Multi-gaming help.

[Tribe]

So im looking for advice in building a new rig for running multiple games at once, some along the lines or 2-3 FFXI windows while also loading WoW or Starcraft. on my current machine after the second FFXI window nothing else is possible, im hoping to be able to load 3-4 games and not have to deal with lag from it.

Is it just wishful thinking to even be able to do this? Im wondering how Mutli-core proccesors like 4-6 cores effect this, and if more then 1 video card is needed. Currently I was looking at 8gigs or ram X6 phenom and a 5770 as a very affordable way to get the results im looking for.

Any opinions is great.

[Darus Grey]

I tend to do this alot, run multiple MMO clients and then maybe another single player game during downtime.

Multicore processors will be the biggest effect on this. Second is you need a lot of ram, enough to cover however many programs you'll have open, this is entirely dependent on what you're running, just look at their memory usgage, add it up, and then give yourself some overhead, don't forget other things like your 40 browser tabs in the equation.

Next, multiple HDDs is not a must, but is very helpful, in an ideal setup, you should have a different storage device for each client, but as a general rule I'd say just don't run more than 2 per 1, or else you'll notice load times/zoning/whatever gets unbearably long when 3-4 games are reading/writing to same disk.

Well it's technically possible to assign multiple video cards to different tasks, my experience has been that this is basically grand jury-rigging and never ends up working as intended. Instead, you simply want a single video card/multi card setup capable of running everything at once, it won't bottleneck very easily so there's no real benefit to the other method.

Based on your current setup it looks like you're basically already there, just an additional HDD or two, and depending on performance, a better videocard(s).

When you actually run the programs, it's important to go into the task manager and assign programs to different CPUs, so that they have dedicated ones instead of all over-loading CPU0