Cost estimate for getting back into 5 boxing

[Zub]

Hi all,

I used to 3-box before wrath, and stopped to spend more time and money on my baby daughter.. but the mb bug is catching with me again and i'm thinking of going 5 this time.. if I can afford it.
I'm not too concerned about the monthly subscription, but rather scared about the up-front costs.

Here's what i got:
- 1x 5-year old machine on winxp that can handle 2 WoWs reasonably if I don't go in Dalaran or Org.
- 1x wow account with 5 x 80 (solo levelled. shaman, paly, druid, priest, warrior), 3 x 70 (rogue, hunter, mage), 62 warlock and 58 Dk.
- 1x keyclone license
- Limited space in my office, so it would need to be on a single machine (but possibly 2 screens)
- ~300ms latency usually (i'm in Sydney) and ~400 if I don't pull the cable across the flat and use my wifi connection instead.
i'm mostly interested in PVE, i don't really care about PVP, or maybe some AVs sometimes.

What are the minimum Hardware requirements for boxing 5 toons on 1 machine?
From what i read around the forum, an i7 with windows 7 64bit and with ~6GB+ of ram should do the trick. but since i'm quite computer illiterate (as HW goes anyway) i'm not sure what that implies in terms of motherboard/bus/power/disk etc. Same question regarding the graphic card.

Question 1: Anyone got quotes for a machine that would work for me? (not too big on building it myself, but can try if much cheaper). What are the important stats to look for?

Currently i have all my 80s on 1 single account, so i would need to transfer 4 of them to different accounts ($25 x 4)
Question 2: Should those accounts be on the same Battle.net account? I guess not, because i can't see how you can log 5 times with the same email without booting 4 toons out of the game, so i guess we need 5 separate email addresses and battle.net accounts?

Question 3: my latency is pretty horrible (~300ms on a good day while solo play). Will that be a problem to m-box 5?
Are WTFast options legal and efficient?


with my current set of 80s, i'm planning of having
- TANK : Shaiah 80 Prot warrior (ilevel ~190)
- HEAL : Soap 80 Holy paladin (ilevel ~210)
- DPS1 : Ghur 80 Elemental Shaman (iLevel ~230)
- DPS2 : Ghør 80 Balance Druid (iLevel ~220)
- DPS3 : Cixi 80 Shadow Priest (iLevel ~180)
With that group i believe i'd be able to jump directly in heroics (after a couple weeks of macros i bet :-)
my druid also has a reasonable tanking set and all toons have dps stuff, but i think the above makeup, if not optimum, is the one i would be most comfortable with.
I see a great combination of buffs, and very little gear clash (1xcloth, 1xleather, 1xmail, 1 heal plate, 1x tank plate)
Question 4: Any comments suggestions on class make up?

Question 5: any other cost, or stuff i forgot?

thanks for reading this long post, and thanks for any answers :-)
-Zub

[Zub]

I just checked my current machine at home and its a:
AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3500+ 2.21 GHz
2GB RAM
Windows XP Home
NVidia GeForce 9400GT

is that any good?

[Edit]
if i'm reading this correctly, does it mean that my machine already supports 64-bit OS and i could update the OS to win7-64 and add a couple Gigs ram to see a major difference?

[Hivetyrant]

Yes, you could add slightly more ram, however for a machine that old, you will either find that the motherboard can't handle more than 4 itself, or you will realise how much large single DDR2 sticks cost and understand that it would be cheaper to upgrade your whole system. (Slight exageration, but you get the point)

The other problem you have is the CPU, which would be the bottleneck once you add more ram anyways.
While the Athlon AMD's are slightly different from Intel in teh way you measure clock speeds, the 2.26 is going to struggle when you throw more than 2 clients at it.

So i'm sorry, but I wouldn't be trying to 5 box on that machine, it would be possible to get it working, but it would still require a bit of money and the performance would be pretty dissapointing.

That is just my crystal ball though, so someone with a similar setup might be able to give a better response

(Though I did run an AMD 4800 X2 system years ago and it wasn't even close to the performance of my last system (which barely ran 5))

[Zub]

was wondering if anyone had recommendations/quotes

[Jafula]

Answer to 1:
I 5 boxed with a Intel Q6600, 4GB Ram and a Nvidia 8800GT with 512MB Ram and 2 monitors on Vista 64bit. I could have one wow on a decent resolution and the other four on low resolution. This was for Burning Crusade. It ran fine (I guess Dalaran would be slow now...). So anything you buy thats better than that spec will be fine for your needs.

I would buy and use Windows 7 64bit; as it can utilise the full 4GB of addressable ram; don't use 32bit as you are losing memory to the video card.

Answer to 2:
You can have all 5 wow accounts under the same battle.net account. When you log in with your email address, you can choose which wow account to use. This is what I do (with 3 accounts).

