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Best Hardware Solution EQIIX 6 box?

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smilinghuman

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Joined: Fri Oct 15, 2010 8:00 am

Post Fri Oct 15, 2010 9:11 am

Best Hardware Solution EQIIX 6 box?

Hi everyone,

Would like to say thank you to the community before hand :).

I have worked in IT for some time and was fairly strong on the hardware front until about 2 years ago. I am reading everything I can and trying to determine which direction to go for a (hopefully) single computer 6 box solution. I have questions:

1. Can a single powerful computer run this many instances?

2. Will a AMD Phenom II X6 be more useful for this than say a quad core CPU?

3. Can a graphics cards in SLI work well for this solution, or should I shoot for a single larger card, IE 2x GTX460 or 1x GTX480

4. Can two inexpensive SSD HDD in a raid config for speed serve up 6 clients at once?

5. lastly is it my imagination or does the current generation of DDR3 tripple channel memory motherboards seem sort of... unreliable? I read about a LOT of them failing and nothing stands out as a very good reliable powerful motherboard for a AM3, SLI mobo, does anyone have a suggestion for a solution for this?

6. How much memory might be necessary for this app?

My current notion is something like this:

1. CPU AMD Phenom II1075T X6, this cheaper core over clocks higher than the 1090T apparently.
2. Undecided mobo, nothing out there looks really stellar
3. 8 to 16 gigs of memory
4. 2x small SSD in raid for speed (if that is possible)
5. Sli GTX460 1GB or single GTX480

Thank you in advance for input
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lax

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Joined: Tue Nov 17, 2009 9:32 pm

Post Fri Oct 15, 2010 12:39 pm

Re: Best Hardware Solution EQIIX 6 box?

1. Yes
2. Yes, 6 cores > 4 cores if you want to run 6 game instances. It's probably also better than an i7 (4 cores, each with hyperthreading to look like 8) due to having 2 more physical cores. It is ideal to have at least 1 CPU core per game instance -- but running a quad core will also work fine. People are running 5 and 6 instances of WoW or Lord of the Rings Online on quad cores for example, 6 EQ2 on a quad would be ok as well.
3. SLI is generally bad for multiboxing (causing performance and stability issues for some people), so I would recommend a single powerful card (Without an integrated second card with SLI) rather than going for two. The same goes for Crossfire. I believe SLI doesn't work in windowed mode anyway
4. Sure. You don't even need to go that far, a 7200rpm SATA drive will not have any problems. But, you should definitely see loading times decreased with SSDs and RAID.
5. No idea there
6. Launch one instance of the game and run around for 5 minutes, then check the task manager to see how much RAM it's using. Multiply that by the number of instances you want to run, and you should expect to need at LEAST that amount (expect some margin of error on how much each instance will use at any given time). ISBoxer and Inner Space won't alter the requirements enough to matter. I would say that 4GB of RAM is pretty typical for running 5-6 copies of any of these games, except for Warhammer which uses like 1GB per instance last I checked. 6-8GB of RAM is probably safe regardless of the game.

Your hardware list looks fine, I would go with the GTX480 rather than the SLI 460 configuration. Also on the topic of GTX4__ I will mention that with previous versions of Inner Space there were issues reported with the 470 with previous builds of Inner Space (see http://isboxer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2499; note that the dev build mentioned in that thread has since been released as the live build of Inner Space). You shouldn't have any problem with the GTX480 but just throwing that out there. Hell, it could have been a driver issue with the new video card series.

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