Multiple Weak machines or 1 Massive Powerfull machine?

[Thedonsquad]

I personally like the one mean machine idea (as i suppose is obvious from my sig). Many of the speed issues can actually be completely overcome, as there are many tools out there. In fact there is an idea i have for the ultimate single machine setup. Besides, unless you are running a complete netflix backup facility out of your house when you aren't boxing, how much will the other 4 machines get any real use? This is one of the realms where I truely believe that a single system setup will match most peoples interest much more, and tech is definatly at a point where a carefuly planned system can virtually eliminate any effective difference.

Basically heres the parts list and concept:

Quad Core 3.0ghz (preferably a model and board capable of 1600Mhz FSB)
8GB Ram DDR2 1066+
2x 320GB Raid 0 (SATA II)
Dual 8800GT or better on PCIx 2.0 bus
Audio of choice
Vista x64

Thanks to the ability to dynamically link the data files in wow you split 4GB of the ram into a ramdrive and copy the files up to it, dynamically link the folders to it. This completely bypasses the reading of the files from the hard drives and skips the bus entirely. The rate at which the system can call for the info and recieve it ends up on the level of approximatly 17000x faster than a typical hard drive.

Granted this creates a helluva hassle each time you have to reboot, but if you are looking for the pure peformance standpoint, you are taking out steps in the process which makes things faster. You also won't be running 4 more computers consuming all that extra power, making it less of an issue to leave the system running (not to mention adding a UPS to help reduce the chances of having to resetup).

Now you have the lowest problems with loading, the 1600Mhz FSB helps throughput to the video cards reducing load on the CPU cores allowing you to have at worst %60 load giving room for keyclone, vista, IM, etc to do it's thing. You also have a solid 4GB RAM left over which is sufficient for 4-5 boxing on a single machine.

The biggest thing for me is the features of keyclone that cannot be achieved by KVM. The program is great, and getting better each week.

[Zite83]

I've ran five accounts on my setup just fine. I already have enough machines in my house (room mates computers, m0n0wall, NAS server) I don't need anymore. I just like having one keyboard, mouse and two monitors. If my main dies, I just click over to the other WoW instances I have running. I prefer just one solid machine.

[farkenell]

Long term I think separate machines is best, Blizz could come out tomorrow and ban key broadcasting software.

Even with a large monitor having many clients in view makes it a pain to write your macros and read smaller text.

I use moveanything addon to resize the macro window and rearrange alot of the stuff on screen so I can see it better.

[Shigan5]

I personally like the one mean machine idea (as i suppose is obvious from my sig). Many of the speed issues can actually be completely overcome, as there are many tools out there. In fact there is an idea i have for the ultimate single machine setup. Besides, unless you are running a complete netflix backup facility out of your house when you aren't boxing, how much will the other 4 machines get any real use? This is one of the realms where I truely believe that a single system setup will match most peoples interest much more, and tech is definatly at a point where a carefuly planned system can virtually eliminate any effective difference.

Basically heres the parts list and concept:

Quad Core 3.0ghz (preferably a model and board capable of 1600Mhz FSB)
8GB Ram DDR2 1066+
2x 320GB Raid 0 (SATA II)
Dual 8800GT or better on PCIx 2.0 bus
Audio of choice
Vista x64

Thanks to the ability to dynamically link the data files in wow you split 4GB of the ram into a ramdrive and copy the files up to it, dynamically link the folders to it. This completely bypasses the reading of the files from the hard drives and skips the bus entirely. The rate at which the system can call for the info and recieve it ends up on the level of approximatly 17000x faster than a typical hard drive.

Granted this creates a helluva hassle each time you have to reboot, but if you are looking for the pure peformance standpoint, you are taking out steps in the process which makes things faster. You also won't be running 4 more computers consuming all that extra power, making it less of an issue to leave the system running (not to mention adding a UPS to help reduce the chances of having to resetup).

Now you have the lowest problems with loading, the 1600Mhz FSB helps throughput to the video cards reducing load on the CPU cores allowing you to have at worst %60 load giving room for keyclone, vista, IM, etc to do it's thing. You also have a solid 4GB RAM left over which is sufficient for 4-5 boxing on a single machine.

The biggest thing for me is the features of keyclone that cannot be achieved by KVM. The program is great, and getting better each week.

Id change the graphics cards to 1 9800gtx2 much faster than dual 8800gts You could always get 2 9800gtx2's and quad sli but thatd be major overkill. drool, 120+fps in shatt. And less power consumption.

Oh and for the processor a larger L1/L2 cache makes things nice and fast as well.

As for the ramdrive, that is highly unrecommended. Not only on every reboot would you have to recopy the files, and since the wow folder is now around 7gb, it would take a long time and it wouldnt fit anyways. The other issue would be having that much data access going on with your ram, if the FSB for your ram is low, more performance issues, but the biggest problem is with that much accessing going on you could run into heat issues and destroy your ram.

