New Computer Specs

[scraggleness]

So i am sure there are probably tons of posts like this but i will see what info i can get. I am looking at building a new PC to dual-box with. In reality i am not ever going to the extreme of more than 3 characters. I already have a couple of 22" monitors that i am using right now but i am curious as to what the consensus is on some of the other components. Throw out some suggestions if you wouldn't mind


CPU
Video Card -
Power Supply - how big?
Motherboard
Hard Drive(s) - How many and what size?

Those are really the main things i am concerned about. 4-8GB or Ram will go in as well. Ideally i want to be around 1500$ when it is all said and done.

Thanks,
Shane

[Oatboat]

so you want us to do your homework for you!?
cpu - dual or quad intel or amd - for 3 wow accounts you could use a Dual core easily
atleast a 512 card - i've got one for sale for 100 bux Nvidia 7950 gt oc
power supply anything 500+ if you are running dual core and a beefy graphics... 650+ for a quadcore and beefy video card
motherboard - all up to what you want... Intel or AMD just dual or quad capable with pci - e slot 4 ram slottage
harddrives are cheap you can pick up some 500g sata drives for 90 bux.

[-silencer-]

You can run 3 on a dual core, but if you're going for a new and very inexpensive machine, it'll be tough to do better than something like this for the price:
Intel Q6600 $195
Asus P5Q-E $160
4GB (2x2GB) Corsair DDR2-800 $87 (or double it to 8GB for $174)
Asus HD 4850 $188 (or two of them for $376)
Corsair (SeaSonic) 520W PSU $115 (or SeaSonic M12 700W PSU $170 if overclocking..)
500GB Samsung F1 $70 (Lot of other options here.. depending on how much you want to spend)
$815

The main suggestions I can offer..
If you have two displays, get two videocards and power each to their own display without SLI/Crossfire.
To reduce lag in high-texture areas (Shatt/IF/Og), get a high-speed hard drive (WD Velociraptor 300GB $280) and sym-link wow data directories.

However, 3 characters can be easily done on an older E6xxx processor, 4gb of memory, and one 8800GT/S videocard. It's really all about how much you want to spend..

Assuming you want to spend ~$1500, I'd go for this:
Q9450 $320
Asus P5Q-E $160
8GB (4x2GB) Corsair DDR2-800 RAM $174
2x Asus HD4850 $376
SeaSonic M12 700W $170
300GB WD VelociRaptor HDD $290 (or get a 150GB WD Raptor & 750GB Samsung F1 for a total of $270)
$1490.

You can always add more larger & slower hard drives later.. Samsung F1 750GB drives are now $100 each.

[Cress]

I wish to add something here IF you are attempting to run a single machine and multiple copies of wow your lag will moslty come from hard drive load times specially in cities

i would suggest adding at least 5 hard drives to the machine for a lot better performance 2 raids <stripe> for better performance if just to run 4 wow clients on,

and a single drive for operating system and 1 wow client

as most of you will notice that when your lagging bad your hard drive will be running off the planet.

hope this helps

[butta]

I wish to add something here IF you are attempting to run a single machine and multiple copies of wow your lag will moslty come from hard drive load times specially in cities

i would suggest adding at least 5 hard drives to the machine for a lot better performance 2 raids <stripe> for better performance if just to run 4 wow clients on,

and a single drive for operating system and 1 wow client

as most of you will notice that when your lagging bad your hard drive will be running off the planet.

hope this helps

I run all my wow's from the same harddrive, same installation folder with minimal problems like you're describing. I think the money would be better spent elsewhere on the system like high-grade ram, quadcore processor, or a high-memory graphics card. I can't emphasize the performance boost I experienced when I reduced bit sample size from 24 to 16 on all clients. Pretty much ended all of my lagging out issues where my system would bog down after a few hours of playtime.

[-silencer-]

I wish to add something here IF you are attempting to run a single machine and multiple copies of wow your lag will moslty come from hard drive load times specially in cities

i would suggest adding at least 5 hard drives to the machine for a lot better performance 2 raids <stripe> for better performance if just to run 4 wow clients on,

and a single drive for operating system and 1 wow client

as most of you will notice that when your lagging bad your hard drive will be running off the planet.

hope this helps

5 drives is the old-school way of doing things. You don't need multiple drives, although it's always nice to have the OS/swap file on a different fast drive than your apps. Sym-links will fix this problem, and it's already been discussed a bunch on this site. This way, you reference the same data files from your various WoW installs. It's better to have the drive be fast in access time and transfer rate (which the 300GB Velociraptors do better than just about anything else) than to use 5x slower drives. The lag is caused from WoW having to fetch every object and texture in cities - think about the city detail, NPCs, and all the different gear players are wearing. Fast access times (10k rpm drives) help fetch that object/texture with minimal delay, and fast transfer rates (RAID0, SATA 3.0Gb/s) help load that texture quickly. Since the textures aren't very large - they're just extremely numerous, I'd put my money into faster access than transfer rates, which is why I'd suggest *1* 300GB Velociraptor or 150GB Raptor over a group of 7200 rpm drives.

Think of it this way when multiboxing hard drives and landing in Shatt:
WoW1 - find and load WoW1 drive1/folder data files.
WoW2 - find and load WoW2 drive2/folder data files.
WoW3 - find and load WoW3 drive3/folder data files.
WoW4 - find and load WoW4 drive4/folder data files.
WoW5 - find and load WoW5 drive5/folder data files.

OR:
WoW1 - find and load WoW1 drive/folder data files.
WoW2 - reference WoW1 drive/folder data files that are already cached.
WoW3 - reference WoW1 drive/folder data files that are already cached.
WoW4 - reference WoW1 drive/folder data files that are already cached.
WoW5 - reference WoW1 drive/folder data files that are already cached.

