Everquest1 Budget Single Machine 6-Box?

[Ishar]

Holy crap, what are you planning to do with 24 toons? Just the thought of moving them makes my brain hurt, since follow doesn't work cross group, and with mercs, thats like 50 toons, lol. I briefly thought about doing 24 or so toons [stacking a bunch of wizards and some enchanters and AEing stuff down...] so curious what's out there motivating you.

With respect to your question, I would think practically any computer out there would be able to 1-2 box EQ. As an aside, in a test run I managed to run 12 or so EQ1s on my beastly machine, and could probably have ran 18 or 24 even.

Looking at their official specs gives us this:

Minimum:
- Operating System: Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7
- Processor: 1 GHz Processor
- Ram: 512MB
- Graphics Card: NVIDIA Ti 4800 or ATI 9800
- Hard Drive: 10 GB of Free Disk Space

Recommended:
- Operating System: Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7
- Processor: Pentium 4 or better
- Ram: 2 GB
- Graphics card: NVIDIA 6800 or ATI x1800

So, its not as simple as just multiplying those by 6 [tho that'd not be a bad idea for starters.] I'd say 1 gig per instance as a ballpark figure, + windows, so 8g of ram ballpark, more is better.

CPU, well it's one core per instance, though you could almost certainly get away with a modern-ish quad-core, again, take your pick. I'd go with one that has logical cores [e.g. more modern intel]. But that's where your in danger of blowing your 500, since ram is cheap. My 3930k handled 12+ instances of EQ no problem, though that's not really a direct point of reference.

3d card, well, honestly any half-decent card will probably be ok. Limiting quality will be your video ram...so price out your other components, and buy it last, and get the most video ram you can. Also, with ISBoxer you can hide the windows under each other [e.g. only display one] if you have to, and probably save on some video rendering that way.

After that, any hard drive will do...a SSD drive for EQ would not be entirely remiss if you could find a steal on one, since load times are a pain. Or do a ram drive. But again, your limited by your desktops/laptop load speed anyway. What are the specs on those, by the way?

I'm pretty sure I did six-in-one EQ 3 generations of computer ago...on a quad-core intel with 8 gigs or so of ram. But can't remember for sure.

Dunno if that helps, since I really don't know. My system specs are certainly overkill, and blows the hell out of your price range.