Question about 6-boxing on a single rig.

Treesong · Post by **Treesong** » Fri Aug 10, 2007 9:57 pm

Hiya, I have been contemplating taking up 6-boxing again, however this time on a single machine. I want to use WinEQ2 (the Pro version) and Keyclone. Now running 6 accounts is going to be a major systemhog I realize so I want to check a few things.

My rig:
Win XP, up to date (SP2 and so forth)
P5N32-E SLi mobo
2 gigs of OCZ platinum ddr2 4-4-4-15
Raptor 1500 HD
Core 2 Duo 6600
2x 8800 GTX in SLI.
Fast DSL con

So pretty good rig with a somewhat weak processor.

I would be running my 5 boxes on low settings off course.

My questions:

Is this even possible or would the network lag kill me: I love to run around with my boxes (on /follow) and I have had earlier experiences using old Wineq versions where the following toons would start to run in circles, aggroing everything in range. This was a few years ago so things might have changed.

Can my CPU handle this? Would a Quadcore CPU do a better job of this? (I could upgrade since this mobo is Quad ready)

Can my RAM handle this or would I have to install another 2 GB (I have a similar pair of DDR2 lying around, had to take that out since old Bios versions of this mobo were giving trouble, but I upgraded Bios so hopefully I can put them in again). Then set up Win XP to use 3GB.

If this setup is in any way viable, would using 2 monitors alleviate the load on the system at all(disabling SLI obviously and using my second 8800 for the second monitor). Or would the bottleneck be the CPU, network and RAM anyway?

Thanks for any answers!

fearless · Post by **fearless** » Fri Aug 10, 2007 10:41 pm

Ram is your bottleneck. 3gb will go a long way to solving your problems.

Futwox · Post by **Futwox** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 7:37 pm

6 boxing on even a 3GB system is going to be taxing.

I ran a 3GB system (2 x SATA disk drives for disk IO) and could 4 box without too many problems. Adding a 5th and 6th session would slow my machine to a crawl due to RAM swapping.

I now run a 6GB system on a Vista 64bit OS and I typically run at about 20% free RAM when 6 boxing. Realistically I could probably get away with a 5GB system, but at the same time I don't want to be at 0 free system RAM. I do run a 3 x SATA drive system (3 EQ instances with 2 chars running off each) to split the disk IO. Not sure how much that affects my performance as well.

Be wary of putting 4GB into a Microsoft 32bit OS. Although a 4GB system is supported it will NOT be able to use all of your system RAM. Likely will only be able to use 3GB *very common or 3.5GB *uncommon. This is due to a limitation of 32bit addressing.

Futwox