Help Upgrading My PC

Hey I'm very new to multi-boxing, and realized since I don't have the money to go out and buy 4 extra computers, I'll just upgrade and multi-instance. Though I'm not very experienced when it comes to the necessary computer hardware.

My current setup is:

Dell XPS 400
Intel Pentium D CPU 2.80 GHz
1024 MB RAM
nVidia GeForce 7600 GS 512 MB

I just ordered another 2 gigs of RAM, but what else should I be looking to upgrade? I want to 5-box with keyclone on the same computer, but I don't exactly know what I need. I was able to run 3 WoWs with 50-95% usage, and FPS jumping from 8-35 on each, though I haven't been able to try 4-5. Any help would be great. Thanks.

Edit: My budget is not extremely high so I don't need the top of the line hardware, though I do want to buy good hardware that will last for a while. Also I might be willing to buy another monitor if its worth it.

remember to reduce the graphics on all of your clones (800x600 res) as well as reduce the effects. anything that would require more rendering. that should help alot. also, remember to not use hardware acceleration for audio... and turn off background audio.

you should be good to go with your current rig. let us know how it works out.

and don't forget the obligatory 5 box 'group pic' post to the screenshots forum :)

hey twenty I have the same comp... exept 256 video... i just went from 1gb to 2 gb ram and it made a huge difference. and im running 4-5 on the same cpu, low quality. my next move is to get a larger monitor but im with you on th budget so who knows when.

The best thing you can do is to add more RAM.
As a bonus you can use different harddrives for your system and for the WOW clients (because with 5 clients you will have alot of virtual memory swapping). I run 3 clients on the same machine and installed every client on a separate harddrive. Really helps, especially in cities.

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Originally Posted by Fortis

The best thing you can do is to add more RAM.
As a bonus you can use different hard drives for your system and for the WOW clients (because with 5 clients you will have a lot of virtual memory swapping). I run 3 clients on the same machine and installed every client on a separate hard drive. Really helps, especially in cities.

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This is a good idea. I am running 5 instances and disk i/o is really the main issue, when I walk into a populated city I have to just sit and let all the clients load data, having each client on a separate disk would probably help tremendously.

actually, you would want to try and share the DLLs, thereby reducing the number of duplicate DLLs in memory. the reason you get better performance across multi drives is due to the game loading non-DLL files, and spreading the reads across multiple readers. (drive reads and writes are sequential)

theoretically, if you could put the DLLs into a common directory and put that directory in the path, then they should share the DLLs. then you put the data files across multi drives.. that'd probably be the best performance, without getting into stripping w/ RAID.

I get far better performance running them all from the same directory vs. separate installs. It must be sharing something?

Why do I keep getting critical errors when I try to run more than 1 WoW window from the same directory?

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Originally Posted by Fursphere

because two running programs are trying to write to the same config files (and such) at the same time.

each WoW instance will need its own directory / folder / copy of all game files

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This is completely false.

I can run 5 wows from the same directory and have zero problems.

I just tried running 2 WoWs from different directories but when I try to open the second window it gives me a critical error. Restarting didn't work either. Any suggestions? Oddly enough I just had 3 windows open last night from a single directory, I dunno what could have changed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Fursphere

each WoW instance will need its own directory / folder / copy of all game files

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That is what I do, and have no issues at all with errors. I also did the same thing with a 3 boxed EQ. Had no issues there either.

Ziie