Need input on a 4-client EQ2 computer setup

[jondough]

I'm considering upgrading my setup so that I can 6 box more effectively. Right now I'm running on 3 machines, 2 healers on an older machine (it struggles), my tank on my main machine (which I always play by hand) and the other 3 on my old machine (also struggles). In an ideal world I'd like a machine that could handle 4 EQ2 clients (I'll turn the graphics all the way down, increase the letterbox, whatever, I don't care what it looks like, just how fast it responds). That way I can just run my main guy on my nice dual core machine with the graphics up, one character on an old computer and the other 4 on a new computer. Then I'll be able to take my old machine I'm not using anymore and make a MythTV box

I'm thinking of a moderately priced intel quad core, I'm unsure on the OS (XP 64?), and the RAM amount (4GB? 8GB?) and the video card (8800 GT be enough? Or would that bottleneck my performance). Price is a moderate factor, I'd like to keep it under 1k if I can (I already have a 22" monitor I can use).

All I care about is the system running fast enough to have the bots respond with somewhat low latency.

Any input from people running 3/4 clients (or more?) on one machine is welcome.

 

[VikingKing]

Do a Q6600 on a P35 board. I'd use a 3870 instead of an 8800 just for consistency and then pop 8 gigs in it. Depending on where you're at cost wise you could drop down a bit and run a crossfire setup with some slightly less expensive cards. You can get decent DDR2 for like $25/gig. You can OC the chip to like 4x3.4 or so with no effort and run your memory at 1066, it should have no problems running 4 clients. Make sure you get a decent PS and you'll be fine and should be well under 1k.

 

[ironape2]

Q6600 is a good choice for quad and paired with a p35 intell board will overclock nicley with stock cooling. Now having said that I would go with the bellow.

Q6600
Nvidia 650i/750i SLI Mobo
2x 8600/9600 non-sli mode
4x 2gb ram

If you assign a core to each instance and have two instances on each monitor you will at max settings minus shadows avg 40+ fps.

Ive found that splitting the workload of the VC over multiple cards results in higher fps then using 1 VC over 4 instances. To maintain responsive bots you will want to have the highest fps you can for each instance both foreground and backround. I also adjusted the the fps limit in IS to accomodate higher frames in the backround instances. No need to artificially limit them if you dont need to.

 

[Pygar]

Just wanted to add my opinion that Iron's recomendation is what works best.

Go quad core, go vista, go 8 gigs if you can, but more impotatly, try to split the video load to multiple cards. Using non-sli and 2-3 screens works best.

With the right system you can six box on one quad core with 3 screens / video cards.

 

[litewave]

if you go with XP (32 bit) 3GB is the limit unless you use the 64bit version. Vista has a very bad rep performance and security wise but it also lets you over the 3gb limit and may work well for what you want.

Not sure how well a VM setup would work but seems a plausable solution as well, with vmware cpu overhead should be minimal. I havent tried it so maybe someone else who has can chime in.