5 wow clients - One pc vs two

[ockhamsrazor]

I have two pcs, and plenty of monitors, more than capable of handling N number of wow clients. I was curious what people thought of using multiple pcs with keyclone vs one pc. This would all be on Win7.

Possible advantages:

• One pc makes for easier manual control of all clients (when needed) - no need for mutiple mice and keyboards and associated hassle
• Less complexity overall - less junk around the desk :-)

Disadvantages:

• Using mainstream graphics cards I can only use two monitors (I think)

Anything major I'm missing?

[Jubber]

With the use of programs like Input Director you dont really have to mess with multiple mice and keyboards.

Edit: it let's you use your main mouse and keyboard across all computers on your network seamlessly.

[ebony]

Input Director is far the best one out there

[-silencer-]

Disadvantages:

• Using mainstream graphics cards I can only use two monitors (I think)

Anything major I'm missing?

The new AMD/ATI Radeon 5000-series cards support up to 3 monitors through their Eyefinity tech, as long as at least one monitor as a DisplayPort. (Or you have an *active* DVI->DP adapter)
Many Dell Ultrasharp monitors have DisplayPort, and I'm currently running 5 windows on 3 24" Dell Ultrasharps with one Radeon 5870 videocard.

[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.

[BobGnarly]

Biggest thing you're missing, as mentioned, is PIP. Depends on how much you use/care about that.

[Jubber]

When spreading your toons across multiple pc's PIP becomes less of an issue. Outside of alot of usage for PVP, in pve we tend to drive with a main toon anyways so it's rare to use PIP for any extended amts of time. What I like about using multiple pc's is being able to turn up the graphics for each of my instances of WoW. There's definately pro's and cons to both sides.

I do my dailies on 1 pc and if I feel like farming heroics or doing doing some PVP i tend to switch to 2 pc's. I like to set my main window and my healers windows to max graphics as I switch back and forth between them often. It also allows me to keep up important windows like IRC, Dual-boxing.com, and whatever else I am doing atm.. Hulu or Anime or whatever..lol.