I thought that since I don't post here a lot (short of asking questions) I'd share a little about my mistakes and successes in building a 5-box setup. Maybe someone in a similar situation will avoid the mistakes I made along the way and do it right the first time. Budget was a driving factor in my setup, but I had to live and learn - and overcome a few snags along the way. Aside from that I've been happy with the end result. I'll begin with a caveat, starting out I had a Q6600 driven PC capable of 3 boxing and a few assorted pieces of hardware I'd accumulated from performing upgrades for friends. I won't be posting any costs or numbers to boast about how inexpensively I was able to get from 3 toons to 5 because: a) I made enough mistakes to offset any savings, and b)If I post prices, they'll be outdated in a month.



With my 3-boxer in mind I thought I'd initially try to push it to be capable of running 5 because I had this huge fear of controlling multiple PCs, as I'd never attempted it before. Big mistake. I'm not knocking anyone's setup that can run 5 on one PC, but I can say that I would have been money and headache ahead to just build a new rig capable of playing 5 if I was adamantly opposed to a second PC. In the end I was able to sell most of the useless parts to PC enthusiast friends, so it wasn't a huge wash. My second attempt was to utilize my Q6600 to do what it is already capable of (3-boxing) and add a somewhat budget-minded 2nd PC to drive the other two slave toons. I bought the parts I was lacking and put together a AMD X2 7750 with 4GB PC6400 ram, and a Radeon 3870 with a single rail 500W PSU. The four 1GB sticks and 3870 vid card were moved from my Q6600 to the new rig and replaced with 8GB of PC6400 and a Radeon 4850. :thumbup:



On the software side, I bought a 2nd Keyclone license (already had it on my main rig) and to get seamless control of my slave rig I ended up using KaVoom! KM and Input Director. For some reason (maybe its just me) I can't maintain smooth uninterrupted control just using one or the other, but both of them together works wonderfully. At first I tried Stardock Multiplicity and had just as well spent the money on a lot of cheap beer. The resulting headache and regret would have been roughly equivalent. Not that I condone drinking that much beer at a time, especially cheap beer. Now I'm 5 boxing between 40-60fps on all screens in all WoW's visual glory. I can't jump the gun and say all this smoothness and FPS will be the case once I reach Dalaran, but up to level 61 Hellfire Peninsula 5-boxing has been great.