Dream computer

[HPAVC]

How much faster is WoW on ssd? Is it jaw dropping, or noticeable but nothing special? Particularly in regard to 5 box.

Planning on an i7/920 box, but nothing I do really benefit from Hyperthreading, so thinking about change it to i5/750 and add a ssd for about the same price.

I didn't see a performance increase worth the money, with the size of drive buffers and memory available now it shouldn't be an issue really. All your copies of wow should be reading from the same exact datafiles and not 5 separate copies of the datafiles so caching will deal with it. If you have 5 separate datafiles, then zoning will be an issue on metal (though tossing an ssd at that problem seems silly)

The game might load faster or zone faster for the first load, but we are talking about a second. All my screens load at the same tiled progress bar. (all character hearth now, all character enter portal, all character accept dungeon, etc)

I think my killer card made a much bigger increase, especially in city movement and large encounters. As far as disk io, there really isn't an issue for me there.

[Ualaa]

For me, the game loads faster, as in getting into the game.
Or landing on a gryphon in a city, is faster.
Zoning, be it on a boat or into an instance is faster too.

Probably half the time it was, using a Raptor for me wow folder.

Dalaran is noticeably smoother, even at prime time.
Have not tried a Wintergrasp yet.

Looking at benchmarks, my SSD is 200mb/sec read speed.
Not quite as fast as the drive is advertised, but close enough (220mb/sec).
My raptor was around 80mb/sec.

[Tofino]

I'm looking at a G51J (http://gdgt.com/asus/g51j/specs/) notebook. They are down under $1500 CDN and dropping. Portability is a huge deal to me these days rather than having to sit in my office to play games, so any normal desktop is totally not on. The G51J is a great deal for not a ton of cash. Main drawbacks according to reviews are heat and poor battery life, both of which are typical gaming laptop probs anyway, and both of which I can deal with. Overall it's a far, far better machine than I currently am using, and it's a notebook!

My main problem post-upgrade is changing my 3-box layout to 5-box . Currently sitting with 3 shams in their 60s and a 80 pally. I'll move the pally to the 4th account but getting that 5th guy up is going to be a slog :|

[d0z3rr]

I'd shoot for a Killer NIC. I heard they are pretty decent, but will run about $300.

[Ualaa]

I've got a Killer NIC.

If you want the "best" system, its a very decent network card.
However, for the price, it is not worth it.
It does take a bit of the load off of the windows network stack, which might be marginally faster pings.
But the gain is very minimal.

The largest practical gain from this card, is that you can prioritize your gaming bandwidth, set your torrents/downloads to maximum speed in uTorrent (or whatever you use), and have the NIC give as much bandwidth to Blizzard as you can get, with everything left over going to downloads.
As in your downloads, even set at 100% speed, won't impact your gaming.

These cards are more for those with a lot of money.
Who want to be able to say, I have the best component in every slot.
On a budget, there are better places to spend your cash.

[EsaJunttila]

Thanks for suggestions and experiences. Especially SSD hard drive puzzles me. Harddrive itself is expensive plus motherboard supporting it is twice as expensive than "normal".

I bet issue about one or several copies of installation has been discussed through before. I must study a bit if it's really so much better to have five installations of wow instead of one. At a moment all three use same copy.

I guess IS boxer's way to make slaves run in small windows saves work from graphics gards? Now I'm having three 1200*900 screens limited in 1920*1200 screen. Using absolutely minimum settings I get some 15 FPS with 512Mt card and 2,8GHz P4 with HT...

[Ualaa]

IS Boxer actually taxes the video card, as if everything was rendered the same as the largest window.
It then scales down the image to fit the smaller window.
But strains the system, as if you had five large windows, each the full resolution of the big window.

The advantage of rendering everything at the same maximum resolution is: extremely accurate and quick mouse broadcasting, far better then anything else.
But it is more of a strain on system resources then other boxing software options.
Not really that big of a deal, definitely playable even on a modest system, especially with tweaks such as the virtual config files where slaves can have every option off, while the main has more options on.

Unless your graphic card is really old and outdated, graphically the only thing that is super challenging is shadows.
You can turn the shadow setting down, and a graphic card which is by far the worst part of the system will run just fine.
Most graphic options in wow challenge the processor more so then the graphic card -- things like spell effects, view distance, density of objects etc.

The largest advantage of multiple installs, is different settings on each install.
If you are using IS Boxer, you have the virtual configuration files, so one install is all you need.

[-silencer-]

So, if you now got 1500-2000 to put together new computer for 5-boxing, how would it be? What motherboard, what graphis cards, how much and what speed memory and so on.

And what about those additional "keyboards"? How essential are they?

I don't think "dream" and "sub-$2000" belong in the same sentence for a computer. I sunk around $4500 into my dream system 9 months ago.

However, an "ideal $2000 multiboxing system" for me would be:
$358 (currently down from $518) 2x Dell 24" ST2410 1920x1080 LCDs
$420 AMD/ATI Sapphire Vapor-X 5870 videocard
$250 1366 X58 motherboard (Asus/Gigabyte/DFI)
$290 i7-920 CPU
$160 6GB (3x2GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1600 memory)
$300 Intel X25-M 80GB SSD
$175 High quality power supply (700+W Seasonic.)

..whatever case, mouse & keyboard to get you by.. and whatever old hard drives you have for extra storage.

Future upgrade:
Add another 3x2GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1600 memory. $160
Add Dell Ultrasharp 2410U monitor (has DisplayPort) for 3x Eyefinity. $549 (down from $599)

[-silencer-]

I'd shoot for a Killer NIC. I heard they are pretty decent, but will run about $300.

Even if you're building a $5000 machine for multiboxing, there are more bang for the buck options than a $300 NIC with marginal gains. Each time I've seriously considered going for this card, there's a more productive way to spend money.. usually involving something like another display or RAID0 SSDs. MMORPGs especially don't benefit as well from the latency reduction provided by the Killer NIC. It's better suited for smaller dedicated server first person shooters where you'll actually notice a difference going from 80 to 60ms latency over WoW going from 150 to 130ms at best.
Already have a $5k machine? Use that $300 to watercool & overclock it. Lag in WoW is caused more from server overhead than anything than can be done on your side of the network.

Like mentioned before, the ONLY reason the Killer NIC would actually be useful for multiboxing is to prioritize Blizzard packets over torrents on that machine. I'd rather just use one of many old computers to torrent while keeping my main machine's network bandwidth available all for WoW.

[cryinsham]

edited i missed page two advice.