Video Card... Is more Vram or stronger GPU better?

[nodoze]

Thanks everyone for all the input and I really appreciate both the www.dual-boxing.com & www.isboxer.com forums !

This computer is mainly a Christmas present for my brother who I am trying to help get into multi-boxiing (he currently only has 1 account but his current PC can barely play it well). I will use it some when at his place (we live fairly close to each other and I go over there to game some of of the time instead of being on vent). I originally got this for 5 WoW clients but am thinking that we may also try 10 on it since my brother will now also have 5 accounts and between the both of us we will now have 10 total accounts.

My research indicated that the HD68XX line was scaling via CrossFire much better than the current Nvida SLI implementations but after reading the guidance on LAX's site that SLI & Crossfire aren't good ideas with ISBoxer I decided to just focus on one big card for now.

I also took LAX's comments on another tread about more cores being better for multiple clients so I went with the AMD Phenom™ II X6 1090T Black Edition Six-Core CPU instead of a cheaper 3core that I was going to try to use & unlock a 4th core. The cool thing about the 6 core is that when playing a single game like Black Ops or what not you can put the 6 core in "turbo mode" which shuts down 3 cores and cranks up the remaining 3 to be much faster so this is a win/win...

They ended up giving a holiday special on the 2GB GTX460 making it cheaper than the HD6850 let alone the HD6870. Most of our WoW clients are on low settings & LAX's ISBoxer wonderfully limits the FPS speed of the background WoW clients such that I am more worried about total RAM than pure GPU speed (and these GPUs are all very close in power). I ended up thinking that while maybe there ins't a big bottleneck between vRAM & shared RAM, more RAM is more RAM and the performance of the graphics cards are all similar and went with the 2GB special sale. This should put me at 10BG of total RAM for now and with an SSD dedicated for WoW I hope we are flying. I plan to keep the windows SWAP file on the disk for now to see if IO is spiking between 5 or 10 clients I will report back if I can dedicate the time to test/analyze...


Since you all were so great I figured you deserved to know what I ended up getting which was the following:

http://www.ibuypower.com/Store/espec.aspx?eid=123417

I am tempted to get myself the exact same build except with the 1GB HD6870 to compare the differences but know that I prefer to play on my laptop and be mobile. I already have somewhat decent performance on my laptop (dual core ASUS with 1GB vRAM & 4GB RAM) but am a little hampered by slow laptop hard drive IO & vista 32bit and also bought my self the following Christmas present to upgrade my laptop:

- SSD 240G|OCZ OCZSSD2-2VTXE240G R
- WIN PRO 7 64-BT ENG 1PK DSP OEI DVD

Thanks again everyone. These forums have been great and I always appreciate all the help (Ualaa was extremely helpful when I first came here and he, among other, made me really trust & be grateful for this site).

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas !!!