Will my system with a 2500K still hold up for 5x WoW?

[Grail]

Hi everyone,

Getting ready to start five boxing. Been dual-boxing for over a year and 5x has always been my goal. Unfortunately, with the ever increasing requirements of WoW, and the demands it puts on us multi-boxers, I wanted to run my system by you for any suggestions on what to improve. I have maybe $400.00 to spend if need be.

Intel 2500K (not oc'd yet)
MSI Z68A-GD65 Mobo (32GB ram max)
8GB G.Skill ddr3 1600
3 Samsung 830 64 GB SSDs (Not in raid)
EVGA 670 4 GB FTW
EVGA 460 2 GB GTX
Windows 7 Home Premium

I have a 24" and a 19" monitor. I don't need to run at 1920x1200... I would like decent settings and fps for my main. Everything else can be turned down.

What can I expect as is? Will the quad-core 2500k be alright with only five accounts?

I am looking at the Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB with 500+ read and write times. I was also going to oc the cpu to around 4 Ghz. I have a nice aftermarket heatsink on there.

I am also wondering if I should go Sam Deathwalker's route and work on a RAM drive solution. I could get 32 GB of good ram and read up on the ram drive solutions I see a number of posts on here about. I understand there would be some load time to deal with as the WoW folder was placed into the system ram.

My system can take ddr3 1866 and ddr3 2133.

Any feedback would be great.

Thanks,

Grail

[MiRai]

Everything should be fine with that system.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

People were 5-boxing WoW with Q6600 + NVidia 9800GT + 4GB RAM. Yours should be fine unless you've loaded it down with bloatware.

[Grail]

Thanks MiRai and Ughmahedhurtz. I remember the days of 5-boxing with the Q6600. I just didn't get in on them! I had an Intel C2D 6420 (dual-core at 2.13) + Nvidia 9800GT + 2 GB RAM. I probably could have done it back then, but here we go! Oh, and so much thanks to MiRai for building the Clique healing system into IsBoxer, that is total win for me. I never could get it to work before despite the excellent videos! Can't wait to try that. Unfortunately, I think I was editing my post while you two were posting your replies. Should I consider a ram drive solution? If all I would need was 32 GB new ram. I could do that.

-Grail

[Ughmahedhurtz]

No need for ram drive if you're using SSDs.

[MiRai]

I agree with Ugh, but I do want to add something. My WoW folder is currently sitting at 25GB (w/o the Screenshots folder). Add in ~2GB for Win 7 x64 and now we're up to 27GB. That leaves a whole 5GB worth of memory for 5 game clients and each of my clients usually sit around 800MB each.

That's cutting it pretty close to maxing out your RAM and unless Blizzard can get some better compression in their MPQ files, then you might expect random clients to start crashing due to running out of memory. If you require a RAM drive (which is highly unlikely), then you'll need to move to the 2011 chipset.

[Grail]

Thanks Mirai, Thanks Ugh!

I was thinking about putting aside maybe 16 gigs for a ram drive and just putting the data files in there, which I am reading on the forums is about 8 gigs. (Read a bunch last night). But if the two of you say not to worry about it, I will just go with 500 + read and writes. Of course, I know real world results may or may not quite be what Samsung advertises. Seems people get different results.

Thanks again!

-Grail

[rfarris]

I'm running off of a Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB and what I've noticed is that while questing my framerate drops to the 40s on my foreground window, but in an instance it stays up at 60. My theory is that in an instance there are not nearly as many players involved and also that the GTX 670 w/4GB VRAM may be able to hold all the textures needed in the (Wrath) instances I'm running.

So, if you plan on mostly running instances, or if you are happy with 40fps, or so, you should be fine with the SSD.

(BTW, the bottleneck locator that the wiki suggests that you run tells me that the GTX670 is my bottleneck on fps. Probably because I'm running on a U3011 monitor at 2560x1600. What to do...what to do...)

[Grail]

Thanks rfarris,

Great to hear from someone using the Samsung 840 Pro.

-Grail