Discussion - 6 EQ on an 8GB Ebay bargain (<~$100) ? (1 Viewer)

[BigDorf]

Hi guys

I've been reading over the forums and saw a few references to the number of instances of EQ people are running on one machine, along with suggestions of budget machines sourced (by example - eBay) for the region of $100.

Would like to encourage discussion in this regard, to see how people have set this up and explore the possibilities.
Currently, I've an 8GB i7 Win 10 laptop and have ran 3 instances fine. (alt-tab boxing)

Can people suggest what sort of things they avoided, or perhaps sought out as good deals when reviewing the computers on offer?

Also, is there best practice around how things are setup. Some sort of optimizations to the EQ configuration, or to Windows to allow 6 instances to exist on one machine?
I'm inferring people are using 5 instances as assistants, with 1 the driver.

I don't mean looking at the install of Very Vanilla, MQ2 components or KissAssist.
I'm referring purely to how 6 (picked as a group size) number of instances can fit into 8 gigs, along with the OS etc, and operate smoothly.

Thanking in advance, for your inputs to this.

 

[Zebadiah]

Greetings All. Huuummmmm I am running an AMD Ryzen 7 1700 Eight-Core Processor and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 with Installed Memory: 32.00 GB. I am currently running 6 instances on this setup and its very stable and is working great so far.

 

[microscope]

I am currently 36 boxing on my PC and it does pretty well but I recently upgraded. I have a Ryzen 5 3600 at stock speed and 32gb ram. With everything loaded in it uses around half the ram, and I have the clients spread out over all the cores so each one is running at about 90% when in combat etc. And that settles to less when doing not much. The only thing I really use is mq2eqwire which is really good. I also have the game installed twice and I run my main client with all the graphics maxed out and all the other clients have all the settings set to as low as it goes, including wire frame models.

Before this I used to run 18 boxes on my PC which was an old sandy bridge 2500K but I had it overclocked to 4.7ghz. My main limit with 18 was that I only had 16gb which used to get gobbled up almost completely by the 18. And back then I was using Titanium client which uses less memory than the modern client. But it just goes to show that the old cpu was pretty good to handle 18 comfortably.

 

[VorpalChicken]

I'm running 6 instances of EQ on my old PC atm (as my shiny new one decided to combust, which is a whole fun story all by itself) I bought the PC in 2012 it's an old Alieware Aurora mk. 1

Processor : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz (8 CPUs), ~2.7GHz
6144MB RAM @1333MHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050

Only upgrades it's had is the GFX card and an 500GB SSD

Works with Redguides and EQwire to run 6 accounts with a minimum of fuss

 

[william12]

3950x 128 gbs of ram, AMD RX 580 8gb running 54 toons at 18% of the CPU and 50% of the ram. I even disable turbo/OC on the CPU and make it stick to 3.5ghz.

 

[eqtrader74]

EQ toons require about 1 GB of memory. As a very old game, it doesn't care too much about CPU. GPU matters if you plan to run at high settings and clip plane. Adding mq2eqwire will let the computer skip drawing all background toons, so that will save a ton of resources and boost performance.

I've run 6 MQ2 toons on an old office HP Pavilion 23 using eqwire. These are about $120 on ebay now. Before eqwire that comp would barely run 2 toons. This is a AMD E2-18xx (roughly like intel i3) with just built-in Radeon graphics and Win8. I upgraded to 12 GB memory so I could also open some web pages. I wouldn't really recommend Pav23 as an EQ box, cause they can be slow to tab between toons once you've been running for a few hours. But you can do 6 on something like this with eqwire.

I've also used older gaming laptops, around the $200 price point, to run 6 toons just fine. On these I tend to lower graphics to min and run stickfigures for the toons.

Ranking performance bang for your buck:

1. mq2eqwire - $10/year and it will make any older spec system run a lot faster.
2. Adding more memory - Try to get at least 1 GB per toon, plus some extra for system stuff. Win10 likes a lot for system. If you want to web browse, go quite a bit over.
3. More cores - It does help, but I've done my main group of 6 toons on a dual core. If you're going to run 12+ on one comp, then yeah I'd look into more cores.
4. Bigger screen(s) - Besides info overload from EQ, once you add MQ2 info, there is a lot to fit on one screen. I'd skip 4k though, the text gets too small.
5. Graphics card - If you like max settings, try doing two installs. One at max for your main toon, then run the rest on a low setting background toon install.
6. SSD hard drive - It doesn't help loading time as much as you'd like, but it is a little better.

 

[BigDorf]

Thanks for this feedback so far guys, appreciated.

I hadn't heard of EQ with wire frame models, so took to the google, and this lead to the eqclient.ini file amendment of introducing:-
StickFigures=1
I gave it a quick whirl. EQ launched, and indeed there on the character select screen a stick wire man. Into the game, and what I took to be a gnome, walked by also looking like a collection of twigs. I didn't see any difference in the memory usage, so infer this is a performance thing for rendering of crowds as opposed to saving ram from loading not used graphic textures.

Whilst I'd asked about 8GB bargains, its interesting to read of your higher ram spec's and what you guys have been able to run on those. It sounds like a ball park figure of "an instance per GB" is standing out as expectations. The mention of specs, with regards CPUs and GPU you have also helps get a feel where you are at.

Really appreciate you taking the time to respond, making note as I see the posts.