5 wow clients - One pc vs two

[Ualaa]

If you have a single PC which is strong enough to play all your clients, without straining its resources, I'd go with one PC.

If your single best PC cannot smoothly handle all the sessions you want to run on it, then multiple PC's is a good option.

You should be able to run at least two monitors on a single PC.
It depends on your available monitor sizes.
The main session should be large enough to see everything fine.
The slaves need to be large enough to notice if something is wrong.
With KC, the swap speed is not terribly fast, so the slaves have to be a bit larger then other options.

$20 per license is very little, but its worth mentioning.
You'd need one KC license per computer.

[ockhamsrazor]

I didn't realize the new ATI cards woudl let you run three monitors (with those caveats). That sounds like a great solution to me because I'd much rather run it all on one box.

With that in mind, I would probably use my 30" for the main wow instance and two 24"'s rotated for the slaves. Assuming I kept the slave's at low res, do you see any problems pushing those pixels out of one card for three large monitors like that?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

A few other considerations:

• Do you like using PiP? Can't do PiP across multiple computers.
• Movie recording. Your PC might be able to 5-box but can it 5-box AND record movies? If that's something you'd like to do, I'd recommend two PCs.
• Redundancy. If your 2nd box can run 4 WoWs, it can probably run 5 with lowered settings. Meaning, if you lose one of the boxes, you can still multibox while waiting for your NewEgg shipment to arrive.
• KM switching. As others have noted, you'll need a KM software app like Synergy (not recommended due to noted bugs), Input Director, Multiplicity (not recommended due to the way it handles output when on your 2nd PC) or even Octopus so you can mouse over to an alt on the 2nd PC and type/drive/whatever.
• Size of Alts. If you use 2 PCs with a 22" or larger monitor, your alts' windows will be big enough to actually see chat and such, depending on how you have 'em configured.

[Khemikal]

ATI has a 6 Display Port version of some of their cards coming out in the future. This will allow 6 monitors from a single video card, though with the stipulation you have the Display Port monitors or you use active DP > DVI converters.

[-silencer-]

ATI has a 6 Display Port version of some of their cards coming out in the future. This will allow 6 monitors from a single video card, though with the stipulation you have the Display Port monitors or you use active DP > DVI converters.

Eyefinity SIX. Which was supposed to be out in November. Which also only uses 6x mini-DP ports. You can spend forever waiting on something that may or may not be released.. or accept a great solution now.

The reason to go with current 3x? Try pushing 6x 24" displays from one 5870 and check your frame rates. Also, if you want to play 1 character across 3x monitors, the center of your character is the middle of the center display. Look at the tech pics of WoW on 2x3 (6) displays.. bezel right through the center of your view. (True, 5x displays in portrait all in a row would be cool.. if the videocard can handle that many pixels...)

Eyefinity SIX is more for having a ton of real estate in 2D apps.. not really intended to have great frame rates across 6x 1920x1200 (or higher) resolution displays. Sure, it looks cool in a photo, but I'd bet at high graphic settings at that high of a resolution it plays like shit.