3 Boxing Hardware Evaluation & a Starter Questions.

[Whur]

I would like to touch on a point that might have been overlooked.

He mentions that he will be using a laptop computer instead of a desktop. Whilst his system specifications are certainly powerful enough to run 3 clients, the real issue he is going to run into will be heat dissipation from his laptop.

The main problem is that with your HDD, GPU and CPU being pushed to their limits, I fear that your computer will overheat very quickly and run the risk of frying your GPU.

I would suggest you google your make of graphics card and find it's maximum temperature and the rule of thumb is (max temp - 30) = safe running temp for GPU

Secondly, make sure that when you play you either manually set your fans to overclocking or have a large amount of ventilation in your space, possibly with a portable fan blowing across your exhaust.

This will be the main problem I foresee with using a laptop computer

Thank you for bringing it to my attention Jeremiah. I actually ran out and bought one of these at a local computer shop for about $20.00 US, Cool Master NotePal (if for some reason the image doesn't show, just a laptop mini desk that elevates the laptops back and has two cheap fans beneath it.)



This sort of brings me to another question. I have a Mac Mini (2010) at home (that I can take with me), which is at the moment not being used a lot as I am not at home. I am wondering if anyone would have experience with these and WoW? I would run Win7 or WinXP on it, and is possible 3 clients to take the burden of the laptop, and 2 clients on the laptop, as I just decided this is way to cool and want to run 5 clients, 5 boxing that is!

Any advice on this would be great, again I am terrible with hardware and graphics cards and CPUs.

Thanks,
Whur

[EDIT]: I forgot to mention I did many searches on mac minis, not many people favor them apparently because they have a crappy hardware history, but some people apparently like the 2010 Mac Mini and WoW, however these were not multiple client tests.

The hardware specs on the newer ones are these, copy pasting:

NVIDIA GeForce 320M using 256 MiB of DDR3 SDRAM
4 GiB (2×2 GiB) 1066 MHz
2.66 GHz (P8800) Intel Core 2 Duo
2 × 500 GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA