I'm considering ordering a new laptop and I would really appreciate input from some of the powergamers on this forum. i7 3rd gen vs i5 3rd gen - is the i7 worth the cost difference since the primary use of this laptop will be running about 6 EQ clients? 16gb ram vs 32gb ram - My guess is that 16gb is plenty but would there be an advantage to going 32gb in a 64-bit OS with 6 EQ clients? SSD drives - I'm not concerned with Windows boot times...EQ gaming performance is my concern. Does eq benefit from running off an SSD drive (zoning times would improve I'm sure)...but with caching of the HD, the CPU cache and a dedicated video card I'm not sure if this is worth the investment Dedicated video card - I suspect that integrated HD graphics could get bogged down as it depends on the CPU...going with a dedicated video card I think is worth the investment...if so would 1 gb card be sufficient or should I consider a 2gb card? Thanks!
You will need something on the higher end boutique if you want to 6 box on a laptop and have it be a good experience. Dedicated vid card and fastest mechanical drives are a must. I5 is good enough but chances are i7 will be default with anything with a good vid card. Hope money is not a limiting factor for you. Otherwise what you need is someone here to say I 6 box on Brand/Model laptop and it's great. Might not be many out there that can say that.
No matter what laptop you get be ready for extremely hot graphics module. That many instances will keep your GPU running hard and hot. In a desktop that's not a big deal, in a laptop that heat permeates the system board and can cause premature component failures. Plan on the laptop to be uncomfortably hot and incapable of actually sitting on your lap. Also plan on regularly purchasing canned air to keep the cooling vents and heat sinks cleaned.
EQ is heaviest on the CPU, GPU doesn't matter too much as long as it's a decent discrete (a.k.a. dedicated) GPU. A CPU like the i7 where you can put each instance on it's own hardware thread would work wonders to keep each instance responsive. You'll want to find a CPU with the best possible speed for your budget. CPU-wise I wouldn't go with anything under 3Ghz, ideally I'd go for 3.6Ghz which is where EQ tends to stay responsive under heavy load (like a raid). Memory-wise I would aim for at least 2GB per EQ instance, be sure to set aside at least 1GB of the memory budget for Windows and other programs you'll likely want (like virus and spyware protection). GPU-wise I would aim for a minimum of 600Mhz and then focus on memory bandwidth. A GPU with GDDR will easily outperform a GPU with SDRAM or DDR memory in terms of memory bandwidth in a game like EQ that taxes the texture samplers really hard.
As far as GPU goes Shillingworth covered that, but the the laptop in general is still going to likely run hot with 6 instances going on it for any period of time. I would suggest you invest into one of those USB powered 'stands' which have a cooling fan in them. This helps two ways in that the fan draws the heat away faster and the extra open area between the stand and whatever the laptop is sitting on to provide more room in which the hot air can disappate. Any stand like this should be well ventilated (lots of holes in it) to provide the best benefit for your system.
In my opinion, you'd be vastly better off using a desktop for gaming. Also, I normally use the NV control panel to enable aniso textures and MSAA which makes EQ look a lot better. A modern GPU (ie: NV GTX-650 or better) will run everything but shadows on with MSAA and aniso very smoothly but I've never tried that many instances on one system. I tend to use multiple machines. With four instances, an i7 Sandy bridge or Ivy bridge is very lightly loaded on the CPU side. Just make sure to get around 2.5GB of RAM per instance you plan to run for the best EQ experience. Also, set max frame rate and max background frame rate to 30 and turn on v-sync in the NV control panel. That makes auto-follow work a lot better and gives you a nice smooth frame rate all of the time with no slowdown in the guild lobby or wacky mouse-look performance.
Thanks folks wonderful information here. Any thoughts on running EQ on an SSD drive? Would running 6 clients be smoother on SSD vs a 7200 RPM x 16mb cache hard drive?
Grab an SSD. I wouldn't recommend anyone pickup any sort of computer these days without one for their OS and at least a few highly used programs. You will notice the difference.
Do I want to run the OS on the SSD or the EQ instances? And if EQ then what is the advantage because the client loads into RAM anyway right?
I put both the OS and EQ on the SSD, but have my steam games on an HDD. The SSD will improve EQ loading and zoning times. Other performance will generally be unaffected.
The GPU will get fried depending on where it sits. On some systems it sit right up under keyboard with nowhere to vent even though it gets billed as a gaming system. Make sure you figure out where it sits.
That's more or less what I see as well but I will admit I didn't sit there with a stop watch to compare it all. Getting one for the OS is quite important though, I will say that I also keep Steam on a HDD but that folder is around 1tb right now and swapping games over and over I never really saw enough difference to justify the time spent with steam mover, etc.
I 6 box on 1 computer, desktop tho. Get the i7 and turn HT on. Assign each instance to 1 real core and 1 HT core (real cores are odd #). I have 16GB of RAM and its never an issue, i have never seen it drop below 6 GB with everything running. You will want a dedicated Video Card, at least 1 GB RAM (IDK how much u actually need since I dont have a way to monitor video memory usage). I use a 1.5 GB 580 GTX and its fine. EQ loads and zones much faster with an SSD. If you can have 2 HDDs in your laptop, get an SSD with at LEAST 120GB so you have some headroom (I got a 60 then 90 GB SSDs and they just werent big enough). You will have some room to install EQ + 1-2 other games and not stress out much on space. Once you have zoned with an SSD you will never go back (tho it will not improve your gaming other than load times/zone times). Its not gonna be cheap on a laptop! GL.
Highly recommend MSI Afterburner to monitor all vital GPU stats, including temperature, fan speed, and its texture memory usage. Make sure that your GPU is on the compatibility list before installing.
If you get a computer with both SSD and HDD, be sure to move the Windows temporary folders and page file to the HDD. There is a program on MSDN to set up hard links, which is an awesome solution to moving files that get written to a lot onto a HDD. Hard links let you make a file or folder appear in a different spot than it's actually located, for example my "Videos" folder is actually just a bunch of hard links into various folders spread across 4 HDD in my computer.
I put a 120Gb ssd in my dell xps laptop and it was MUCH faster loading EQ, but only for one character. If I try to log in multiple accounts, it slows way down, but still faster then a regular hard drive. I have 4GB of ram on that laptop, but on my other I have 8gb with an ssd. Like someone said, you need about 2GB for every other instance you want to run plus the OS. So for 4 instances, you would want at least 8GB. Make sure you get a 64 bit OS so you can have more then 4GB of ram. I also see that it takes A LOT of cpu power, which I can't understand as it ran fine on my pentium 3 pc years ago. You would think by now it would run like silk, but somehow it keeps wanting more ram/cpu power. I still don't understand why I can log one character in fine, like less then a minute, then the 2nd takes much longer and the 3rd can take several minutes. This happens on both laptops. I have 8gb ram/ssd drive/dedicated video card,very fast cable connection, processor is an A8 AMD on one, which I think is the weak link, but come on, its a freakin 14yr old game!!!!!!
It's not really a 14 year old game though Buds. It's a game that was released 14 years ago and has been in a constant development cycle ever since. There is a huge difference between software that stagnates and software that is being actively developed. Give it time and WoW will run into the exact same scanario, it's not a question of 'if' it's a question of 'when'.
