Stepping up from 3 to 5 boxing - my learning experiences

[EvoX]

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to get from 3 toons to 5 because: a) I made enough mistakes to offset any savings, and b)If I post prices, they'll be outdated in a month.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.

[alcattle]

I would like to know if your main machine can run 5 toons smoothly. I know it will run as it is the same as mine except for the vid card. That will be my next upgrade when I start seeing a real lag, but for now with the low settings (too low I feel) it does ok. I could also go your route and throw together a second PC together, almost got the stuff now.

[EvoX]

You're right... my Q6600 will run 5, and with the slaves on med-low settings it is fairly smooth. Nothing great, but playable. The biggest problem I had was one or two toons would drop follow quite frequently while grinding in Elwynn Forest/Eversong Woods (I tried both sides on different realms). A couple of things that came to mind were that instances and major cities would be frustrating to no end, and that my setup would be far from future-proof since there's the likelihood it would become less playable in future patches. Would a higher end vid card resolve this? Possibly. A friend let me borrow his 2GB 4850X2 for a weekend before I'd decided to build the second rig and I seen a little improvement after testing a variety of configurtions to see what worked best. Cities were still choppy as predicted, Orgrimmar and Stormwind were like a slideshow near the bank/AH. A 4870 might have been a bit better. /shrug Had I tried running 5 on a single monitor it could have been smoother than on two. For me, squishing 5 toons onto either a 19" 4:3 or a 20" widescreen just makes the windows too small to be playable. For that matter, running 5 on those two monitors made the text and portrait healthbars too small to be useful for me. 3-boxing on those 2 monitors with the 20" roatated in portrait mode was ideal for my eyesight (which isnt horrible btw) and kept up really well in all the areas I'd travelled. It only seemed logical to get another 20" and complete the H-configuration to make the move up to 5-boxing.

I was considering adding SSDs, sym-linking, and so on. The potential expense of staying with one machine was escalating with every "what's next if this doesn't help enough" thought that crossed my mind. The option of multiple pcs seemed a less costly choice all the time and I didn't want to potentially fall into the routine of chasing down the FOTW video card or other bottleneck cure every few months to keep up with new content, only to see it all get hit by the failtruck should a new expansion come out in the next year. I want to believe that will be 18 months down the road, but nothing is certain.

What settled the score for me was reading posts on here. Some 5-boxers had come to the conclusion their Q6600s had seen its day, but just wasn't cutting it anymore. Then I read posts from other members (mikekim, vyndree and pinotnoir in particular - thanks so much for all the info you all shared) that highly praised the use of multiple pcs over a single one and how much smoother it becomes splitting the load over more than one machine. It couldn't have been more accurately described. After the upgrade to the Q6600 and donating parts to the alt rig, playing the 5 toons spread across two machines is so smooth it "feels" more like youre only dual-boxing again (logically) while using med-high graphics settings.

I would recommend leaning toward the 2nd PC, especially so if you have some of the spare parts already. It's slick, and much more future-proof.

[alcattle]

Did the first machine have 8 gigs of RAM? Sounds like how mine was acting when I could only get 4 gigs to work.

2 PCs are easy, space for more monitors and PC on 1 desk is the hard part. Thanks for keeping your finding posted.

[EvoX]

Initially I started with 4GB of RAM, and upgraded to 8GB (Had Vista 64-bit). It didn't do enough to cure the lag in cities either, so I installed Win7 RC 64-bit and kept that partition barebones (OS, Antivirus, WoW & AddOns). Doing so helped close the gap as well, but still not enough to be smooth everywhere.

Regarding the space constraints, I'm doing fine on a relatively small corner-type desk:

[alcattle]

ok, I have one screen that swivels and 1 normal 19" I might be able to fit a 2nd swivel monitor although 4 in one screen is livable. 2nd PC can sit to the side of the desk.