Optimum Multiboxing Performance - Thoughts on two systems

[MiRai]

I may be wrong but it's sounding like higher end machines tend to max out at around 10 accounts. As I could run 10 on a relatively old Mac Pro it seems that for multiboxing, hardware technology advances have not produced significant game changers.

I honestly believe it's possible to run more than 10 clients efficiently on a single machine, but because I don't personally run more than 5, I can't debunk the statements that others are making.

I currently run some ridiculous video settings (Ultra+ / DX11) on 5 clients at 1920x720 and, from what I've tested so far, can hold a steady 30/30 fore/background FPS when there's a bunch of other players around. It would be easy for me to drop my slave clients to 20 or even 15 FPS and free up, theoretically, 40-60 FPS worth of CPU/GPU power in order to feed more juice to my main client. I would have trouble trying to 5+ box with these settings, but I would already know that ahead of time and would be willing to turn my settings if I chose to move to a larger team.

When I did some 20/30-box testing on my old machine, I ran into an issue that you might describe as "thread lag" -- Where the system itself tends to just become very laggy when trying to do basic things such as open up the Start Menu. It didn't actually seem to affect me playing the game, but I did want to re-test this stuff now that I have a much more powerful machine.

As for the cost, I may have been looking in the wrong spot. I was comparing a slightly customized Digital Storm Aventum II H2O Level 3 Performance PC to the new Mac Pro as customized above. I'm guessing now that there is a ton of markup.

Uh... yeah. Now I see how those two machines were similar in price.

As I'm a bit nervous about building my own machine I'm looking for a solid performer that I can use for years without too much trouble. Maybe building is the best way to go. Now I guess I'm looking for 2-3 of them. Do you guys have any suggestions? Thanks again : )

Most people who've built their own machine will tell you that it's easy to do because everything only fits into its own 'slot' and you can't mess anything up. However, when something does go wrong you had better be ready to troubleshoot it by scouring the internet for answers by hoping you put the right keywords into Google search.

You may even have to randomly guess which component is bad, and unless you have another one lying around to test it, you're just going to have to RMA it and hope that you were right. I think if that would have happened to me back in the day when I started building computers I may have stopped trying to build my own, or at least have stopped for a bit.

If you're looking to build some ultra top-end machine with water cooling and all of that, then I wouldn't recommend you try doing that for your first system; but if you were going to put together a few machines, then it would be easier to troubleshoot things because you'd have identical hardware in the other machines that you could troubleshoot with if any issues arise. I guess if you were willing to try piecing together your own, you might try searching on YouTube for recent videos of people putting together their own stuff. The only thing I'd watch out for is people giving information or advice that's blatantly wrong or generally frowned upon. I guess the only way for you to know that the information from a random YouTuber might be wrong, would be to watch a lot of build videos and then try to filter out the stuff that just doesn't seem to be consistent.

I've been very casually boxing Rift over the last year and have run most of the content and was looking into WoW again. I'm still miffed about the bg /follow thing as it makes me worry that I might sink some money into it again only to find I can't play. But Mirai's dungeon videos, interesting improvements to ISboxer and various contributions to this site make boxing WoW seem like it might be fun again.

Oddly enough, most of those "interesting improvements" have been present in ISBoxer for quite some time and most people don't even know them -- Except Menus, which I was using as glorified Click Bar buttons and are relatively new. I started that series (which isn't dead and is just on hold, by the way ) with the intention that I would show how someone who multiboxes can look to make improvements to their profile and how it can evolve over the course of time, as well as, just show some general multiboxing with an attempt at semi-interesting, but not all that exciting, narrative.

I finished this reply in a rush because I was pressed for time, but if anything I said doesn't make sense, just ask and I'll try to explain it better.