WoW: 25 box GPU / CPU Recommendations

Greetings,

Not sure if is the correct forum to ask this, but here I go:

My PC specs atm are:

CPU: i5 - 760 (4 cores) oc to 3500Mhz.
Ram: 8GB
Gfx card: Zotac GTX 660Ti 2GB DDR5
HD: 60 SSD SATA2, for the SO and paging file.

Atm I am boxing in WoW 5 accounts on this computer, with one at high settings, the rest on low, on fair also works fine. I have other 4 account on another PC with similar specs but a ASUS GTX 470 card.

I was thinking about upgrading my main PC to be able to run at first 10 accounts and then at some point 25 accounts, one at high settings, the rest low or fair.

Which PC settings do you suggest for that?
Maybe someone that already runs on those settings can give a more real advise.

I would like a decent PC which is not actually the best you can built which also will cost a fortune Maybe around 2000€ , 2500$

Thanks!

[MiRai]

I doubt there's a machine out there that will run 25 clients smoothly, and even if there was, you'd be spending over $2,000 on it. I ran 30 clients as a test to see how far I could push my hardware about two years ago, but I would never ever want to play the game like that because even though I had my settings turned down all the way (on the slaves) I was lagging out the entire operating system.

Perhaps a 6 or 8-core socket 2011 CPU and an nVidia Titan paired up with > 32GB of RAM would be up to the task, but you'd still most likely be forced into using DX9 in order to jam 25 clients into the video card's RAM during any type of in-game action.

hmm, maybe the best is just then to go for 2 machines with 12-13 clients each

Or use the 2 machines I already have for a 5 + 5 setup, and get a new one for 15. Since ISBoxer can control up to 5 pc's still have some margin

Just was wondering the "one" machine thing also for power / space optimization.

Thanks for the input tho.

[MiRai]

hmm, maybe the best is just then to go for 2 machines with 12-13 clients each

Or use the 2 machines I already have for a 5 + 5 setup, and get a new one for 15. Since ISBoxer can control up to 5 pc's still have some margin

I think everyone that I've come across who multiboxes > 15 clients at one time breaks up their Character Sets across at least 2 machines. I'm not saying that 25 clients isn't possible on one machine, I would just hate to see someone drop a ton of money on a machine that may or may not perform up to their standards while running so many clients at once -- Especially when you finally engage in a large scale battle.

Thanks for the info.

Just for the record, it is any point to get an I7 vs an I5? since they have the same physical cores and seems that hyperthreaded cores does not really count...

[MiRai]

Thanks for the info.

Just for the record, it is any point to get an I7 vs an I5? since they have the same physical cores and seems that hyperthreaded cores does not really count...

There's no doubt that Hyper-Threading helps:

http://www.dual-boxing.com/threads/4450 ... post336875

EDIT: For anyone else reading this, the above statement may or may not hold true for games other than World of Warcraft.

[lax]

it is any point to get an I7 vs an I5? since they have the same physical cores and seems that hyperthreaded cores does not really count...

Yes there is a point to an i7 over an i5, and HyperThreaded cores do really count!

The major difference as I understand it is that the virtual cores do not process ALL instructions, just some of them. Not enough of the instructions to run a full game instance on its own, but enough that if you put your game instance on the PAIR of the physical + HyperThreaded core, you get a very real performance benefit.

ok thank you both for the remarks about HT.

It seems interesting what you say Lax about 1 physical paired with one HT, can run well one instance.

For example on my i5, 4 cores non HT, I have noticed that the default ISBoxer CPU settings of 1 full core to the main slot, and the other cores for the rest of slaves, does not work well on me, maybe would on HT processors.

When I apply those settings on a 4 slot team, my main window on high settings sits at 10-15 fps, while other seems at 30fps (foreground fps). At the begging I though was a problem with ISBoxer reducing my performance a lot by running on 32bit instead of 64, was used to play at 60 fps main window, 30fps foreground without the software. But fast I realized was something to do with the cpu settings, so I have changed the plan to allow all the cores on all the windows, and voilà, my main screen jumped to 60 fps again on high, and slaves were smooth at 30 fps on follow.

[lax]

For example on my i5, 4 cores non HT, I have noticed that the default ISBoxer CPU settings of 1 full core to the main slot, and the other cores for the rest of slaves, does not work well on me, maybe would on HT processors.

It's equally inefficient on HT processors; the same number of real cores are going around the same number of game instances. When you say "the rest of my slaves" we're talking about 5 game instances total, right? 5 does not fit equally on 4, which means that Round-robin is going to double up on one of the cores, but not the other 3; this is why the other setting performs better for your CPU and your team.

In ISBoxer 41 Beta (soon to be released), the CPU Strategy no longer defaults to the Round-robin setting; instead, it calculates what it believes will offer smoothest performance, which in this instance will be "Select all CPUs with every window".

When you say "the rest of my slaves" we're talking about 5 game instances total, right?

Well, no, actually for that example, I have set a 4 slot team, to make sure that everyone was getting at least one core.

My test showed that at least on my computer (i5-760. @3500), one core is not enough to feed one instance on high settigns (only 15 fps).

I have tried round robin and 1 core to slot1 (main char at high settings), both were giving bad performance. Once I selected all cores to all instances, everything was smooth, for all clients, like if I just got a new computer

btw, now that we are talking about the new releases. I have read somewhere, not sure if was in dual-boxing, that is going to be a future innerspace 2 with 64 bit support? If so that is going to be great, I see huge performance increase running on 64 bit (at least on wow).