The Hidden Forest

Wait you didn't check this out thinking about undies did ya?

Question, I plan on building a new computer say around feb or so. I box 4 on my laptop (w/ dual monitor) and that has its hiccups for sure. So what do you have and how many do you box at a time. My goal is to box a full group. But I'd like the room for alittle more.

[1. Software] The biggest upgrade you can make will be software-wise, and that's staying away from Titanium if you're still using it. That alone will speed up load times, and decrease RAM usage.

[2. Software] The next big upgrade is allowing the FPS plugin (MQ2FPS.dll) from MQ2 to manage each client's frames per second.

[3. Software] In-game settings. Turning off new models, spell effects, clip plane, and dynamic lighting can go a long way towards getting more clients to run smoothly on the hardware you currently have.

[4. Hardware] RAM. If you max out settings (Underfoot client), budget 1GB per character. If you minimize settings, budget around 500MB per character.

[5. Hardware] Video card. I recommend a dedicated one with a minimum of 1GB video ram, more depending upon the setting you use in game.

[6. Hardware] Processor.

[7. Hardware] SSD (solid state drive). I love mine, but I have to admit that once the client gets loaded in to RAM when you start up the client, there's not too much use for the SSD after that. So for gaming, an SSD is nice but not a big difference. For nearly everything else you can do on your computer, an SSD is pretty amazing.

[8. Internet] If you're playing on a slow connection with bad latency, that's never fun. In fact, if you are, then I'd put internet way higher up on this list. But for someone with a 10megabit connection, you probably won't see much, if any, improvement with more speed.

Zoning times are generally determined by how much 'stuff' your character has saved about them. More items, augs, aa's, flags - more loading time. Making lvl 1 noobs is a treat with how much faster they zone =)

Thanks for your reply Noren. I agree with all of those. Havn't messed with FPS though... gonna have to load it. Right now im running on my laptop a intel i5, 4g of ram and onboard graphics ofcourse. What I would like to get is a AMD FX 8150 (they have the 83's out but not sure about them) with about 16g of ram and a decent gpu (havn't made up my mind on that yet, if i can do it i'd like to get a 2gig card or run 2 1gig cards). A ssd is a must along with a 2tb hd for media and such.

The machine im gonna build has to be a multi tasking monster since thats what i do.

If you buy that setup and do all of the software adjustments I talked about above, you'll be wayyy overkill for this game. You could probably box 32 (which is the limit per IP on this server, iirc) smoothly lol.

I play on a laptop that was a Spring 2011 model, has a sandy bridge i7, dedicated Radeon 6770m, 8GB ram, a 256GB Samsung 830 SSD, and if I want to I can (but don't) play 15 chars no problem. Probably could do more, I just haven't tried it.

That being said, if your goal is 6 toons, then you will vastly surpass your goal with that setup!

Overkill is cool with me.