[marvein]

I personally like the one mean machine idea (as i suppose is obvious from my sig). Many of the speed issues can actually be completely overcome, as there are many tools out there. In fact there is an idea i have for the ultimate single machine setup. Besides, unless you are running a complete netflix backup facility out of your house when you aren't boxing, how much will the other 4 machines get any real use? This is one of the realms where I truely believe that a single system setup will match most peoples interest much more, and tech is definatly at a point where a carefuly planned system can virtually eliminate any effective difference.

Basically heres the parts list and concept:

Quad Core 3.0ghz (preferably a model and board capable of 1600Mhz FSB)
8GB Ram DDR2 1066+
2x 320GB Raid 0 (SATA II)
Dual 8800GT or better on PCIx 2.0 bus
Audio of choice
Vista x64

Thanks to the ability to dynamically link the data files in wow you split 4GB of the ram into a ramdrive and copy the files up to it, dynamically link the folders to it. This completely bypasses the reading of the files from the hard drives and skips the bus entirely. The rate at which the system can call for the info and recieve it ends up on the level of approximatly 17000x faster than a typical hard drive.

Granted this creates a helluva hassle each time you have to reboot, but if you are looking for the pure peformance standpoint, you are taking out steps in the process which makes things faster. You also won't be running 4 more computers consuming all that extra power, making it less of an issue to leave the system running (not to mention adding a UPS to help reduce the chances of having to resetup).

Now you have the lowest problems with loading, the 1600Mhz FSB helps throughput to the video cards reducing load on the CPU cores allowing you to have at worst %60 load giving room for keyclone, vista, IM, etc to do it's thing. You also have a solid 4GB RAM left over which is sufficient for 4-5 boxing on a single machine.

The biggest thing for me is the features of keyclone that cannot be achieved by KVM. The program is great, and getting better each week.

Id change the graphics cards to 1 9800gtx2 much faster than dual 8800gts You could always get 2 9800gtx2's and quad sli but thatd be major overkill. drool, 120+fps in shatt. And less power consumption.

Oh and for the processor a larger L1/L2 cache makes things nice and fast as well.

As for the ramdrive, that is highly unrecommended. Not only on every reboot would you have to recopy the files, and since the wow folder is now around 7gb, it would take a long time and it wouldnt fit anyways. The other issue would be having that much data access going on with your ram, if the FSB for your ram is low, more performance issues, but the biggest problem is with that much accessing going on you could run into heat issues and destroy your ram.

Myth, using your computer a lot will not ruin its components. As long as you are not running your computer in a far too warm environment any amount of use will not hurt it. In fact system builders (especially overclockers) forcefuly stress their system in order to 'burn-in' the components and check stability. Also, even the slowest DDR2 ram on the market is still faster seek times than a hard drive but none of this is practical due to the size of a WoW installation.

[Shigan5]

im not saying using it all day or something im talking about all at one time. Amount of load on the ram is how i should have worded it. CPUS can only handle so much load, and at some point ram could potentially as well. Could being key word as ive never stressed ram enough. You would either bottleneck or overload your ram.

Overclocking does stress a machine and they only stress it to a point, and yes some overclocking settings are stable at idle, but put a load on them and they draw too much power and overheat. Which is what im trying to get to. Everything is only stable up to a certain point.

[Oldin]

Fact:

My current setup

AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000+ 3.00GHz
8800 GT
3 GB of RAM (XP Max)
single SATAII drive 320GB

Is more than beefy enough to 5box wow, watch porn and fraps the main windows character at the same time without any noticeable drops in FPS. Main goes from 70 to 40 when activating fraps Not noticeable by human eye.(of course using horizontal span due to XP)

Alt windows are stuck at 15FPS all the time with keyclone command editor setups.

[Thedonsquad]

Id change the graphics cards to 1 9800gtx2 much faster than dual 8800gts You could always get 2 9800gtx2's and quad sli but thatd be major overkill. drool, 120+fps in shatt. And less power consumption.

Oh and for the processor a larger L1/L2 cache makes things nice and fast as well.

As for the ramdrive, that is highly unrecommended. Not only on every reboot would you have to recopy the files, and since the wow folder is now around 7gb, it would take a long time and it wouldnt fit anyways. The other issue would be having that much data access going on with your ram, if the FSB for your ram is low, more performance issues, but the biggest problem is with that much accessing going on you could run into heat issues and destroy your ram.

Myth, using your computer a lot will not ruin its components. As long as you are not running your computer in a far too warm environment any amount of use will not hurt it. In fact system builders (especially overclockers) forcefuly stress their system in order to 'burn-in' the components and check stability. Also, even the slowest DDR2 ram on the market is still faster seek times than a hard drive but none of this is practical due to the size of a WoW installation.

