Which is more important on one computer?

[grizzly89]

Hi

I 2 box on one computer and was wondering which has the most effect for upgrading purposes?

A) Processer
B) Amount of ram
C) Video card

I currently have an P4 3.2 i believe, 1 gig of ram and a radion 9700 with 128 meg on it.
Short of building a new comp which will probably happen in the future,which of the above
should I replace as a stop gap measure.

Thanks

[Merescata]

Memory, video, processor.  In that order, IMO.

[Hinthi]

Memory, video, processor.  In that order, IMO.

I agree.  More memory seems to help quite a bit.

[sunkash]

( although the above might be true in many circumstances ), as with many things, it really depends on your starting point. If you have less than 1G ram, definately if you have less than 512M, and a decent graphics board, memory will probably give you best bang for the buck. If you have very low end graphics, this might be the better alternative.

My original system, for example, "3 years old now" was built mainly as a bussiness program compute engine  "before I started playing EQ" had 2.4G processor, 1G ram, very lowend graphics board. going to any zone that had trees. i.e. JPF, warsisk, etc. screen would litteraly freeze, and I could not even move most days, game even crashed many times. Looting in JPF had to use "and play" in overhead view, /tar corpse, and /loot, sometimes even requiring me to sit first. Upgrading to 2G ram, did very little to improve this. Upgraded to Nvidia 5700, and the game just flys now, took out the extra ram, and dont even miss it.

bought a 'mid level gaming system' a year, or so ago, to start 2 box'n ( 2.1G processor, 1G ram, nvidia 5500 ). play a druid here most time as a DPS/healer bot for my beast. Casting group gate to PoK, my main could zone to PoK, zone to Guild lobby, then to Guld hall, be sitting in regen pool about the time druid managed to show up in PoK. Took the extra 1G out of main system, installed here, and now main is in guild hall about same time as druid shows up in pok.

so really its all a matter of what you have now, in all 3 areas, memory, graphics, processor, as to what is going to give you most bang for your buck. PS: yeah I run the same exact virus program on both boxes, and even main computer has tons more software packages loaded on it, bot box, has only EQ & virus prgrams loaded. tested upload/download performance is same on both.

[tunr]

More RAM is not always a good thing as windows will create a swap file on your hard drive the same size as the amount of ram in your system.
Since EQ is a graphic intensive program you would want a high end video card if your going to 2 box. Now, some here will disagree with this, but if you want to run all the character models in both EQ windows on the same system you will need a video card with at least 256 mb of ram or better to prevent the lag you will get. especially when zoning both characters at the same time.

CPU speed is a plus and a P4 or better would be more than sufficient to handle 2 boxing on the same system.

[Sarkaukar]

Yeah Looking at a full raid of luclin models will almost always bring your system to a crawl. Even with a 6800 Ultra SLI setup, because the issue is more CPU bound then vertex or fillrate bound (though it does have a large number of vertices).

The main problem is that the luclin models have on average 30 seperate textures and over 100 bones. They end up being about 40 batches each on average. So when you have 40 to 50 of them on the screen you are doing 1500-2000 batches just for the characters, then add in the zone geometry, the particles, and whatever objects are about and it gets alot higher.

One of the things that I hope to be able to work on in the near future is automated texture atlasing for the character models which should reduce the batch counts fairly significantly. That should reduce the hit for rendering character models enough to allow a decent machine to not crawl so much with a raid of luclin models on the screen.

[maxawesome]

For boxing, CPU is more important than anything, especially if you're using a single physical computer. My advise is based on my experiences using WinEQ2.0:

I would recommend a dual-core CPU for the simple reason that WinEQ2.0 will assign affinity to the most available CPU for each instance of EQ you run. I run two. This works magnificently.

Video isn't so much an issue because you can always scale down graphics in EQ options menu to allow better game-play performance. You can't throttle the amount of CPU it uses.

RAM is always important, but even more important, as few realize, is Hard Drive speed. Typically people experience a bottle-neck here as much of the data EQ uses is cached to and from the Hard Drive. Therefore I recommend a pair of SATA drives in a RAID0, or similar performance RAID config. I currently run PATA drives in RAID0, and I experience almost no lag when running both toons, even in guild raid situations (of course I do turn off particle effects).

That's my two cp.

[Stumps_Bertox]

oh damn, wineq 2.0 has dual core support? i just ordered a 256meg vid  2.0 ghz dual core laptop from dell for "work"

[Merescata]

i just ordered a 256meg vid  2.0 ghz dual core laptop from dell for "work"

1705 or 1505?