What hardware for 10+ Multiboxing? WoW, MMORPGs

I want to know which hardware is the best to multibox 10+ clients? Of course a Intel CPU with 10 Cores is the best but it isnt cheap, they are overpriced. Graphics will be low so it will be CPU intensive. I thought a Xeon E3-1230V2 will do the job but will 4 Cores with HT be enough? It also has only 3,3GHz with boost to 3,7GHz. Or should I buy the i7-3770K which I can overclock to 4,5GHz? Well there is also the i7-3930K with 6 Cores and HT... I dont know which I should choose.. 12-15 clients at the same time, main window 640x480, seconday 160x120, ingame 800x600 with low/medium settings.

What about the GPU? Something like the AMD 7950 or GTX 670? Will 2GB GDDR5 be enough?

[lax]

Well how many? 10 or 12-15?

My PC that I designed last summer to be 10-box capable uses a GTX 570, a 4-core+HT i7 (forget the model number off the top of my head, sorry), and 16GB of RAM. You also want a fast hard drive, and loading times would quite likely benefit from an SSD. You're also going to produce a lot of heat; my case is one of the High-Airflow cases from ThermalTake -- I'm not a fan of watercooling and I wanted something quiet this time around. Gigantic-ass fans on this thing mean quiet


4 vs 6 CPU cores is going to be a HUGE difference if you're going 12-15. It's easy to explain why... 12 divided by 6 is 2, and 12 divided by 4 is 3. That's the number of game instances that would be handled by each core, and the lower that number is, the better performance you're going to get (probably as it approaches 1; going lower than 1 is less likely to be a huge benefit).

As far as video card, if you're talking 640x480 and 800x600 with medium/low settings, then sure just about the only metric you're going to worry about with a current-gen (or recent) mid or high end video card is the amount of RAM on your video card. That's some low resolution though I think mine run at 1920x1080.

The amount of RAM on your video card is going to be important to how many game instances you can launch. There needs to be enough remaining in order to allocate the backbuffer(s) or the game will fail to launch and produce a DirectX error (e.g. can't start 3d, etc). Yes, of course it also stores textures and such, but most of those can remain in system memory if the VRAM is consumed (or you might start seeing missing textures, replaced by solid colors instead). 2GB of RAM on your video card should be fine

Thank you Lax again, you really care about your customers!

I think I will buy the Intel Xeon E3-1230V2 (pretty much like IB i7) because it costs only 200€ in my country. I would like to buy the i7-3930K but 500€ is too much. Also the mainboard for the i7-3930K costs twice as much as for the Xeon and the CPU has a significant higher TDP.

Window: Cores
#1: 1 and 2
#2: 3 and 4
#3: 5 and 6
#4: 7 and 8
#5: 1 and 2
#6: 3 and 4
#7: 5 and 6
#8: 7 and 8
#9: 1 and 3
#10: 5 and 7

Would this work well? Does it matter if it is for WoW or MMORPG like the upcoming GW2?

You should keep physical cores on a single game:

#9: 3 and 4
#10: 5 and 6

[MiRai]

Don't buy a Xeon and then gimp yourself with a shitty server board that wasn't built for gaming.

The Intel Xeon E3-1230V2 is basicly a Ivy Bridge i7-3770K with 200MHz less, no overclocking and no HD 4000. It works on the sockel 1155 mainboard (H77, Z77). It will perform nearly as good as the i7. Yes it is designed for servers but that doesnt mean it's shit for gaming. Here are some benchmarks (all credits to pcgh.de).

Battlefield 3
Anno 2070
Shogun 2
Skyrim
Starcraft 2
Dirt 3

But I dont know when I would overclock the i7-3770K to 4,5GHz if it would perform that much better than a Xeon with 3,3GHz (boost to 3,7GHz).

I saw your 10 and 20 boxing WoW on dual-boxing.com... how did you got it worked so well? Because your little windows are capped at 15/10FPS? Would id also work with 10 or 20 clients with fair/good settings and 30 FPS on all windows?

[MiRai]

I saw your 10 and 20 boxing WoW on dual-boxing.com... how did you got it worked so well? Because your little windows are capped at 15/10FPS? Would id also work with 10 or 20 clients with fair/good settings and 30 FPS on all windows?

That was awhile ago so I'll have to make some educated guesses in answering this.

In both of those 'tests' I was running all screens at 1920x1080, but you stated in your initial post that you were going to run at very, very small resolutions.

My Tests

Code:

1920x1080 = 2,073,600 pixels x 20 game windows = 41,472,000 total pixels (load on the system was manageable)
1920x1080 = 2,073,600 pixels x 30 game windows = 62,208,000 total pixels (RAM was a limiting factor in this test)

Your Proposed Setup

Code:

640x480 = 307,200 total pixels (main screen)
160x120 = 19,200 total pixels x 14 secondary screens = 268,800 total pixels
------------------------------------
576,000 total pixels

While this isn't a real equation (because frame rates are also a factor), it's probably a good way to guesstimate what type of performance is to be expected. If you were disable instant swapping (you will need to if you want to render secondary windows at lower resolutions), then the load on the system overall drops dramatically.

Personally, I could never have my main screen at such a low resolution and at 30FPS... it would drive me insane.

Thank you MiRai for your reply. I dont like to play on 640x800 (ingame 800x600) but I thought it would be necessary when multiboxing 10+ clients... so could a i7 or Xeon with a GTX 670 2GB handle 1920x1080 main screen and 9-12 secondary windows inside the primary in the lower left corner with 240x135 without instant swapping on fair/good settings while every window runs with 30 FPS?

[MiRai]

Yes. I doubt you'd be pushing that system anywhere near its limit.

Hm... I was only able to run 10 WoW clients and after that everything became freezing and super chunky.
1. I disabled swapping and instant swapping.
2. I made all wow window's resolutions 720x576 and made isboxer fit them in half a monitor resolutions of 1920x1080

My computer specs:
Win 7 64bit
i7-2600K @ 3.4GHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX590 3Gb VRAM
16Gb RAM

I think my video card is the one that is capping because my CPU usage does not go above 50% and RAM does not go above 9Gb.
I have noticed there is no difference if instant swapping is disabled or not disabled. The lag and freezing starts at an equal number of wow windows open. After about 12 windows.