There are actually only a few select files that you need to be accessed that fast, and the vast majority of that is textures. The first setup of that would take a while, yes, but that would include creating a batch copy file that creates the ramdrive, makes the folders, copys the files for peak performance, and creates the symbolic links for the files. This is not a new concept, in fact vista includes something that does essentially the same idea, it's called ReadyBoost and it copies things that make your computer FEEL faster to a flashdrive, such as start menu lists and links, etc. The time it takes to complete the operation on sucessive boots would not be as horrible as you think once the batch file is created, as the files in question are not updated during gameplay. Most SATAII drives maintain about 60MB/s while reading larger files than the buffer, so yes, the copy operation would take a bit of time, and this could be lowered running a Raid 0 setup (i copy form one raid to another at sustained rates of 120MB/s which means i can fill the 4 GB in less than a min.

The bus from memory to graphics memory to GPU is a much wider and faster bus with less inbetween than a hard drive to mem to graphics memory to GPU. As far as memory burning out, marevin is correct, and i'm not even talking about OC'ing to get to this, i'm talking about buying memory thats been proven to be able to be overclocked and survived the 1 day stress/burn in test in those situations (guys clocking DDRII to 3-4-4-7 from 5-5-5-12 and running stable) taking the memory thats 5-5-5-12 and running at it's SPD will have plenty of lasting power, many high end DDRII dimms come with heatsinks on them, and a few even have other alternate cooling methods (eg watercooling, micro peltier to heatsink, copper piping to a larger heatsink)

Overload your ram, please explain, with a ramdrive, thats kinda hard to do when you aren't changing or adding data much once it's loaded it's now just a data repository thats being read from. With the rest of the ram, thats what caching is for.

[Shigan5]

It all depends on the ram.

But what im trying to say is everything has a limit on how much it can do at once. Examples:

You are copying a 4 gb file from one folder to a next and the whole progress bar shows up. Not bad. Doing the same thing 6 seperate instances at the same time, your bottlenecking your harddrive. Its not going to be copying at the same speed. Not very bad, other than an inconvenience.

You have internet explorer loading a page. Not bad. 50 seperate instances of the same thing at the same time. More than likely your CPU ( and your connection) is going to be at 100%. At factory settings this isnt bad, but overclocked your drawing alot of power now and producing alot of heat. If overclocked properly, no worries but if never tested at 100%, lots of potential problems.

You have a few components in your comp and a 300W power supply, not bad. Same power supply but running higher end components and you dont have enough amps on your 12v rail, potential power supply blow outs or failure, and potential ruining of components.

Now as for the ram, you could just get bottlenecked speeds, or you could get overheat issues. Which is what im getting to. The heat issue was what i was hitting on and yes, you could remedy with cooling. but depending on what ram he gets and what his current setup is, he might get a good couple of sticks with heatsinks, but idk what the heat implications for that much data access might be. Or he could go for the water cooling, which is a big expensive step. And if he doesnt get ram with any form of cooling or heat sink, potential heat issues.

[marvein]

im not saying using it all day or something im talking about all at one time. Amount of load on the ram is how i should have worded it. CPUS can only handle so much load, and at some point ram could potentially as well. Could being key word as ive never stressed ram enough. You would either bottleneck or overload your ram.

Overclocking does stress a machine and they only stress it to a point, and yes some overclocking settings are stable at idle, but put a load on them and they draw too much power and overheat. Which is what im trying to get to. Everything is only stable up to a certain point.

Again that is not correct, all of those issues can be countered with cooling (some as simple as just adding another fan) There is nothing wrong with running a CPU or RAM at 100% load 24/7 as long as, as I said, you are not already in a really warm environment. But any computer whether under 100% load or not will not perform well if the ambient air is really hot because it cant cool itself down. And no offense to you but it sounds like you have no idea how overclocking works if you are saying "and yes some overclocking settings are stable at idle" Everyday use OCs are perfectly stable. I currently run several that are in order to get a bit more juice out of them, mostly for folding since WoW doesnt need the horsepower. an OC that is not stable at load is not a stable OC, that is what "stable OC" means. One of my first dual core purchases was the first run E6200, its been running with a 35% OC, at 100% load, having been turned off only 3 times (power outages) for over 6 months and it is still rock solid. Intel/AMD make excellent chips that can handle the stresses of constant use. After all take a look at servers, which the 'small business' line is often identical to home computer CPUs, they are often under much more stressful loads and still function fine. Hard drives are much more likely to die first due to their moving parts.

Oh and one other point, nearly every intel and AMD chip made these days supports thermal throttling to avoid damaging itself if it thinks its getting to hot. Turn on your PC and remove the heatsink you will see what I mean. So unless you are doing something that requires this kind of cooling you arent likely to kill your CPU using it at full load, especially without an OC http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=387525 (unless of course you are using a really crappy PSU lol)

*edit* putting high power demand items in a comp and hooking them up to a garbage PSU and watching it explode is not a valid point for your argument that loading down computer comonents will cause them to fail. Thats like saying driving an 18wheeler a lot can cause it to die but then you mention that you are using regular unleaded gas instead of diesel, that doesnt hold any water.