I can do 25-30 on the computer I built a few months ago. I would suggest splitting it up and doing 2 computers though because it's easier to manage. I also just got all my accounts banned that were on 1 computer, so splitting them up might reduce risk of getting all banned at once.
Because WoW and HB dont scale with Cores its recommend Heartz over Cores. I would prefer a Intel Quad Core CPU (Xeon, I5 or I7).
But if you have more cores, you can throw them in VMs and have each VM on a VPN to spoof your ip and then it won't look like they're all one one PC either a ton of overhead though.
And get instantly banned for using a VPN, great idea... Also, using VMs would just decrease the amount of bots possible to run.
MaxMuster is correct here but I like to add two comments: 1. Make sure you have a SSD in your system. If the bots log everything and you have a lot of bots running HDD can be a bottleneck. SSD solves this issue. 2. I do not agree to his GTX 460 info. While he is correct that this GPU is enough I cannot recomment running such a GPU on systems running 24/7 due to energy usage. More modern cards like GTX 960 are much much faster while staying cooler, more silent and using less energy. If you bot at home and your parents pay the electricity, forget what I said If you bot for your own and you have to pay, this is something to keep in mind.
Thanks for proving me wrong with your very informative post In the context of botting, with the details turned to low, the game wants a better CPU than GPU. Then, even when the game is turned up to high/ultra, in situations such as raids the CPU is often the bottleneck of systems.
The GTX 460 was only a sample to show that GPUs is not important for Botting direct. With the aspects of energy, faster and cooler your right.
and do you think that the graphics part from the CPU is enough when you get an i7? or the onbaord graphics on some motherbaords?
This is a good Question. Never saw someone only running the I7 / OnBoard GPU. But i think its to low.
You can run 5 clients smoothly on integrated graphics. So I gotta disagree with you there, wow is more cpu intensive.
@OP This is generally a really bad idea. It's just much more safer to buy shitty old PCs and run 5 clients on them each, you can get these for like €200. So you'd need 6 of em to run 30 bots and its going to be much much more smooth than running 30 clients on one PC, even if that PC costs €2000. Then you just VNC connect to each of the PCs and have those windows up on your main computer, zero lagg. What hardware do you need for this? AMD processor with integrated graphics like the A8 5600K 60gb SSD 8gb ddr3 This system should be able to run around 6-10 bots @ 20fps with settings tuned down to lower than low. But sure, if you want to buy something extremely high end just for the epeen feeling, go for it. It's neither economical nor practical though.
Onboard is not enough. No matter how low you adjust the settings. Onboard is atm. not fast enough for mass botting. I doubt that even the new onboard GPUs coming out these days are fast enough. You need an extra card I would say.
btw. I agree with Macatho. In my opinion it makes more sense to have a couple of thin clients capable of running 3-5 wow instances instead of having huge machines running more. You can easily sell and exchange the smaller pc's if the hw id is banned somehow and blizz is always targeting them. Even if you can change a lot of hw info with software Blizz might read fixed data and gets you this way.
My i5-4440 3.1ghz uses 35-40% cpu with 5 bots. I'd say 10-12 is easily doable, but 15 might be a bit too much.