It's no comparison - symlinks are MUCH faster than separate drives. The only time I'd recommend 5 separate drives is if you're 5-boxing on 5 separate PCs. Otherwise, it's a waste of money/power/heat.

[Cress]

Quoted from "Cress"


I wish to add something here IF you are attempting to run a single machine and multiple copies of wow your lag will moslty come from hard drive load times specially in cities

i would suggest adding at least 5 hard drives to the machine for a lot better performance 2 raids <stripe> for better performance if just to run 4 wow clients on,

and a single drive for operating system and 1 wow client

as most of you will notice that when your lagging bad your hard drive will be running off the planet.

hope this helps

5 drives is the old-school way of doing things. You don't need multiple drives, although it's always nice to have the OS/swap file on a different fast drive than your apps. Sym-links will fix this problem, and it's already been discussed a bunch on this site. This way, you reference the same data files from your various WoW installs. It's better to have the drive be fast in access time and transfer rate (which the 300GB Velociraptors do better than just about anything else) than to use 5x slower drives. The lag is caused from WoW having to fetch every object and texture in cities - think about the city detail, NPCs, and all the different gear players are wearing. Fast access times (10k rpm drives) help fetch that object/texture with minimal delay, and fast transfer rates (RAID0, SATA 3.0Gb/s) help load that texture quickly. Since the textures aren't very large - they're just extremely numerous, I'd put my money into faster access than transfer rates, which is why I'd suggest *1* 300GB Velociraptor or 150GB Raptor over a group of 7200 rpm drives.

Think of it this way when multiboxing hard drives and landing in Shatt:
WoW1 - find and load WoW1 drive1/folder data files.
WoW2 - find and load WoW2 drive2/folder data files.
WoW3 - find and load WoW3 drive3/folder data files.
WoW4 - find and load WoW4 drive4/folder data files.
WoW5 - find and load WoW5 drive5/folder data files.

OR:
WoW1 - find and load WoW1 drive/folder data files.
WoW2 - reference WoW1 drive/folder data files that are already cached.
WoW3 - reference WoW1 drive/folder data files that are already cached.
WoW4 - reference WoW1 drive/folder data files that are already cached.
WoW5 - reference WoW1 drive/folder data files that are already cached.

It's no comparison - symlinks are MUCH faster than separate drives. The only time I'd recommend 5 separate drives is if you're 5-boxing on 5 separate PCs. Otherwise, it's a waste of money/power/heat.

I will have to look into this thanks for the heads up <i didnt realize you could do this>.

when i bought my raptors i didnt go for the big drives at the time the big 300 or 150's were slower for access times than the 70's this may have changed but when i built this machine the 70 gig drives had the fastest access times

I wish to add something here IF you are attempting to run a single machine and multiple copies of wow your lag will moslty come from hard drive load times specially in cities

i would suggest adding at least 5 hard drives to the machine for a lot better performance 2 raids <stripe> for better performance if just to run 4 wow clients on,

and a single drive for operating system and 1 wow client

as most of you will notice that when your lagging bad your hard drive will be running off the planet.

hope this helps

I run all my wow's from the same harddrive, same installation folder with minimal problems like you're describing. I think the money would be better spent elsewhere on the system like high-grade ram, quadcore processor, or a high-memory graphics card. I can't emphasize the performance boost I experienced when I reduced bit sample size from 24 to 16 on all clients. Pretty much ended all of my lagging out issues where my system would bog down after a few hours of playtime.

i run fast hard drives for my raids 64 bit os quad core cpu and 4 gig fast ram tho my system is gettin a lil old now. i run all wow clients as i would a single client im not sure of my fps i cant remember what it was at till i log into the game but i think it was between 60 and 100, i do sometimes get lag in cities sure but thats usually background processes running as well that im too lazy to turn off

i could go down the multiple pc road as i have 4 pcs here all capable of running 5 box on individually and this was my original plan but i found this system was just so good that its just not worth the power bill

just one other thing here i run my wow on 24 not 16 bit my lag issues do mostly come in game from blizzard

being in Australia my latency even on a single client is usually around 400- 500 so <lag>

but thanx for the correction guys

now i gotta research symlink <sigh>

[Bovidae]

Symlinking is the best thing to come out of Vista, imo

1 Velociraptor 300gb
4 GB ram (DDR2 or 3, or 8gb depending on budget)
2 video cards not in SLI/Crossfire, 8800GTS or GTX 260/280 (depending on budget)
Q9450 - is a good processor to look at
and of course a mobo that can handle it all. I like the Gigabyte X38/X48 boards.

[scraggleness]

okay so it seems that some people say 1 high end video card and some say 2 non-linked lower tier... so i guess in my price range i am looking at either

1 nVidia 280 or 2 ATI HD 4850

I was thinking of the 2 video cards with a monitor to each card... what are the thoughts.. will i see any decrease performance with the one card and 2 monitors?

[-silencer-]

I'm really curious to see the performance of using a SSD just to host the /data folder. Access times (.1-.3ms) destroy Velociraptors (4.0+ms) and read transfer rates are also faster if done 16kb+ at a time. Since you'll only be using the drive for reads, no need to lower lifespan with regard to the read/write limit of MLC SSDs. Is anyone using an SSD for WoW? I may have to try one out sometime soon - prices are getting more reasonable. ~$200 for an OCZ(Samsung) 32GB MLC SSD, or around $450 for a 32GB SLC SSD. They're RAID capable, so if they prove to work significantly better than a raptor, I may have to purchase two and an Areca ARC-1200 RAID controller.