building a rig for less than 2000$(for 5-box)

[Wilbur]

Get a 512 MB Graphics Card. 320MB is not enough. Two 10K RPM drives should be enough.

Personally I suggest the following Hard Drive setup.

Whatever size you require for your OS - SATA2 7200 RPM. The key with your OS is the sustained data transfer rate. Which is why we go for a SATA2 Drive.

You then install WoW on some 10K RPM drives. I'd recommend 2x WoW installs per drive. With a seek time of 3.9 seconds, the Raptors are easily the best. SATA 1 though, so not advisable for file storage due to the slower data transfer rate.

Storage drive - SATA2 500GB or larger.

[Djarid]

Ok My tuppence...

I 5 box on one PC, on one monitor. It works and PiP is great but it would probably be better on 2... bear in mind aspect ratios if using keyclone and PiP. Widescreen is 1.6 so you would have to replicate that aspect ratio on your clone windows in the second monitor... if both are the same size, no probs the clones are just 1/4 the size.

Hard Drives
There si absolutely no point going th emultiu drive route with WoW... 1 HD will give better performance as the disk reads are cached at the disk and probably L2 which will blow the benefits of parrallel drive access. 1x access from disk and 4x access from cache is a lot faster than 5x access from disk.
NOTE: this does rely on using multiple parse points see junction or mlink [Other] PowerShell script to create symbolically linked (mklink) copies of WoW

The biggest bottle neck on my system (athlon x2 4600+ 2.8Gb RAM Radeon X1950Xt) is the CPU bore cores run flat out when running 5 instances, I am not approaching the memory limit and my gfx card seems fine. Therefore I would definitely advise getting the best CPU / Mobo you can.

Why 8Gb? This seems to be a bit unnecessary as 4Gb is more than sufficient to run 5x WoW, a video running in another monitor, half a dozen tabs open in forefox and an excel sheet open.

[Wilbur]

Actually, junctioning 2 Installs per HDD will give you better performance than accessing everything from the 1HDD.

[MaltheMM]

i know it might give best performance to have to copies per drive but im only planning to have 2 copies of wow(even though im planning to run 5) , yes i know that is bad for the performance aswell but i see no need to make all my macros x4(i know i could just copy the macro-file but thats not me ... )

the ram is because and i quote "ME NEEDS IT ! , ME WANTS IT !... MY PRECIOUS !!!"


BTW updated the first post

[Djarid]

Actually, junctioning 2 Installs per HDD will give you better performance than accessing everything from the 1HDD.

Why do you say that? Surely each subsequent request for the same piece of data will be provided from cache, when zoning etc this means that data should only be retrieved from the platters for the first request, everything else should be from cache, either the disk's, controller's (if it exists) or the processor's.

[Wilbur]

This was the same theory we applied when everything was run from 1 Install. In practice it didnt work out as well. HDD Cache isn't big enough given the minor diffrences in data queueing. Whilst in theory it is sound, the minor diffrences in timing requests means its not as effective.

[MaltheMM]

this video cards supports4(FOUR) monitors