im not necessarily a vet or anything but i went the single machine route. i was able to build a machine from the ground up on new egg for about 1600 and it is just fine for pve. i dont pvp ever so i cant say anything for that but i get no lag have about 30-45ms latency almost constantly and have never crashed a client or anything like that. im running an intel quad core with 8gigs of ram, vista64, 2 250gig HDs, and one 8800gt. runs 5 like a dream.