Playing 20 toons on 1 computer?

[incendie22]

If all the alts screen was minimized except for the main ofcourse, would playint 20 toon simultaneusly work on a quad-core, 8600gts geforce computer?

[zanthor]

If all the alts screen was minimized except for the main ofcourse, would playint 20 toon simultaneusly work on a quad-core, 8600gts geforce computer?

Sure would, as long as the quad core was running around 32gb of ram and was faster than any quad core I've heard of (even Overclocked).

[glo]

For what it cost to build the super machine needed to do this you could have a small army of lesser machines capable of running hundreds of clients. That is if you could even do it at all. The lesser machines would run the game extremely well and would have a bit of extra fault-tolerance.

[Xzin]

The short answer is *yes* you COULD. But I question the practicality of doing so for all sorts of reasons aside from botting and other nefarious purposes.

[not5150]

Would be an interesting experiment ... I managed to get 13 running on a quad-core Phenom processor, but that was with the help of a super SSD.

You reach a point of diminishing returns where the machine just becomes prohibitively expensive - that's when a separate machine becomes cost effective.

I think it's an interesting thought and geek experiment if you actually get it working.

[Xzin]

You reach a point of diminishing returns where the machine just becomes prohibitively expensive - that's when a separate machine becomes cost effective.

Kind of like the old Silicone Graphics SUPER multi piped machines. That ran $1M+ dollars. And are now eclipsed many times over by a single desktop machine.

[algol]

I think a more interesting question is: can you run WoW on an Atom processor? Some of those netbook-turned-minidesktop machines would be pretty funny for slaves. More so given the laptop-like power draw.

[Sam DeathWalker]

An SSD will make up for a lack of ram?

[pengwynman]

An SSD will make up for a lack of ram?

I wouldn't think so-- SSD's are GREAT for read times, booting, etc. but I believe they aren't so good at writing.. there might be an overall improvement over a regular HDD but i'd upgrade the ram first. ram prices are pretty low these days, there's no reason memory should be a limiting factor in a high-end setup.

edit: an SSD would make overall load times quicker, but as far as *making up* for a lack of ram... having extra ram would make for smoother gameplay i believe

[not5150]

Always upgrade RAM first because the worst thing is to have your operating system start swapping to the hard drive.

If you cannot upgrade your RAM anymore (OS limit, no more slots, etc), then an SSD will definitely help IF you put your swap file/partition on the SSD.

There are many types and speeds of SSDs. Indeed some do write slower than a hard drive and there are some that write A LOT faster than hard drives. There secret sauce is the type of flash used and how many parallel controllers are in the drive.

You see there's an upper limit on how fast a flash cell can be written or read from, so the only way to make this go faster is to do parallel writes/reads. This is similar to hard drives arrays. Take the fastest hard drives out there, let's say a 15,000 RPM one. These are fast, but there's an upper limit to how much data can be accessed. How do you get more information from these drives? Ahh, you put a bunch together with RAID and read/write all at once.

Solid state drives are made with several flash chips. You can think of each flash chip as a separate hard drive. Your data is generally striped amongst the chips... sorta like RAID 0. A slow SSD might only access a few chips at a time, but a really fast SSD may be able to access dozens of chips in one go.

RAM is cheap... max it. Then and only then should you look into SSDs.

I play with SSDs every day and I think they are the wave of the future, but most people probably don't need one right now.

Bloody hell that was one heck of a brain dump... maybe I should start selling SSDs.