Please suggest the most useful system upgrade...

[d0z3rr]

I'd say hard drive access is the most discussed topic on the dual-boxing hardware forum. More than RAM, processor type, MB, and video card. You have many people claiming that the SSD has helped both their load screen times (from 30+ seconds with 5 toons in Dalaran to 2 seconds) as well as general game play (new textures, especially in highly populated areas, are being read in all the time while you move and other things move towards you). Between discussions of RAID0, SSDs in RAID, hard drive access, etc, I think you are definitely in the minority on thinking harddrive access time has little to do with multiboxing. After having enough RAM, many would say an SSD is the best upgrade your system can make.

How often do you boot your machine in comparison to how often do you see a load screen for WoW? I use my computer to primarily play video games so that question is very easy for me - I'd much rather wait an extra 15 seconds for my computer to boot using the 7200 drive and have my WoW loading screen be near instant. WoW is somewhat intensive on accessing the harddrive, but nothing big. A single player wouldn't really need an SSD. However, a 5 boxer will see a huge performance increase from moving from a single 7200 drive to even a slow SSD.

30+ seconds to 2 seconds? Of course there would be in increase there. Those people took the WoW folders and put them on a newly formatted non-defragmented space. Same exact improvement would have happened if they had just reformatted the drive it was on.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I 5 (used to 10) box on 7200 rpms drives and Dalaran loaded perfectly fine (30 seconds would be insanely long even for a 7200 rpm drive).

[daviddoran]

30+ seconds to 2 seconds? Of course there would be in increase there. Those people took the WoW folders and put them on a newly formatted non-defragmented space. Same exact improvement would have happened if they had just reformatted the drive it was on.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I 5 (used to 10) box on 7200 rpms drives and Dalaran loaded perfectly fine (30 seconds would be insanely long even for a 7200 rpm drive).

There's the key, driveS with SSD you dont need more than one. It also depends on the population size on your server, on a very active server, dalaran takes an extremely long time to load due to the sheer number of characters that stand around.

[daviddoran]

I'm in a similar situation, I have a q6600 (mine is overclocked) 8GB of ram and an SSD, and I am currently CPU bound. When i 5 box (all alts are set to lowest possible, and the main is set only slightly higher) and all 4 cores are working at or near to 100%. I am planning on upgrading to a core i7 930 with 12GB of ram. (I'd go 9GB if they made 3GB sticks that were affordable)

I disagree that SSD for wow is pointless. EVERYTHING loads faster. I recently logged in a buddys computer, and in dalaran it took forever for the other characters to show up, where on my system its near instant. SSDs are very affordable now, you just cant fit an OS, games and media files on em just yet without breaking the bank.

I used to run 2 computers, but the added complication of the extra mouse and keyboard (for other non multiboxed tasks) and lack of windowswapping with isboxer made it not worth it for me. Only thing I missed is that if my main computer crashed, my other characters on the other PC were still able to play, and I could communicate this to my teammates.

[d0z3rr]

All 10 of the WoW folders were on the one 7200 RPM drive, they then had symbolic links to a normal WoW folder on the same drive. It is also an 8mb cache drive, so I didn't even have them on my newer 1tb 16mb cache drive.