Cost estimate for getting back into 5 boxing

[Zub]

thanks.

I've been trying 3box again on my machine (my normal account and 2 of my old BC accounts, on wotlk 10day trial)

Latency was not a problem indeed. It was over ~300ms on a single wow, but didn't change at all with the wows loaded. remained 300ms

I went around Org/UC and silvermoon, no problem, then jumped on the Zep from org to borean tundra, and all WoWs crashed during the load screen.
After a few attemps (the toons where all on the zep going back and forth) i managed to get them all in Borean tundra, one by one.
But as soon as I have more than 2 intances of wow open in northred, they crash.
I get an error message about memory allocation. I guess 2GB doesn't cut it for 3wows (even though they only take about 500-600mb in mem it seems)

now i just need to win the lotto to upgrade all this..

[Zub]

I might be able to get my hands on a cheap deal:

- Q8300 Quad core
- 4GB RAM
- Win7 - 64
- nVidia GT 320 1GB video card

how would that work with 5 wows? any idea?

[Jafula]

That should work; it's more grunty than my box that I 5 boxed on.

[Monk3yv]

Yeah Zub that should work fine, probably better than what I had when I started.

Use full potential of the 4 cores by splitting them up for your different WoW.exe's and you are good to go imo.
(I'm probably preaching to the choir but hey doesn't hurt)

[Tonuss]

1- No quotes, but if money is a concern, skip the Core i7 and look into an AMD Phenom CPU. They have four-core and six-core processors at much lower prices than their Intel counterparts. A quick price check on NewEgg says that a Core i5-750 (quad core, 2.66GHz) costs about $195 and a Phenom II X6 1055T (six core, 2.8GHz) costs about $200.

Eh, so maybe the price advantage isn't what I thought it was.

Just as important, get a good video card. I believe that you can get an ATI Radeon 5770 for around $150-180 or a 5850 for around $300-330. Both can handle multiple WOW clients without a problem.

As a reference point: I 5-box on a Core i7-920 (2.66GHz) with 12GB memory and a Radeon 5850 attached to a 1920x1200 screen. I have dual 5850s connected to one monitor each, but I often run all five WOWs on one monitor. No problems at all with this setup. As a bonus, it runs a single WOW at full resolution and with all graphics effects at max smoothly, only slowing a bit in Dalaran when it is crowded.

2- You can log in to multiple WOW accounts with a single battlenet email login. It will simply ask you to specify which account to use after you enter your battlenet email and password. It will only log you out if you specify the same WOW account twice, otherwise you'll be fine.

3- Moderately high latency isn't as bad in PVE as it is in PVP. My latency on my current server runs from 150-250ms. But the server I first multiboxed on typically had latencies of 220-330ms. Aside from a slight lag when switching targets, this was never a problem for me. I imagine that for PVP, a half-second lag on target switching would be pretty disastrous.

4- I'll leave this to others, I almost never run instances, I usually just do outdoors questing and level toons mostly for professions and because I'm not entirely sane.

5- See above re:video card. Also for hard drives- I run five accounts off of five hard drives, but that's a bit extreme and probably not the most efficient way to go. Dual SSDs (primary character on one, secondary characters on the other) and a shared folder for the secondary characters might be faster and perhaps even reduce the lag between the party members.

[Teal]

I have a pretty basic setup and have no issues boxing 5 accounts

[Zub]

Thanks all for your feedback.

Seems however that i got an even cheaper solution: my GF's computer is more recent and can handle 3 wow nicely (maybe more, need to test - bloody tuesday maintenance!)

it's performance mark is double that of my own machine, which should be able to handle 2 wows ok. (3 wows crash only in Northrend)

so all in all, 3 wows on one machine, and 2 wows on the second
Now i need to find a cheap way to pass the keys from one to the other, .. either a second Keyclone licence, or some other way. i don't think i can afford ISBoxer subscription though. I'm stretching as it is..



Planned costs
- cross machine MB tool - $???
- upgrading 2 accounts from BC to WOTLk - 2x $40
- upgrading 2 accounts from vanilla to WOTLK - 2x ($30 + $40)
- moving 4 toons from main account to slaves accounts - 4x $25
Total = $320+

i might be able to use the scroll of resurection on some, so that might save me a couple months play here and there.
any thing else to think of?

[Jafula]

Now i need to find a cheap way to pass the keys from one to the other, .. either a second Keyclone licence, or some other way. i don't think i can afford ISBoxer subscription though. I'm stretching as it is..

HotKeyNet - its a winner, I used it for the longest time, until I was lured away by ISBoxer.

http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=16177

http://www.hotkeynet.com/wow/wow-sam...ur-on-two.html

http://www.hotkeynet.com/wow/wow-quick-start.html

[Zub]

awesome, was looking into that in the wiki
cheers

[Lemartes]

I currently 5 Box on a Duo Core Intel with 8 Gigs of ram. Dalaran is horrible in peak times but instances are pretty good.

I'm in the middle of an upgrade though. Going to AMD Hex Core with 8 Gigs ram. It was pretty cheap too.

AM3 MB - I spent 210 for the 890fx but you could go cheaper - like 150.
Memory - 8GB A-Data DDR3 2000 ram. Was 119 per 4 Gig kit. I bought 2. These were the cheapest ram i could find.
I bought an expensive power supply (Antec Truepower 1000) and mid class video card as well (HD5770). 210+180. you could go cheaper on the power supply.

All thats left is the CPU in 2 weeks which is 220 bucks for the slower Hex Core. I can't wait.

So for under a grand you can build a decent 5 boxing machine.