10 boxing on 1 computer. worth it?

[incendie22]

Has anyone tried this and have found it fun to doing so? Is it possible on 1 computer and with what setup?

[Nairi]

get a skull trail(or wait for intels I7 8Core cpu) motherboard and pop 2 quadcores and one beefy GTX280 or (4870X2 not sure if this crossfire thingy would work with windowed gaming unless they fixed it)...

[Turenn]

Worked well to 10 box on my Q6700 with a 9800GTX and 4gig of ram, I didn't do that much, just ran around abit it HFP testing it out, will do Kara if I get to 70 before the expansion. I had all the graphics set on low.

[not5150]

I 5 box on my skulltrail with no problems. CPU is around 10-15% in IF.

RAM is your biggest limitation and if you start swapping to hard drives, you'll be dead in the water. With 5 WoWs, I'm using around 2.5 - 3 GB of RAM. With 10, you would definitely go over 4 GB.

[algol]

Doing okay so far with just a dual core...albeit a very tweaked system. Oh, and 8GB of system RAM and 768 VRAM. But 60 FPS more or less stable on the main 1920x1200 screen with high textures etc (i.e. Vsync). The slaves are locked to a lower frame rate, but fill nearly that many pixels again between them. Woot?

Yeah, I should probably drop in a quad core eventually. Meh. I want new speakers first, I think.

But if only two cores can do five respectably, eight should be fine for ten - provided you have the memory, bandwidth, etc, and that whatever actual display constellation you want doesn't fry your vid card. But CPU power should not be the limiting factor. 2-3 sessions per core is fairly reasonable if you have appropriate settings and the rest of the system cooperates. Within limits...I don't know that I'd go for 20 even if you had 20 cores somehow. Stability tends to scale a bit worse than the number of instances of the program, so you're looking at over 20x the normal crash risk of a slightly crash-prone client then. Better to break up the boxen at some point below that. Five per machine is okay if it can handle it, ten is extreme but doable...but probably the limit.

Oh, and cost per client is probably somewhat below optimal once we start talking Skulltrail and so forth.

[not5150]

Yeah.. skulltrail is a frankenstein board. You should be able to get 10 machines on a decent single CPU quad-core.

[Xzin]

Getting 10 to *run* and getting 10 to be playable are different things. With a beefy enough set (pair? three?) of video cards, a quad core, about 8 gigs of ram and 2 - 3 SSD drives, this could be quite playable. As snappy and responsive as 10 dedicated boxes? Probably not but pretty close as long as you cranked stuff down to reasonable settings and make a few compromises.

*muses over how this wasn't even remotely possible only two years ago*

[algol]

I would probably start with two video cards with 512MB+ memory each, but on a board with a third full PCI-E slot. My 8800GTX hasn't complained much yet of five clients, so that should be okay. But I do have an 8800GT I cannibalized which will probably find itself dedicated to handling the second screen when I have time to fiddle. It depends on what you want as far as screens. One (large) screen with two cards in SLI/Crossfire could be amusing.

Memory capacity, both system and video, is likely a very large part of why I'm getting away with this setup. But you can easily get 4x2GB DDR2 for under $200 these days. Weird stuff, that. 4GB modules are still much more, of course.

[Fef]

< Warning : thread necro ! >

I was bored waiting for the extended maintenance to be finished on my server, so I gave 10-boxing a try. Unfortunately I could not create more than 3 trial accounts, so I had to limit my experience to 10 WoW clients launched, but only 8 of them with a character loaded.

I set up a main window, and 9 small thumbnail views along the top and right side of the screen sides (24') . Thumbnails were limited to 10 fps, and main window limited to 40 fps. I ran the 8 characters to Stormwind, and I am happy to report that the FPS on the main window was still at 40. I could not try Dalaran, for obvious reasons. The small tests I did didn't seem to show more lag than when I am 5-boxing (I have a decent ADSL connection). I am confident two more accounts would not be an issue since both memory and processor usage always stayed under 45-50%.

My system is a Mac Pro with dual quad-core Nehalem processor, 12GB ram, a HD4870 video card, and a 60GB OCZ Vertex for Vista 64 and WoW. Playing WoW is the only thing that is done under Vista on this drive/machine, all the rest (obviously work related) is done under MacOS running from other drives.

Now I'm very tempted to create 5 new real accounts, transfer one of my two level 80 groups, and give 10 boxing a real try .... Expensive though.

Please tell me it's not worth it !

[Fef]

Thanks Fur, exactly what I needed to read !

I'm mostly useless in PVP, so I would have aimed for PVE. But ok, I still have quite a lot of heroics to clear. It is not like I hit my limit yet with five, far from that.