per card. 2 Gig would be better. Go for a card that has a processor of at least 900+ MHz too. Get an SSD Drive too for the wow install and OS install.

Now you don't necessarily need more than one computer to run this either. Its not like it used to be with computers and running copies of wow. You can run over 100 copies of wow on the best system if you wanted to and still have tea and crumpets in orgrimmar, stormwind, or the like. Now thats more copies a sane person would want to run however, so I'd start with your 24 that you want to do and be comforted knowing one PC is more than enough. I gather however, you want to have more than just 4 monitors for this. Perhaps you want one monitor per PC. well then you want to have 6 computers then with dual SLI graphics cards and then you can save money by getting an NVIDIA GTS 550 range, a i7 2600k processor, and about 16gig ram on each computer would do the trick too. Still run the SSD drive cause its the better way to go.

As for network, depends what kind of connection you have, a regular broadband provider would be more than enough to support even 24 copies of wow running on the internet. I have a connection speed of 25mbps on an optic connection, and even most providers provide 10mbps on their super connection through cable companies. This is again, more than enough to run that. I don't think wow uses alot of bandwidth but i'm sure you'll notice it when you're in a heavy populated city when doing a city raid.

Oh yeah if you're going RAF on them, then remember, get the trial codes sent via the invitation through the recruit a friend page on your battle.net account, don't register the accounts online then try to link them, it won't work, and you will need to contact bliz to set it up manually. Sucks cause I had to do it, but they were nice about it. But you can defer from calling them by doing it right the first time :rolleyes:

For old content, a team of 5 level 85 is more than enough i'd think

you would probably be better with picking up an i7 2600k, 16gb ram, SSD and a 3gb GTX580.

start off with running 10 accounts on this and see how you get on.

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Originally Posted by drarkan

Well you're looking at running one copy of wow per account, so you want 24 accounts? thats 24 Serial numbers for Classic, Burning Crusade, Lich King, and Cataclysm.

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Dont forget you get a free upgrade to BC now a days. one less expense.

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Originally Posted by Oatboat

Dont forget you get a free upgrade to BC now a days. one less expense.

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Yeah true, I was lucky enough to buy my last two accounts when classic, BC, LK were a total of 20 bucks... should have bought 100 copies just for future endeavors. But live and learn :p for now 5 accounts is enough for me.

100 accounts? I cant possibly imagine. Good Lord WHY?! The largest raid is 40, and its old school.

Sorry, this is just a waste of money... or a troll.

You need to explain what your goal is for the 24 accounts before anyone can give you a decent answer.

As i said my goal for the 24 accounts would be to have 24 Horde frostmages so i can basically just run around doing old school raids alone also terrorizing the enemy cities and basically just having a good old time? i would be running them on low graphics excempt for my main account which is on my main PC so the 25th character will be run on a high end gaming pc and the other 24 are just to be on low.

old school raids dont really need 24 mages thou ;)

You could use i7 1st gen or higher, and 16-24 gigs ram, a nvidia 580+ video card or higher. SSD drive, enough to hold windows 7 and wow - probably 128 gigs min space.

You'd need 2 of these, each can run 12 copies of wow. Total 24. That's probably the cheapest way to go.

If you wanted 6 different machines, I don't know what you'd use. Maybe a q6600 and 8 gigs ram or something, and a nvidia 400ish series video card.

You want to stay away from any VMs - they aren't going to be able to handle the graphics, and it would be a PITA to switch to 24 VMs to configure anything. Normally hosting companies aren't going to have any graphics card besides a 16 meg VGA on-board adapter.

You could always buy a machine and try to co-locate it at a hosting center, but terminal servicing into it would be horribly slow, and it would be probably frustrating as hell trying to configure anything in wow.

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Originally Posted by Kicksome

You could use i7 1st gen or higher, and 16-24 gigs ram, a nvidia 580+ video card or higher. SSD drive, enough to hold windows 7 and wow - probably 128 gigs min space.

You'd need 2 of these, each can run 12 copies of wow. Total 24. That's probably the cheapest way to go.

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Separate installs of wow does not improve the performance. There is no difference accept more space taken up on your drives. One install can run unlimited number of copies of wow, only that it will probably top out somewhere due to processor capacity.

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Originally Posted by drarkan

Separate installs of wow does not improve the performance. There is no difference accept more space taken up on your drives. One install can run unlimited number of copies of wow, only that it will probably top out somewhere due to processor capacity.

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Yeah, if I implied you needed 12 copies of wow - I didn't mean to. It takes up like 31 gigs, and with the OS and other stuff taking up a lot, you'd need min 64 gig SSD.