EVE General Discussion

Hi,

I'm considering building a new PC, and I'm wondering what the community recommends for a PC intended to run multiple Eve clients simultaneously?

Dual potatoes wired together...

Seriously multiple clients aren't that much more of a strain than one client. If you can handle one you can probably handle 3-5

Concentrate more on good graphics card than processor. SSD drive of course.

Eve does not use a significant amount of ram or cpu. 8gb is plenty unless you plan on running client numbers in the double digits. As previously mentioned it depends on what exactly youre planning on doing. 3 screens 3 clients, 1 screen 3 clients, etc. If you plan on multiple clients being displayed across multiple screens then a decent video card is your priority. If youre using one screen its not as much issue since no matter how many clients are running the same number of pixels are being calculated.

Other than that, ssd cause if youre gonna have multiple clients accessing the drive at the same time you to want to be bottlenecked by access speeds, and network speed and reliability. If your connection isnt up to snuff and youve got 4 clients sending and recieving packets then bend over and prepare for socket closures.

Most important of all these things, read and understand the eula. You may not send inputs to multiple clients simultaneously. You may not use third party software to display only portions of each client screen. All clients must be viewed full and unedited. You may not use macros to send more than one shortcut command with a single keypress. If the input cant be assigned in the shortcut settings for a single action then it cant be assigned to a programmable key.

Have fun, dont get banned, and dont whine about it and claim innocence if you do.

I have been running several accounts for some time. The rig I'm using now I built four or so years ago. I'll give you the specs so you have an idea what level of (old) hardware will do for you.

i5-2500 CPU @3.3GHZ
16 GB RAM
8800GTS GPU (EVGA made I think)

Using this I ran as many as five accounts driven unto two 32 inch monitors (1080p), using the awesome eve-o tool.

While the 5th account did stress the GPU a little and I had to turn down some quality settings on a few accounts, I never had any issues. I caught a sale a few months ago and picked up a GTX970 and its WAY overkill for eve. Five accounts all on highest settings don't even take it over 50%.

As far as internet connection, eve needs a stable connection way more than speed. There is a lot of traffic, but not much data. Several times when my ISP was having issues I ran my five accounts of my cell phone (AT&T) and never had any issues with socket closing.

Hope some of that was helpful to you.

Yeah, I guess I should have been more specific.

Eventually I want to be running up to 5 accounts simultaneously. Multi-Monitor setup (which I suspect might be the most complex/expensive part to set up, and the part I haven't done before).

I've done some research and discussed the options with my landlord, who's a rather successful private IT consultant in his day job. It's actually cheaper to build a couple lower end PCs, and KVM them together, than it is to build a single really powerful PC to run 5 accounts simultaneously on a single tower multi-monitor setup.

For example, to build by better tower would cost the following: (prices from newegg and in US$)
CPU: 200
M. Board: 140
RAM: 100
GPU: 400
Single 1TB standard HDD, optical drive (dvd burner), tower, and power supply come to about 200.
Total for higher end tower that doesn't run 5 clients at full graphics: about US$1,040 without monitor and can power three HDMI ports or two DVIs

To build my lower end PC:
CPU: 90
M. Board: 75
RAM: 50
GPU: 120
Single 1TB standard HDD, optical drive (dvd burner), tower, and power supply come to about 200.
Total for lower end tower that can still run 2 clients at full graphics, or 5 on the preset for memory: about $550 without monitors and can power two DVI ports.

If you just get what you need to meet the recommended requirements for the game, and have access to some slightly used towers and optical drives, you can build one for significantly cheaper.

My setup I had planned on building, before the screaming deal on my newer tower came up, was to spend about US$1,000 and build three towers. One higher end to run 3 monitors and two lower end to run a single each.

After stumbling about in Eve for a month or so I finally decided to be a multi-boxer. I built three rather hi-end computers (i7/16 gb ram/ATI R9 Series (Can't remember which one, too lazy to hunt it down) along with three rather compact computer desks. The monitors are all squished together with all three trackballs on the center slide-out tray. Each computer runs one client, each client has multiple characters so basically this setup enables me to fly three ships at once. I never attempted to fly Eve with multiple clients on one box as to me it seems just so cool to fly my ships in formation. For my own preferences I'd rather multi-box with fairly high-end gaming computers rather than go the single box route. Either way be prepared to drop some loot; I could've bought a small (used) car for the money I've got in this setup.

My Eve command Center:
Eve Command Center

With the same UI layout I find I can alt-tab between 2 clients on the same system and utilise them pretty much as effectively as one - where it starts getting tricky is with 3 (or more) clients as its much harder to remember which client you need to change to and not so seamless to swap between them.

It doesn't take much. I can easily run 3 accounts on a laptop I got off the shelf in best buy...