Ordered for 10 account computer, hopefully its good enough

[Smoooth]

Right now I'm playing wow 5 accounts across 2 computers. I've decided to move up to 10 accounts and down to 1 computer. After hours and hours of research and looking for deals this is what I ordered.

ASUS M4N82 Deluxe Motherboard
AMD Phenom II x4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz Socket AM3
16GB Samsung (4x4GB) DDR2 667 PC2-5300
Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 x2 2GB
Corsair 850W Power supply
Full size tower with good cooling
2x WD 640gb sata hard drives
DVD burner
mouse/keyboard

Total came out to just about $1500. The ram itself was $400 and that was a deal compared to other 16gb solutions. 800MHz ram would have been $500 and at least a 3 month wait or over a grand to get some right now. I'm hoping the 16gb of 667 MHz works good for me.

I've built 3 computers before and every single time SOMETHING went wrong. Maybe this will be the first it just all comes together.

I will post again when it is built and how it runs 10 wows. I cant wait.

[Starbuck_Jones]

I predict that it will fail all over itself on the cpu. OS +10 instances of wow I don't see 4 cores handling that to your satisfaction unless I googled the wrong cpu.

[DLoweinc]

i've got a pretty good system for 5 boxing and i hit 1.5GB per client of RAM usage after loading up Dalaran. You are going to be cutting it close with 16GB as I am with 8GB and 5 clients.


I think what is going to kill you is hard drives. I noticed a huge increase when I moved to SSD's.


Couldn't you put together an intel core i7 system for roughly the same money? I would think that the RAM throughput of that sytsem would be of a lot more benefit.


It will probably run, but you will need to turn the graphics settings down a lot.

I hope it runs though! for your sake

[Smoooth]

The CPU I got has been tested and rated very similar to the i7 920 which is the lower end version of the i7. I saw some review where the AMD runs crysis at high physics 1078x762 at 101 fps and the i7 at 110 fps.

I plan on running my main at full screen and detail. The 9 alts will probably be 800x600 max and low detail. If this setup can't handle it I still have the computer I use now that can either just run the main or take over some of the slaves.

How should I setup my wow folders? I was thinking just 2 folders, 1 on each drive.

[Otlecs]

I am [cutting it close] with 8GB and 5 clients

Really? Do you have a whole shed-load of (perhaps unnecessary) add-ons enabled for your drones?

I 5 box and use ~60% of the 8GB on my machine.

How should I setup my wow folders? I was thinking just 2 folders, 1 on each drive.

That's how I'd do it. My theory is that the main will most likey have one set of graphics settings, and the drones will have another.

Putting them on separate physical drives will probably maximise the effectiveness of the cache in each case.

That's my theory. I've never imperically tested it

Give the sofa a good shake and see if you can find enough spare change for an SSD drive too. It made a visible (almost startling) difference to zoning and load times (including player textures when wandering around the lag pit known as Dalaran) for my drones.

As others have said, I reckon the CPU and disk I/O will be your bottleneck.

[zanthor]

5 clients, 1 machine.

I'm running 8GB of ram, a 3.0ghz phenom II clocked at 3.3ghz on air with no voltage tweaks at all, and an 8800gt/7600gt set of video cards.

Clock a 3.3 up and really wind it tight, use a better main board than I have and better video cards I can see it running 10 clients.

[Ualaa]

I'm running a Q6600, 8gb ddr 800mhz ram, 10k raptor HD (one wow install), HD4870 X2.

Basically in Dalaran with five clients at once..
If I mount up and use Pally Crusader Aura..
I will usually lose 1-2 toons between Krausus Landing and the Portals.

Up until Dalaran, I could 5-box anywhere.. BG's, Shatt, raids etc.
I'm smooth enough to play 5-box anywhere in the game, except Dalaran/Winterlag.

Not upgrading my system until next summer unfortunately.
Will go with some form of i7 by then.

Still, my specs aren't anything special as of now, and what is available on the market.
However, other then Dalaran/Winterlag, the game is very playable everywhere.
WoW doesn't push a computer too hard.

[DLoweinc]

I am [cutting it close] with 8GB and 5 clients

Really? Do you have a whole shed-load of (perhaps unnecessary) add-ons enabled for your drones?

I 5 box and use ~60% of the 8GB on my machine.

It is probably because I have my draw distance at max. I do have roughly 90MB of addons running per client, but that is somewhat insignificant.

Also one thing to note is that you should aim for a video card with as much RAM as possible in my opinion... I noticed a HUGE increase when I went from a 512MB card (ATI 4870) to a 1GB 4890. The disk IO of loading all the textures into the graphics card RAM from the dat files is probably what kills dalaran...



I will also agree with the poster above.. if I use crusader aura I lose a toon on follow, so I often don't use it. When I use my epic flying mounts I am almost guaranteed to lose one if I use crusader aura.

[Multibocks]

Thats why you make the paladin with crusader one of your followers, you wont lose anyone!

P.S. 8GB of ram for 5 clients?! Wow Im sitting much lower... I'll have to check but last time I looked it was maybe over 4GB.

[Coltimar]

Smooth, I can run 8 clients on a system one generation older than what you are building. I don't have any trouble. With the right setup, you should be fine. SSD is nice but you can accomplish a lot with having your clients on a separate RAID0 array. That's what I did.