Read this:

http://us.blizzard.com/support/artic...rticleId=26163

You DON'T have a 30 day wait to transfer toons from one battle.net account to another, because they are all on the same account.

With an authenticator, you have to wait for the auth key to change 5 different times before all your toons are logged in. Each toon has to log in on a different key.

Answer to 3:
Living near the bottom of New Zealand and triple boxing - my latency is 202, 273 and 272. My household has had 5 wow's running on its connection with no problems.

I would be wary of WTFast.com just because your data is going through their proxy and you have no idea whether or not they are collecting your login packets and analysing them for your credentials... Obviously I don't use the service.

You might find the 5 wows all have about a 300 latency anyway and your pipe can handle the extra load.

Answer to 4:
Tank, Heal, DPSx3 ...

Answer to 5:
1) Get an authenticator. If you have a smart phone, use the software version.
2) Buy an ISBoxer/IS subscription and use it! Seriously, well worth it. If you need a name to use in the referrer field, 'jafula' should work :-). Keyclone author is nowhere to be seen on these forums and Lax is on every other day at least.
3) Install Jamba...
4 ) ???
5) Profit!

[Zub]

Thanks for your feedback jafula, very interesting.
(got an authenticator already

[Monk3yv]

Hello Zub,

First let me just say you make great posts and replies!

I too a considering the initial costs for transfering 4 accounts to a specified server, so I'm with you there.
I was looking around for the specs on my computer at home but can't find it, and I am out of the country.
I was able to 5 box relatively smoothly however, here is what I remember;

-Edit- Found an old xfire account with specs -Edit-

Manufacturer:
HP-Pavilion
Processor:
AMD Phenom(tm) 9500 Quad-Core Processor (4 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
Memory:
3582MB RAM
Hard Drive:
489 GB
Video Card:
NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS Factory Overclocked (Around $95.00 on sale at the time from Newegg.com, awesome site*)
Monitor:
HP w2408 Wide LCD Monitor
Sound Card:
Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)
Speakers/Headphones:
Razor Barracuda Surround Sound Headphones
Operating System:
Windows Vista™ Home Premium (6.0, Build 6001)
Using Keyclone.

I wish I could comment more but I'm also somewhat computer-speak illiterate. (Also apologize for my English)

As far as the battlenet account question,
I am not sure because I had 5 accounts made before the battlenet merger, But I have merged them all into one battlenet, and you can pick the seperate accounts from the log in screen.

Hope this helps! Goodluck!

[jinkobi]

Zub here's my system specs for my 2 year old machine. I'm able to 5 box just fine with my main on ultra and slaves on lowest. Maybe it'll give you a rough idea of how much power you want. Definitely go with a 64bit system so you can have more memory. I'd say 4 gigs is the minimum to 5 box anything more is just better performance.

Also I have ALL my accounts on 1 Battlenet account. It allows you to use just 1 authenticator to cover all your accounts. You can indeed log in all your accounts without being booted- you're provided a dropdown menu and your WOW games are seperated by whatever name you give them. Such as WOW1, WOW2, etc...



Video card is an Nvidia GTX 285 1 gig.
Operating System: Windows Vista™ Home Premium (6.0, Build 6002) Service Pack 2 (6002.vistasp2_gdr.100218-0019)
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8200 @ 2.66GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
6 gigs of DDR ram installed but you know 32bit so only 4 is utilized.

[Zub]

cheers!

[mikekim]

here is the spec of my main machine that I originally used for 5 boxing (before Running on Multiple machines) i have since upgraded the GFX to a HD5850 and added an SSD, but it used to run 60fps for the main and 30-40 for each slave

screen pic of my original setup (back in the day when I used to use Keyclone & PiP)



Coolermaster Stacker 832 Tower Case
Enermax Galaxy EGX850EWL 850W Modular PSU
4x Akasa AK-191-SM Smoke Ultra Quiet 120mm Fan
Zalman ZM-MFC1 Plus Black Multi Fan Controller

Intel Q6600 G0 2.4Ghz Core 2 Quad CPU
Asus Striker Extreme nForce 680 (Socket 775) DDR2 Motherboard
OCZ 8GB (4x2GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz Reaper HPC Dual Channel DDR2 4-4-4-15
XFX GTX260 896mb Graphics Card
Samsung SM-245B 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor (1,920 x 1,200)

Western Digital Raptor 150Gb SATA, 10,000 rpm, 16MB Cache
Western Digital Caviar Blue 250GB SATA-II 16MB Cache
2x Pioneer DVR212BK 18x DVD±R/±RW (Black) SATA
5x Akasa Serial ATA 45cm Silver Data Cable

Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard
Logitech G5 Laser Mouse SSeries Steelpad 5L Gaming Mat
Creative labs XFi Xtream Fatality Pro
Creative Labs 5.1 Speakers
Running Windows Vista Ultimate 64Bit