So here's what I'm looking at building. I'm mostly planning to box 6 to 30 instances of EQ on an emulator server and run macroquest, likely with the modbot or a similar plugin in the future.

I already have a case, 610W psu and an M4 crucial 128 gb SSD. I use windows 7 and currently I'm using the Titanium client, though I have been considering an upgrade to one of the newer clients for 0 coin weight and other benefits.

Here's what I'm looking at upgrading to inside the box:

GIGABYTE GV-N670OC-2GD GeForce GTX 670 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card $399.99

G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL8Q-16GBZH $114.99

MSI Z77A-GD65 LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS
$179.99

Intel Core i5-3570K Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4000 BX80637I53570K
$229.99

Subtotal: $924.96

I suspect 16 gb RAM may be an issue at some point so I'm thinking I may want to swap to a pair of 8gb sticks or just build it with 4x8gb sticks from the start. My current mobo has a cap of 8 gb but I put 4x1gb sticks in it and I'd have to replace all 4 sticks to max out it's capacity.

Something else I'm considering is going with the i3770 for the additional processing power. It's been over 6 years since I last upgraded.

Opinions? Comments?

It looks good to me, but I'm a bit of a slouch when it comes to hardware. I always have to brush up on new things for a few weeks every time I build a system. http://www.tomshardware.com/ can be your friend when you are researching components, but perhaps someone more knowledable has better advice.

I can tell you that I've boxed 12 on a mid-range system I built about 4 years ago. Although, performance began to be effected going beyond 9 clients.

Can save some money and go with a cheaper video card. My old 8800ultra runs better then almost anything else I've bought (and killed) since.

Get more ram, you can never have enough ram if you are a serious boxer.
I went from a 4 or 8 gig setup to 92 which is a little over kill but I run a bunch of other stuff that I use it for.

92 gigs of ram.... what the fuck dude

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117286
Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo) 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1155 69W Quad-Core Server Processor BX80637E31230V2

From what I've read and been told this processor is as fast as the i7-2600k for the price of the i5-3570. The cons are that it doesn't have onboard video (I'm buying a video card) and it isn't really overclockable. I don't overclock my machines so that's just fine for me too. Last time I tried overclocking the minimal gains I received were vastly offset by the increased crashes.

Another pro to the Xeon is hyperthreading. I haven't found concrete evidence this will help run multiple instances of EQ and MQ2 but speculation I've picked up says it should. Any opinions here?

I picked up 32 gigs of ram on a deal for the new machine yesterday since it was a 1 day offer.

I saw the 92 gigs of ram and laughed for a second. I figured it had to be a typo meant to be 12 gigs. :)

purely for boxing on eq emu, the processor doesn't matter as much, i have a similar setup to what you described and i box 25 on 16gb easy, my processor cores never go above 5% utilization (i have a quad core i5 no HT). as war mentioned above, ram is the main thing to worry about for boxing alot. and as maud mentioned, tomshardware is a great place to go, i would suggest anandtech forums (forums.anandtech.com), you can look through suggested setups, post your desired setup/goals and have others there give you ideas/help save money/get more performance.

about the HT, in general it will help out with processing (it essentially emulates a second virtual core for each actual core), however i don't think eq really uses SMP very well. in addition as i mentioned processing power will not really be a bottleneck for you in this purpose, i would opt for a cheaper processor unless you are going to need that processing power for something else.

also the speed (i.e. 3.3ghz) of the processor is somewhat irrelevant in terms of actual user performance. to get a true gauge of the performance benchmarking software is used to determine the "real world" performance of processors. sites like tomshardware have tons of benchmarks and comparisions for this purpose.

I built the machine a while back and overall I'm happy with it. I've been boxing 18 on it. I can do it with full graphics but the spell effects were just too much. I literally was going blind with spell effects maxed out. If I was killing a raid mob with more than 2 or 3 groups or with others the mob was just a bright blur with so many spells hitting it at once continuously.

My cpu usage right now is ~38%. I have 3 groups of eq toons on and google chrome open with mq2 running and all I'm really doing is auto tradeskilling.

Physical memory is at 47%.

The only time the machine lags is when I zone multiple groups at once but I haven't been to plane of fire yet (don't have access).

I have had some graphics glitches. Some toons will get this strobe light effect or they'll lose graphics and see through most of the world around them. Camping that toon to desktop and reloading always fixes it. Something gets corrupted for individual toons, not for the whole machine. I'm guessing the graphics issues are related to EQ emulator's build or maybe my graphics card. I didn't have problems when I was running just 6 but with 18 sometimes 1 or 2 toons will have the graphics issue. The game still runs fine, just has a strobe light effect of flashing screen with some toons.

I'm happy with the machine. I never did OC it mainly because I just want it to run stable. I did put 32 gigs of ram in it. Had to upgrade to windows 7 professional edition to use all the ram. The home edition of win 7 only supports 8 gigs of ram so keep that in mind if you buy more ram. Apparently professional and ultimate support up to 192 gb of ram but 32 gb is the most I've seen for a personal pc mobo.

fwiw, UF client is much more lightweight and happy with multi-instancing than titanium.