Can i handle it?!

[Snowy42]

I'm about to start playing wow again, and i'm going to go straight into 5-boxing shammys. But i'm not sure if my rig will handle it.

I'm going to be getting pwnboxer... i don't know exactly how much difference this will make, but i'm hoping for a lot!

This is my rig (don't laugh!)
Intel E2180 @ 2ghz
4gb ddr2 800
nvidia 9600GSO

I understand this isn't a great rig... and if there's no way it will handle it, i will be willing to spend some money on it (working at a computer wholesaler helps with costs!)

If this rig won't do it, how much more will i need to run the game effectively? I read somewhere that an E8500 would allow the main instance of wow run at 50+fps with the slaves working at ~18fps (i don't think this was with the help of pwnboxer though).

That's about as far as i'd be willing to go when spending money on my cpu. Will i need a better GFX card to handle it? Or is it all based on processing power?

Any info here will help a LOT, thanks guys.

[Ualaa]

Warcraft if mostly CPU intensive; shadows, weather effects and spell effects are about the only thing that really pushes your video card, and you can disable or turn down most of these.

Although you don't absolutely need it, I'll still recommend 1GB of ram per warcraft plus 1GB for the operating system. Sure the game will run with less, but this has to be the single largest upgrade available when you have less then this amount of ram, plus its one of the cheapest upgrades possible.

The CPU is the key for boxing. The better you can go, the better your results will be.

After Ram and CPU, a low end SSD is definitely the next upgrade to consider; it will impact your play far more then the video, but you won't need this at all to five-box. I'm just mentioning it as the third best upgrade, quite a ways behind the CPU and the Ram, but probably a fair ways ahead of the video.

[p0weruser]

As Ualaa said, the game is CPU reliant, you said that the most you were willing to pay for is a E8500, well I looked on newegg.com and those are available @ 189: Newegg.com - Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale 3.16GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor

versus the quad version which would help you more & its cheaper.
Newegg.com - Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 Yorkfield 2.66GHz 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor

ram is good for now, if your able go to 6GB

and WoW is not graphics crazy so your current is very well fine.

I played off a ATI 3450 for awhile (extremely low-end) this things was decent for awhile Newegg.com - ASUS EAH3450/HTP/512M Radeon HD 3450 512MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card (no-longer sold)
Its the same as your 9600 GSO.

[Snowy42]

Ah good to hear, so really all i gotta do is upgrade the cpu (lol that rhymes :P)

That's really all i wanted... i didn't want to have to upgrade my mobo to a i5 capable system, get a i5-750, replace my ram with ddr3 and do all that, all i wanted was a cheap upgrade to handle multiboxing.

Thanks guys

[EaTCarbS]

What MoBo do you have? That will tell us a lot about how much you can upgrade.

[Snowy42]

Asus P5KPL, socket LGA775, so any intel up to a quad core will fit

[EaTCarbS]

Yea just get a quad core, up the ram and get an ssd and you should pwn 5 wow windows.

[Snowy42]

Originally Posted by EaTCarbS

Yea just get a quad core, up the ram and get an ssd and you should pwn 5 wow windows.

I can't see how a SSD would really benefit gaming that much. :S

[Ualaa]

For warcraft, if you don't have enough ram, that's your biggest improvement.
If you do, then more ram does basically nothing.

After that, processor is the next biggest thing.

After the processor, the SSD is a larger positive on gaming then anything else, and by a very large margin over say a fancy video card or pretty much any other addition. In particular load times for entering Dalaran or an instance are faster, but you're smoother anywhere there are lots of bodies such as battlegrounds or wintergrasp.

[Snowy42]

I see...

But they're so expensive for such small sizes... the best i can get (which is a brilliant price for where i am) is AUD$115 for a Kingston 64Gb SSD V-Series 2.5" SATA-II. I could buy a normal 7200rpm 1.5tb hdd for the same price!