Help me build a gaming PC for playing 3 simultaneous instances of Eve Online on 1 monitor.

[randalthor20001]

Greetings,

I was advised to post here, from AVSforums.

I am helping a friend build his first PC. He will primarily be using it to play the Eve Online. My friend wants to have 3 separate instances of the game running at the same time. He'll only be using 1 46in LCD TV for his monitor. It's the kind of game where you can switch between playing multiple instances of the game.

Right now he is playing on an ancient HP PC. It has an Athlon 64 X2 (T) 4200+ 2.2 GHz cpu. 2Gb of ddr1 ram. And I added in a Nvidia GT 430 graphics card. Its running Windows 7. Somehow, it's able to run 2 simultaneous instances of Eve at 1080P, with mostly maxed settings. But if my friend tries to run 3 instances of the game, it bogs down and isn't really playable. He wants me to help him build a new gaming PC, so that he can play 3 games of Eve Online simultaneously, at maxed out settings, at 1080p, on one LCD TV. He wants to future proof it for future updates to his Eve Online game. He'll also be using the PC to watch Blu-rays/mkvs in 1080p. He does a lot of internet surfing, with multiple windows open at the same time.

So with that in mind, I'm trying to select components with multitasking and gaming in mind.

The recommended system requirements for Eve Online are:

OS: Windows® XP Service Pack 2 / Vista / 7
CPU: Intel Pentium® or AMD dual core @ 2 Ghz or greater which supports SSE2
RAM: 2 GB
HD space: 20Gb Free Space
Network: ADSL connection or faster
Video: ATi Radeon 5750 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
Drivers: DirectX® 9.0c (included) and latest video drivers
DVD-ROM : 2 speed DVD reader or greater required.

Should I be looking at quad core or 6 core CPUs? Should he get the Intel Core i5-2500 Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core or should the get an AMD FX-6100 Zambezi 3.3GHz Socket AM3+ 95W Six-Core?

Should he get 16GB of memory? Or is that overkill, and should he get 8Gb instead?

For the graphics card I was thinking of a Nvidia 560ti. Is that enough, or should he get a 570 or 580?

Benchmarks aren't really helpful for figuring this out because there aren't any out there for running multiple instances of Eve, at the same time, on 1 monitor.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[MiRai]

Why is everyone posting their hardware questions in a non-hardware forum today?

EDIT: Thread moved.

[randalthor20001]

Why is everyone posting their hardware questions in a non-hardware forum today?

EDIT: Thread moved.

Apologies.

[riffraff]

I was running 11 clients on a crap computer I got from Staples (low settings etc). with 8gb of ram. 8gb will be fine for running 3 clients.. more than enough. About the video card, I don't know a lot about what to get. My friend suggested a AMD 7770 for $160 on NewEgg and it's been a beast! The card I was 11-boxing with was $100 when I got it a year ago. Again, almost anything you get will be somewhat of an overkill.