Multi-Botting Rig?

[browneye]

I'm thinking about building a rig just to run bots on, and was wondering if anyone had any experience with setting up something like this, and what their experiences were and any recommendations they may have. I've heard good things about the new Ivy Bridge chips for botting setups like this, but I'm really clueless as to whats best with regards to cpu, gpu, and anything that affects performance.

Specifically, I'm looking to run anywhere from 8-16 bots, either Diablo 3, SWTOR, or most likely a mix of the two. I've been running a couple bots on my current rig in VMWare and am quite happy with the performance I'm getting from them, but I'm not sure how well that would scale up. If I had to choose, I'd rather run each one in their own VM, but if there's any gains to be had otherwise, I'd be happy to change that!

Any and all input is welcome, especially if you have any input as to whether SLI/Xfire is a help for something like this, as well as anyone who's built something for this purpose with consideration paid towards cooling and power consumption.

[FiremanSixNine]

This doesn't answer your question however..

You should note that it isn't really desireable to run that many bots on a single rig as you're exposing yourself to too much risk. 4 instances on a machine is the sensible limit. Someone's probally going to tell you they don't ban on IP. They follow it, when one is banned and investigate the other accounts on it. The other solution, VMware is takes too much resources imho.

So if you ran 4 d3 and 4 swtor that would be smart. I'll leave it to someone else to give you the geek talk on specs required

[beck3210]

Greetings,

Not sure what the guy above me is talking about -- since if one of your bots is detected, then the program itself is detected and nothing will save you.. ex: Hellbuddy

Anyway...

I'm currently running 15 bots on my rig. It's not top of line, I'm not using SLI/XFire cards. I'm just using a 2048 Dedicated Memory GE Force GT 520 Video Card. Nothing fancy.

I'm running with AMD FX-4170 4.2GHz Bulldozer 16GB DDR3.

I'm currently using "4" USB 16GB Kingston Flash Hard-Drives -- Which personally is allowing me to run at 30FPS on each bot.

What I've noticed is Diablo 3 is a huge strain on data transferring and the hard-drive tends to lag on loading maps when game ends.

Currently I'm at 70% CPU Usage and 62% Memory Usage.

I'm also rendering with wire frame, movement rendering, and low performance rendering.

My video card is running typically around 58F-60F.

Hope that helps.

Thanks,
-beck3210

[browneye]

Yeah, getting detected is the least of my concerns

Thanks for the input, that's actually not too far off what I'm currently running, just my board is maxed out at 6GB. That's probably where I'm hurting the most. Looks like its time to go motherboard shopping!

I hadn't considered running off USB drives, and on the bots I have going now that's absolutely where the biggest lag is, so I'll give that a shot as soon as I dig some up.

Are you running all of these directly or through a VM? Also, what are you using to change the rendering options? I hadn't tried anything like that before.

[Smoogels]

Just don't get a Bulldozer chip if you need to do anything with games

What specs have you got now, may I ask?

[browneye]

i7 920, 6GB DDR3, Radeon 5770, which I'm running 1 bot on while playing myself, as well as an ancient Core 2 Duo with a GeForce 9800 that chugs along. Neither setup is optimal, and I'd like to keep my gaming desktop just for me in the end, and let the bots have their own.

[Smoogels]

i7 920, 6GB DDR3, Radeon 5770, which I'm running 1 bot on while playing myself, as well as an ancient Core 2 Duo with a GeForce 9800 that chugs along. Neither setup is optimal, and I'd like to keep my gaming desktop just for me in the end, and let the bots have their own.

I would personally use that as a botting rig (which it's very capable of, if you upgrade the RAM a little to 8GB at least) and the CPU is still pretty decent.

If you got yourself a new gaming rig you could grab quite a decent computer pretty cheap
i5 3570K
8GB RAM
AMD 7850 GPU (or 7700 if you have a lower budget)
650W PSU

Which could play any game on the highest (with a few exceptions, like BF3 with the FXAA MSSA settings)
Your current gaming computer could do what you wish.

[browneye]

I'd like to do that, just my motherboard is a turd and maxed at 6GB (its an unsupported board that came out of a Gateway system), but it handles everything I play at least. Maybe targeting some (cheaper) parts around that level would be a good way to go though.

As an aside, are there any software optimizations that anyone recommends?

Thanks again for all the feedback here, I'm getting a good idea for what I should be targeting.

[Phygar]

For 8-16 bots you definitely want an i7

[ladygamer]

Think I would need a 2gb card for 10+ bots?

I currently have a

Intel Core i7 860
16GB DDR3
GeForce GTX 275

But currently running 6 and it sometimes 'freezes' on the one of the bots. When i check cpu..it's only around 40% and ram only being 6gb..

so assuming it's the video card?

Would u think I need a SSD? didn't know running then on Flash Drives would be fine... running them through multiple diff folders, but same drive tho ;x

any input would be great

[Smoogels]

Think I would need a 2gb card for 10+ bots?

I currently have a

Intel Core i7 860
16GB DDR3
GeForce GTX 275

But currently running 6 and it sometimes 'freezes' on the one of the bots. When i check cpu..it's only around 40% and ram only being 6gb..

so assuming it's the video card?

Would u think I need a SSD? didn't know running then on Flash Drives would be fine... running them through multiple diff folders, but same drive tho ;x

any input would be great

By running them off different folders you are making the spinning hard drive struggle as it will have to read different folders for each content, not a great idea even for a SSD

To get the best performance you would need to run them off 1-2 folders. It probably explains the freezes

[ladygamer]

By running them off different folders you are making the spinning hard drive struggle as it will have to read different folders for each content, not a great idea even for a SSD

To get the best performance you would need to run them off 1-2 folders. It probably explains the freezes

thanks, seems to have helped, +rep

[qshan]

I am currently using

Q8300
6GB Ram
MSI Radeon R4890
SATA drive

to run 5 bots. CPU utilization is around 50% to 70% with Ram at 80%.

[qshan]

How would you able to run multiple clients from 1-2 folders? I seem to have trouble running it even with -launch command and client do gray out and exit afterwards.

[Macpod]

How would you able to run multiple clients from 1-2 folders? I seem to have trouble running it even with -launch command and client do gray out and exit afterwards.

Same question for me... how do you do that? ISboxer?!