Multiple Weak machines or 1 Massive Powerfull machine?

[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.