Now here’s a question -just how much money does it cost to multibox? Once again, software costs are a non issue. But what about hardware costs?
Well, I am willing to bet that somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of players already posses the hardware required to quad box Eve. So, quadboxing wouldn’t cost a super majority of players a dime to do.
But what about boxing more than that? Well, I first built my rig in 2012. I then spent about 250 bucks getting a GTX 1060 when it came out, and then spent another 350 about 6 months ago to upgrade the RAM, CPU, and Mobo (Ryzen 5 3600 and 32GB of RAM) (Oh, I could have also sold my old hardware on ebay to further reduce my total cost, but instead used it to upgrade friends and family). This allows me to multibox at least 11 accounts stably. I’m not sure what my upper limit is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I could get up to 20 accounts. Obviously, a lot of players would also need to upgrade their PSU’s, and not everyone knows how to upgrade systems, but the fact remains that it would probably cost most players less money to upgrade their systems to the point where they can multibox 20 accounts than it would cost them to buy a latest gen console right now.
Where I got the 70% figure from
- I don’t have access to a current hardware survey for Eve players. But I do have access to steam’s December 2020 survey. So let’s use that to get a ballpark idea of what the typically player can do.
- 89% of all steam users have 8 or more gigs of RAM (You might be able to get away with less, but I know that 8GB can get the job done).
- I don’t know what is the minimum GPU that can handle quad boxing is, but I found a guy who said he does it with a GTX 650M. Which means that any card which is comparable or better, and has more than 336MB of memory can quad box Eve. This means that pretty much any card from the GT 740 tier or better (that also has at least 512MB of RAM -some of those older cards might only have 256MB. Don’t know, didn’t check) should be able to quad box. This means that around 70% of all steam users should be able to quad box Eve (I stopped adding after I got to 67%. Also, do note that I excluded the “other” category even though a lot of the newest cards appear to be grouped in there).
- Okay, the number of players that can run eve based upon their CPU’s is even harder to figure out because steam only gives data about clock speeds and cores, and not individual CPU’s. However, given the fact that 85% of CPU’s are quad core or better, and the fact that 76% of CPU’s have a clock speed of 2.7GHz or better, I don’t consider it unreasonable to conclude that CPU’s are probably not a bigger bottleneck than graphics cards are.
- Long story short, GPU’s are probably the limiting factor for most players. Which means that somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of all players can quad box Eve.