Multiple Weak machines or 1 Massive Powerfull machine?

[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.