Advice about upgrade

William Briot · April 16, 2016

Hello everyone,

I am a computer engineering student in France, and I am planning to upgrade my current desktop configuration (you can see it in my signature) by changing the CPU, motherboard and memory with a budget of 700-750€ (around 790-850 USD or 1010-1090 CAD).

I want to upgrade my old gaming desktop into a work computer (I need to run from 1 or 2 virtual machines, up to more than a dozen at the same time) with occasional gaming.

The others components will be upgraded later.

What I think would be a good upgrade :

- I7-5820K (cheapest I found is 409€)

- MSI X99A SLI PLUS (appear to be a good bang for the buck in euros, 245€)

- 2x8 GB of HyperX DDR4 (2x8 is cheaper than 4x4 from what I saw and more will be added later, 75€)

Thank you for your time.

Ps: Just posting before going to sleep (I'll be back in 9-10h, it's nearly midnight here).

HPWebcamAble · April 16, 2016

~~As far as I know, each virtual machine needs one CPU core, plus one for the basic OS. So you could only have 11 at a time.~~

Move along...

Mark77 · April 17, 2016

I don't have a lot to say, but I've read that Intel NICs are really, really preferred over Realtek hardware for VMware. You might want to verify accordingly, as well as the presence of VT-d support.

2 hours ago, HPWebcamAble said:

As far as I know, each virtual machine needs one CPU core, plus one for the basic OS. So you could only have 11 at a time.

No, most virtualizers do not work that way. And there are Xen / KVM setups, on Linux, that have literally hundreds of virtualized sessions on the same physical CPU.

p.s. I don't see a SSD for your "desktop" in your signature line. That's something that should be addressed if you don't have one. As even your i5 is still a pretty decent machine in the whole scheme of things for the sort of stuff most "computer engineering" students would be doing. And even runs virtualization stuff just fine.

William Briot · April 17, 2016

I agree that the i5 would be enough (although it doesn't have Hyper-Threading and VT -d) if the virtual machines were only small apache web server, but I need to have several Active Directory and Windows VM running which consume a lot ressources.

As for the Intel Nics, I have no idea but I will take a look at that.