Quote Originally Posted by Ishar View Post
I just use them "independently".

Hmm. ok, i Suppose Theres two answers to your (second) question, and I'm not an expert so if someone wants to correct me, feel free...

Since this is a boxing forum, its perfectly feasible to use the older computers to run single characters. In fact, most of my computers are fairly week, WRT the average rig here. They don't have to be. There are many posts about this sort of thing, so in that respect, if your say, 5boxing, and have spare monitors... by all means invest in some software (isboxer, keyclone, or grab some free equivalent (check the software forum)) and run 2/5ths of your team on those older computers, provided they will run wow and you have a monitor. (Desk setups can get complicated, I used to have 3 CRTs on my desk before going with LCDs)

To give you an idea, the specs for my 'slave' machines are something like a dual core with a Geforce 8400 and a 40 gig harddrive. Even if they won't run wow, you can still use them to read things like wow-wiki or watch youtube videos or whatever while logged in. My 'main' computer could easily run 5 wow's. I still prefer to run each slave in his own machine though.

The other way to consider your question 'linking them together' well, you could build a (small?) cluster. With 2-3 nodes I don't think it would be very worthwhile. Also, (I believe) you don't generally do games or 3d on that sort of thing. It just doesn't seem practical, and wow would have to be designed around that sort of thing and it's not. Theres a huge latency between computers in a cluster versus cores in a CPU as well. At any rate this is outside my area of expertise. I admit to being tempted to look into setting up a cluster once or twice. I didn't, because I really dunno what I would do with it once I did it! Tho there are possible exceptions with the configurations where people use nodes to control monitors as part of a wall of monitors; I've never messed with that one way or another.

Hope that helps.
much thanks for taking the time to respond. extremely helpful in pointing me in the direction.