PC for home office. Needs to run VM's

[darragh.delaney]

Hi All,
Thinking about getting a PC for my home office. Because of my work I may need to run multiple (<4) virtual machines so will need extra memory. Not too worried about running games although would be nice to run HD videos smoothly.

Any thoughts on the following?

Case STYLISH PIANO BLACK ENIGMA MICRO-ATX CASE + 2 FRONT USB
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-3470 (3.2GHz) 6MB Cache
Motherboard ASUS® P8H77-M: M-ATX, DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0Gb/s, CrossFireX™
Memory (RAM) 16GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (4 X 4GB)
Graphics Card 1GB AMD RADEON™ HD6450 - DVI,HDMI,VGA - DX® 11
2nd Graphics Card NONE
Memory - 1st Hard Disk 500GB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD5003AZEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)
2nd Hard Disk NONE
RAID NONE
1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
2nd DVD/BLU-RAY Drive NONE
Memory Card Reader INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
Power Supply 350W Dual Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan
Processor Cooling INTEL SOCKET LGA1155 STANDARD CPU COOLER
Sound Card ONBOARD 8 CHANNEL (7.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Network Facilities 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT - AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs
USB Options 4 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD
Modem NONE, I WILL BE USING BROADBAND
Floppy Disk Drive NONE
Firewire NONE
TV Card NONE
Operating System NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
Office Software NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Monitor NONE
2nd Monitor NONE
3rd Monitor NONE
4th Monitor NONE
DVI-D & HDMI Monitor Cables NONE
Eyefinity / GeForce 3D Vision NONE
Keyboard & Mouse NONE
Mouse NONE
Gaming Mouse Pad NONE
Speakers NONE
Webcam NONE
Headsets NONE
Surge Protection NONE
Cable Tidy NONE
Printer NONE
External Hard Drive NONE
Warranty 3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)
Home Installation NONE
Data Recovery NONE
Delivery 2 - 3 DAY DELIVERY TO REPUBLIC OF IRELAND (£19)
Build Time Standard Build - Approximately 7 to 9 working days
Pricing Information

Price (excluding VAT) £423.33

 

[Frank100]

Hi,

Ideally You really need to stretch your budget to an i7 as this gives you hyper threading (and therefore 8 threads). Multiple virtual machines are going to use up your 4 cores very quickly. I know you say less than 4 but your actual machine's going to start getting a bit slow. If budget is an issue maybe a 6 or 8 core AMD would be better.

16GB of memory is about right. For an extra £2-3 you could get 1600Mhz memory and for business purposes that would be worth it. The default speed of the memory controller for the Ivy bridge chips is that speed.

If you are using a copy of VMWare Workstation then you'll have much better driver support in your virtual machines. It's not cheap though. The free variants have inferior driver support so that probably means no HD movie support in the virtual machines. I say probably so you'd need to check.

I haven't looked up the stats for your suggested graphics card but is be a little surprised if that supported full HD anyway. It's a bit old and I can't remember it's stats.

I know I'm suggesting spending more money but I think you'll find your current build a bit of a compromise.

 

[Karnor00]

You should be able to run HD videos fine with just integrated graphics - at least that's certainly the case for a standalone machine, I don't know much about running virtual machines. The only reason to get a GPU is for gaming, for some editing software which benefits from it or to connect up multiple monitors.

 

[darragh.delaney]

Thanks for your advice\recomendations to date. If I was to look at AMD processors, would this spec be okay? Main thing is the ability to run multiple virtual machines

Case
STYLISH PIANO BLACK ENIGMA MICRO-ATX CASE + 2 FRONT USB

Processor (CPU)
AMD A10-5800K Quad Core APU (3.8GHz) & Radeon™ HD 7660D Graphics

Motherboard
ASUS® F2A85-M: (M-ATX, DDR3, USB 3.0, 6Gb/s)

Memory (RAM)
16GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (4 x 4GB KIT)

Graphics Card
Integrated AMD Radeon HD 7000 Series Graphics

Memory - 1st Hard Disk
500GB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD5003AZEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM

Memory Card Reader
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT

Power Supply
350W Dual Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan

Processor Cooling
STANDARD AMD CPU COOLER

Sound Card
ONBOARD 8 CHANNEL (7.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)

Network Facilities
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT - AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs

USB Options
6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD

Operating System
NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED

Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE

Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE

Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)

 

[wowcraftify]

Look in 'AMD extreme computers' for 6 or 8 core processors, this would improve performance because four cores will easily be used up. Hope this helps.

 

[Toxophilix]

I think adam7999c is on the right lines. I don't have experience of running VMs (or anything) on AMD processors, but it would surely make sense to pick an 8-core CPU for your purpose. Even the high-end FX CPUs seem pretty cheap.

One random thought: if you are going to be running this machine for long hours at a time, under heavyish loads, then you might want to get a bit better case to optimize cooling. You won't have a high-end GPU pumping out heat, but a heavily worked eight-core CPU is going to generate a lot of heat.

 

[wowcraftify]

I never quite understood how amd could sell an 8 core processor at such a low price because, as far as I know, they're actually pretty good. Side note, you might want to upgrade the case and/or CPU cooler.

 

[Toxophilix]

I never quite understood how amd could sell an 8 core processor at such a low price because, as far as I know, they're actually pretty good.

They're cheap because they have to be, I think. I'm sure AMD would love to charge more if people would pay it. If you look at these benchmarks - FX8350 vs i5 3570K - http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/697?vs=701 - you can see that one processor is ahead in some areas and the other in others. So is it a tie? Well, not if you're a gamer or anyone whose main interest is getting a single or dual-threaded application to run as fast as possible. You can see the i5 is easily ahead there. The FX shines on 7zip performance, but people don't care about that.

Well, that's my take on it anyway. I don't think there's anything wrong with AMD's technical abilities, just with their strategy.

 

[wowcraftify]

Wow! I knew the 3570k was better for gaming but I didn't know it would be that much of an improvement, what makes a supposedly slower, quad core CPU better for gaming than a 4ghz 8core CPU?

 

[Toxophilix]

what makes a supposedly slower, quad core CPU better for gaming than a 4ghz 8core CPU?

Well, they have different architectures and evidently Intel's gets more done per core per clock-cycle. (That alone doesn't necessarily mean it's better, but as things shake out it seems to be.)

Also, the eight cores don't help the AMD processor win the gaming challenge because 99% of games use less than four cores. Most probably use two or one. (This is also why the i7 is not considered a worthwhile upgrade over the i5 if you are only interested in gaming. The i7's signature ability is that is can simulate eight cores though it only has four physical cores. This is also not particularly useful if the program you are interested in is only running two threads to start with.)

Of course, we might see games that could use more than four cores appearing over the next couple or years, but then again we might not.

 

[Karnor00]

Don't read too much into the number of cores either. Intel and AMD measure these things somewhat differently so you can't directly compare the two. AMD's 8 core machines share some components between cores, so it's not really 8 completely independent cores.