The Equipment (Being a cheap boxer)

I'm not the cheapest guy around. I have nice toys, and I'm not afraid to spend money on quality stuff... but for some reason, I'm doing everything I can to spend as little as possible on this project. Why? Well, dispite the fact that most folks around here spend 7-12 bucks on lunch, when they hear I have 5 WoW accounts, they freak out. I freak a bit too.

$75 a month isn't much of an entertainment budget. (Let's not talk about how much my girlfriend costs.) :) So I don't know what the big deal is, yet, I can't help but shudder whenever someone says "Uh dude, that means you pay $75 a month for WoW." Then again, I also pay almost $20 a month for my guild website! /bah. Lets get on with it.

In an attempt to spend as little as possible, I've been experimenting with running 5 WoW's on 3 machines. As I mentioned before, I'm using Maximizer to "squish" the games vertically. Here it is at work on my setup:

This has worked fantastic. I have a beautiful 24" widscreen for may main toon, and the two 17s are just fine for when I need to mouse over and right click to loot quest items. (we'll talk about "gathering" quests while multiboxing, later. ugh.)

The two "sub" computers have AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processors, and one machine has 1gig of ram, while the other has 2gig. This was working fine, but the machine with 1gig was alot chunkier than the one with 2gig. (which was relatively smooth with all graphic options turned down)

But then I took my "Test Taurens" into Orgrimmar. Yikes. The lag on the 1gig machine was so bad, I would lose /follow, and had to go back and get a toon multiple times. That's bad. I can't have that. So after doing some research, I found out that RAM is by far the biggest player when running multiple instances of WoW on a machine.

So I'm going to push them both to 2gig, and when I'm ready to pvp, i'll push them both to 3.

I use a logitech G15 keyboard for my macro/broadcasting. See the 18 customizable buttons to the left of the main keys? They can all be assigned to a button on one of my 12 bars, and with two shifts, I actually have quick access to 54 extra buttons. To the left of the keyboard, you'll see my N52 Nostromo gaming pad. That's where my left hand sits while gaming.

The other two keyboards are there for when I screw up Synergy, and have to reset everything. Once I have more confidence, I'll move those to the floor.