Interested in 5-boxing, need insight on upgrading my PC for the job.

[DrGamut]

I'd like to run 5 instances of WoW from a single PC, and I'm trying to determine what upgrades are necessary to do so comfortably.

My current rig:

ASUS P5B Deluxe
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz
2x1GB G. Skill DDR2 800 (HZ)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX
Windows XP
2xNEC MultiSync 90GX2 19" LCD (1280x1024).

So I'm thinking the obvious upgrades would be another 2GB of the same memory (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231065) and the Core 2 Quad Q6600 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115017), which would only set me back $400.

But would that be enough? Would I have to run the instances at lowest settings to get a seamless frame rate? Could I at least get my main instance on full details with the alts on minimum? Would switching to Vista for the larger memory utilization be helpful or hurtful?

Is there any other hardware I'm going to need to be successful? Thank you.

[Kaynin]

Yes, that would be enough.

You might experience lag in towns, but instances/pvp and such should all go smoothly. Your upgrades would be similar to my rig apart from a few details, I got a slightly faster graphic card and slightly faster memory, but other then that the same. And I run a xbox smoothly.

Run everythng on maxbgfps 15 and maxfps 45.

[Fragmad]

That comp will do totally fine. If you want to tweak tough, clock your cpu and buy 1-2 more gb's of ram.

[Wrex]

That comp will do totally fine. If you want to tweak tough, clock your cpu and buy 1-2 more gb's of ram.

You mean 5-6gb total? What O/S recognizes that >.>

[Wilbur]

a 64 bit one.

[DrGamut]

Hey guys, thanks for the replies.

I ordered the Q6600 processor as well as two G. Skill 2x2GB DDR2 800 (BPQ) kits (8GB of RAM!). I had no idea DDR2 ram got so cheap!

I've decided to wipe and install Vista 64 bit after the upgrade, I'll be sure to share my experiences.

[Wilbur]

Might be an idea to get a couple of low capacity, low access time HDDs'

[DrGamut]

Might be an idea to get a couple of low capacity, low access time HDDs'

I have two Seagate Barracuda SATA 250GB harddrives in RAID 0. Not sure how their access time measures up, I'll look into it.

EDIT: Well they don't compare to the 10,000 RPM drives, but their seek/write times are the lowest for their type on newegg.