New to this: 5 Characters, 1 Box. What must I purchase?

[Grung]

I have been looking through many guides, and in general people have said you need multiple machines. Still, I see people saying they are five-boxing on one machine and this is what I hope to achieve.

One Computer, Two moniters (One for main, one for a 4x split). Can this be done with one mouse, one keyboard also?

Can this be done? Money is not a concern, and I do not want 2-3 computers when I can use one good one (and have it for other things also).

[keyclone]

G'morning Grung and welcome to the forums!

check the site: http://solidice.com/keyclone
using keyclone, you can run 5 on one machine (my current setup... 2 monitors with a 1 and 2x2) or across multiple machines

here is a shot using maximizer on a single screen and 5x wows



there are other pics in the screenshots section

if you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a note

have a great day and welcome to multiboxing,

Rob

[Nitro]

I have been looking through many guides, and in general people have said you need multiple machines. Still, I see people saying they are five-boxing on one machine and this is what I hope to achieve.

One Computer, Two moniters (One for main, one for a 4x split). Can this be done with one mouse, one keyboard also?

Can this be done? Money is not a concern, and I do not want 2-3 computers when I can use one good one (and have it for other things also).

You only need one PC and two monitors to 5 box.

Windows XP Pro
Quad Core Processor (Q6600 will work fine, get better if you got the cash)
4 GB of system ram
no more than two wow installs per harddrive unless u use symbolic linking but i dont know much about that, i use 5 harddrives in my machine currently
a good video card, im using the 9800gtx (just use one card in spanned desktop mode for best performance)

Just one keyboard and one mouse and your rollin, if u need help on the finer points after you get your rig and want some help send me a message and we can hook up in vent some time.

[DIE_KUH]

I just started my multiboxing project last week. Started with the following:

- Quad-Core CPU (Core Q9450)
- Vista x64
- 4 GB RAM
- 8800 GTX
- 20" monitor + 24" monitor (1920x1200)
- keyclone (well worth the money, considering how much the hardware costs )
- just one WoW installation (you maybe could use another one for the main if you use two monitors)

I think you could play this with five accounts, I started with three (main on the 20", 24" in pivot mode). Switched to four accounts, tried to just use the 24" monitor, but 960x600 for each account just isn't enough. Soooo, added this:

- 30" monitor (Dell 3008WFP, IQ-wise way better than the Dell 2407WFP I had) (2560x1600)

Some numbers: 2560x1600 are 77% more pixels than 1920x1200, 30" is 56% more area than 24". So it has finer pixels. I like that. Remember: A Macbook crams even more pixels per area onto its display. And has the same resolution (1280x800) each account has with my setup, by the way.

This is really nice for a quad-setup without using an additional monitor for the main. Yeah, if I already play four accounts, why not five, I know. I guess I would just split the screen differently with five account (upper half of the screen 3x 853x800, I guess that would work, even though it's a weird aspect ratio). It's quite comfortable not to have an additional monitor. And surprisingly, the 8800 GTX can handle it fine, with everything maxed and 2x FSAA.

But yesterday another problem cropped up: 4 GB is not enough! At least not with Vista x64 and if you have much stuff running in the background. 4x WoW with some addons = 2.5 GB, OS + stuff = 1 GB or more... so now it's 8 GB and I'm happy.

The only problem I see with five accounts is that you either have to use one CPU core for two WoW instances. Or you split four instances over three cores. But Intel's new Quads should handle that just fine I guess.

[Ken]

I will be buying (for 4 clients):
- Quad core Intel Q6600
- 4GB RAM (initially I will buy 2GB, as this seems to be enough in Linux for now)
- 2 sata harddisks
- GeForce 8800

I already have a Samsung 226BW 22" widescreen, which has a good price/size/quality ratio.

[Knytestorme]

I will be buying (for 4 clients):
- Quad core Intel Q6600
- 4GB RAM (initially I will buy 2GB, as this seems to be enough in Linux for now)
- 2 sata harddisks
- GeForce 8800

I already have a Samsung 226BW 22" widescreen, which has a good price/size/quality ratio.

Go with 4Gb of RAM straight off the bat rather than 2 (and I'd also suggest going for 2x2 rather than 4x1 just in case you still want to expand in the future), main reason being that under windows each instance of WoW takes about 450Mb of ram so even with only 4 clients you'll be very very close to the swap limit right away (aand perhaps over depending on what you are running as services and how much ram WinE takes up while running). RAM is cheap enough compared to everything else at the moment that the extra 2Gb shouldn't add much to your build cost.

[iPooper]

Not sure if this is going to help you but my alt comp runs 4 boxes, my main just one. Alt comp is pretty crappy but runs 4 boxes with max settings.

AMD 4800+ (2.4GHz Windsor core)
BFG 7950GT OC 256MB GDDR3
AN52 (Motherboard)
3GB PC2-6400 5-5-5-18-23
80GBx2 WD Raid-0
Windows XP Pro

IMO and from the looks of it, you really dont need a high end comp to multibox.

From experience I like have 2 comps, lets you run something on main comp and do something like watch movie on different comp with (my setup 2 keyboard but you can use one and do the same.) You can be alt tabbed and keyclone still sends the messages to the other wow windows.

[Ken]

I will be buying (for 4 clients):
- Quad core Intel Q6600
- 4GB RAM (initially I will buy 2GB, as this seems to be enough in Linux for now)
- 2 sata harddisks
- GeForce 8800

I already have a Samsung 226BW 22" widescreen, which has a good price/size/quality ratio.

Go with 4Gb of RAM straight off the bat rather than 2 (and I'd also suggest going for 2x2 rather than 4x1 just in case you still want to expand in the future), main reason being that under windows each instance of WoW takes about 450Mb of ram so even with only 4 clients you'll be very very close to the swap limit right away (aand perhaps over depending on what you are running as services and how much ram WinE takes up while running). RAM is cheap enough compared to everything else at the moment that the extra 2Gb shouldn't add much to your build cost.

Thanks for the tip, but I don't have that memory problem, because I'm running Linux. Each WoW instance takes about 200-300MB and my operating system (including the Gnome - the graphical frontend - takes about 120MB). Memory usage will rise when I go to Shattrath of course, but I don't have that problem yet.
I will indeed buy 1x 2GB for easier future expansion, another good tip, thanks.
I'd rather save some costs with RAM so I can have a better graphics card. Good RAM isn't cheap these days (the 1000MHz+ stuff). Only old PC800 is cheap, but that's too slow for these CPU's.

[Mak]

I already have a Samsung 226BW 22" widescreen, which has a good price/size/quality ratio.

I have that monitor too! Just had to say that. I was going to say to get more RAM too but since I don't use Linux I trust your judgement. =P

[Ken]

I already have a Samsung 226BW 22" widescreen, which has a good price/size/quality ratio.

I have that monitor too! Just had to say that. I was going to say to get more RAM too but since I don't use Linux I trust your judgement. =P

Windows does really effed up things with memory. I have a friend who has 3GB of RAM and Windows(2k or XP) is already complaining that it's running out of memory .. while there's 1.7GB of memory free RAM!
Windows also seems to do really weird things with caching and cleaning up memory.
When I open up Maya at work(Windows XP), I can't open an explorer Window anymore, because Windows can't allocate the resources for it. (although there's lots of RAM left to use). If I'd have applications like firefox or explorer open, they would have strange behavior like not showing the "file" and "edit" drop down boxes until Maya is closed down.
Eventually it was Vista who drove me mad into the arms of Ubuntu. What a love story. XD