hey frosty-



definitely sounds like you did right by your system. the video card is very nice and the memory is where you need it. I just prefer intel but it really depends on what you are running honestly. nice rig you will have though.

I was a little suprised by the memory usage in WoW vs EQ2 now that khatovar andi went back. here is how it went...

pre- WotK we ran 4+1. I always play the +1 (tank). We were able to outland run pretty much anywhere with no problem with 4 on her box. the WotK came out and things got really ugly. she was unable to really travel (and I am not talking about phased areas breaking autofollow). it was stutter travel and became virtually unboxable from point a to point b in the "world". but summon everyone to a stone and run in a dungeon... no problems. we could run the dungeon with zero issues. we experimented. If we stayed close to the ground it seemed we could travel slightly better for longer. go fly up and poof... degrading performance almost everywhere.

after investigating further i noticed that WoW was using approximately 1gig of memory for each instance running after a short period of time. well on a 32bit OS thats more memory than your computer has so it was running on swap which means you are done. we added 2 gigs (to a total of 6 gigs) and the problem almost completely disappeared in WoW. still not optimal in dalaran with more than one toon but we could at least move the team on auto follow to do heroic violet hold without it taking 10 minutes. everywhere else was flawless.

so we cancelled all our accounts and went over to eq2 and decided to see how many we could box... we also had memories of how much resources eq2 used. and we found that our "memories" were when we were running computers that were made 4 years ago. thats a huge difference. with 6 gigs we can run 5 on one box. like khatovar has said its not the greatest but that honestly is not leaving alot of room for anything else, especially if you get into a high usage fight. so we are gonna push up to 8gigs and that should allow us to run in medium settings on all or high settings on one at least.

the box you are making... sounds like 5 box capable to me easily. only problem is your view space (monitors)... but that is something you can work towards as you go along if you wish... you will be quite happy with how the game looks though. start turning those settings up and see the game how its meant to be seen. you will be happy.

just seeing my first griffon i laughed out loud remembering what the wow griffons look like in comparison. I just keep asking myself "what was i thinking". khatovar helps set me straight.



cheers