Multiboxing, SLI or no?

[Unexpected]

I know SLI doesn't effect 1 WoW too much (in some cases causes FPS decrease). But what about 5? I am shopping around for a GPU right now, and it seems a GTX 480 cost about the same as 2x GTX 470s. But if 5 wows were to spead out on 2x GTX 470s seems like it should logically run better, but I am wondering if all 5 WoWs may just use the same card and leave the 2nd to collect dust...
Anyone know how it works in reality?

[Ualaa]

Some people report an increase in performance with SLI/Crossfire. Most people report a decrease.

Warcraft has not been optimized for SLI/Crossfire, but the only way you can find out if you'll benefit from SLI is to try it.

If you play other games that take advantage of SLI/Crossfire, that is definitely a consideration. I know quite a few boxers have multiple cards, not in SLI/Crossfire, for the additional monitor plugs.

The only consideration for multiple cards is which video card is rendering the images for a given monitor. With XP, if you switch from one port to another (even on the same card) you get a severe performance loss. With Vista/Win7, you can switch between monitors as long as they're both being rendered by the same video card, without any performance loss. If you were to put four slaves on one video card and the master on the other, a PiP switch would be a performance loss.

If you don't have enough RAM, adding more is the largest benefit for a system. If you do have enough, generally CPU is the best bang for the buck. Almost as useful as a CPU would be an SSD drive. On low settings, an 8800 GTX will run five clients fine... but a stronger card will let you play with more eye candy.

[Unexpected]

Yeah I have a i7 920 12 GB ram and all that jaaz. Just running an HD 4890 right now and looking to upgrade it. Looking like single GTX 480 will be the way to go

What actual benefit would an SSD offer to 5boxing? I can live without faster loading screens, will it do more than make a unit appear a few ms faster?

[Ualaa]

Faster load screens is the main benefit. Not just getting into the game initially, but anytime you zone... instances, boat/zeppelins, battlegrounds, hearthing. Especially in cities, it could make movement smoother (lots of textures to load for all the armors).

You could try the Performance Monitor tool (Perfmon, I believe) to see if your hard drive reaches 100% (ie, is a performance bottleneck) at any point while gaming. Just open the utility, box wow normally without whatever you typically have open. Half an hour into your session, check the utility to see if anything reached 100%.

[Tim]

I have 2x GTX 480 and SLI does work, as in each of my cards are at 10%. Something is wrong with WoW internally in that it just simply won't use your whole graphic potential, regardless of SLI or not.