Dungeon 5 Mans

I have to start by saying i know very little about multiboxing... i always thought that bigger is better so i7>i5 but i was told that wasn't the case.

I am looking at http://pcpartpicker.com/b/kpkTwP for my dungeon / rep farming group and was wondering if it will handle the load. Right now i am aiming for less than $1,500 if possible. Also if anyone has any changes they would recommend from personal experience i would appreciate it...

I will start with a single monitor + TV setup for now then upgrade as time goes by... this will be for WoW and a little bit of NAS stuff.

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to help.

[MiRai]

I have to start by saying i know very little about multiboxing... i always thought that bigger is better so i7>i5 but i was told that wasn't the case.

That sounds like something a person playing a game in single-player mode would say. When multiboxing, the more threads you have, the better off you will be. i7 > i5 any day of the week when multiboxing more than 2 or 3 characters (especially if you're going to turn up your video settings).

I am looking at http://pcpartpicker.com/b/kpkTwP for my dungeon / rep farming group and was wondering if it will handle the load. Right now i am aiming for less than $1,500 if possible. Also if anyone has any changes they would recommend from personal experience i would appreciate it...

In addition to switching out the i5 for the i7, I'd probably double the size of the SSD so that you can store the games you multibox on it. 120GB is cutting it close when WoW alone eats up 30GB, and if you start playing other online games, then they will generally eat up at least 15-20GB each. All of that plus the Windows install starts to add up, and you generally don't want your SSD (or any drive, really) sitting near full.

I will add that it's not entirely necessary to play games from the SSD, but man oh man, the loading times from an HDD can really take awhile depending on where you are or what you're doing. Slow loading times (especially while multiboxing) can affect the speed at which models and textures load onto your screen in busy or more populated areas.

Also, others have mentioned the potential bottleneck of 16GB of RAM for 5-boxing these days, so if you can (now, or in the near future), you may want to bump that up to 32GB. Personally, I think 16GB should be fine assuming you're not running a bunch of browser tabs in the background or trying to run 4x SSAA on all of your game clients, but I'd definitely monitor the Task Manager to see where the RAM usage is so that you know if 16GB is cutting it or not.

[bob]

and, in addition to the changes MiRai has mentioned, if you can throw any leftover money are upping the GPU to a 980Ti, (the Asus Strix looked nice), I reckon that would about top it out for your $1500 budget, and make a nice gaming machine.

thank you all for your quick help... for the i7.. is there a certain model that you guys can recommend that is good for gaming?


Edit: as for the games i am thinking of having a separate SSD for them... the 120GB will be just for OS and Antivirus and such.

[bob]

i7's don't have much choice in the range that your interested in above your selected i5. A 4790K is about it really. The other would be a 4770K, but this has a lower clock (GHz) than the 4790K, so might as well pay the extra $90 (above your 4690K pricing - the 4770K was around $70 more), get 12.5% more GHz, and more threads.
You could just go for a 4790 (non K version) if you are interested in saving $15, but most decent gaming motherboards will do an automatic minor overclock on the K version, so the $15 will give you a little bit extra.

Edit: as for the games i am thinking of having a separate SSD for them... the 120GB will be just for OS and Antivirus and such.

I understand why people do this, but with SSD's it will make little noticeable performance difference to you unless configured correctly, while the difference in price for you to get the Samsung 250 EVO is $73, vs $63 for the 120. Personally I think you'd be chucking $50 you could better spend elsewhere.

Now if you were going to be pounding that extra drive with lots of disk writes, or you had an application that will take advantage of multi threaded writes (which need to be to different devices to actually receive this class of performance benefit), then yes, it can be worth getting another drive for a specific function, but reads, not so much (unless you are using a RAID setup). If you really wanted a second SSD, I'd drop the 1TB HDD and put in a 1TB SSD instead. Reduced noise/heat/power, and a load more performance. Of course the issue may be the pricing for that; you are starting at about $280 for the Mushkin jobby looking at PC Part Picker.

Mind you that does depend a bit on what you are using this second drive for. You said NAS type things. I think a 1TB for NAS type things is rather small these days (my 4TB seems rather small these days), but a quick search on PCPartPicker shows me you could get a 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 for about the same price as your 1TB, or you could look at a 3TB HDD for $75. Then the price per GB starts to diminish the other way, so it becomes about using 1 disk vs 2, which is a noise/heat/power/available plugs/socket factor.

Oh i already have a Synology 1813+ for my NAS so the extra 1 TB will be to just hold extra downloads and stuff to be transfered to the NAS.. i know that 1 TB might be overkill but i would rather have a bit of flexibility.

If the difference is <$100 for each item but the impact is better then i will probably go for it since it will help in the long run.

I am sorry but i didn't get the part about the second SSD. It will not be in a RAID and i am worried about if i have to reformat my PC multiple times since it might take me forever to install the OS then WoW plus any other extras.

thanks for all your help in this build and bearing with me

Edit: so i updated the original build to http://pcpartpicker.com/user/ash23/saved/WZFD4D using everyone's input

[bob]

Fair enough. I had a bigger response, but hey, it's your PC, and if you're putting it together, then you have enough nouse to be able to organise your stuff.

Your config is very enviable.