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How much ram do I need for a new pc?


midiman25

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Hi I,m looking to buy a new workstation pc possibly a Dell Precision.

I want to run Vista Ultimate x64 so that I can take advantage of as much ram as possible. The reason for this is that I will be running Virtual Machines and other hungry games on it.

I am thinking about going for 8GB but this is the maximum the motherboard can handle using a Intel C2 Duo CPU.

If I upgrade to a Xeon Quad I can use a 16GB - 32GB ram configuration

With the industry moving so fast is 8GB going to be enough??? I want the machine to last for around 5 years min.

My current Dell has 1GB ram and that was a lot 4.5 years ago. But the majority of PCs today are coming with 4GB ram as standard. So 4GB x 4 yrs equates to 16GB if trends continue.

What I am trying to say is this. If I buy an 8GB machine now, to advance futher would require me to buy a new motherboard later down the line.

I,m also looking to add 15K SAS drives.

What should I do?

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I think you've lost touch with reality. You do realize any ram you don't use just goes to waste. I'd just stick with the 4GB, even with the fact you're running some VMs and games at the same time. The VMs, when they go idle, will swap to the page file and won't be using ram anymore. There really comes a point where it's just a waste. And I really doubt you'll be running those VMs 24/4 and even if you are, they won't all be active.

Edited by TravisO
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Lost touch with reality I like that.

I want to run some VMs simultaneously. Some VMs will need 1GB of RAM!!

So if I run two of three together plus my OS. I could run into trouble with 4GB. 8GB would be a safer bet and is fairly priced.

But todays apps are so RAM intensive how long will 8GB last when runing virtual machines and games on a pc??

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I am thinking about going for 8GB but this is the maximum the motherboard can handle using a Intel C2 Duo CPU.

That's already overkill for like 99% of tasks, but it never hurts.

If I upgrade to a Xeon Quad I can use a 16GB - 32GB ram configuration

And that will cost you what, 3x as much as your computer costs in the first place?

It's not the processor that's the limit here, it's the motherboard. More RAM means either very expensive server boards with lots of slots for RAM, or a motherboard that accepts very expensive memory sticks of large capacities. And Xeon CPUs are also very expensive compared to C2D's.

With the industry moving so fast is 8GB going to be enough??? I want the machine to last for around 5 years min.

My current Dell has 1GB ram and that was a lot 4.5 years ago. But the majority of PCs today are coming with 4GB ram as standard. So 4GB x 4 yrs equates to 16GB if trends continue.

Hmm, I'm not sure if I've seen a single desktop with 8GB of RAM yet, so moving fast to that, I dunno. 4GB standard? Not the case yet either. The vast majority still ship with only 2GB.

What I am trying to say is this. If I buy an 8GB machine now, to advance futher would require me to buy a new motherboard later down the line.

So what? Spend $100 on a new motherboard in a few years, problem solved. What's wrong with that?

I,m also looking to add 15K SAS drives.

Wow, I wish I had that kind of $ to spend on a computer...

VMware-wise, you can already run a large amount of VMs within 8GB. If you leave 512MB for the host OS, and assigning 256MB to each VM running XP, that's 30 copies of it running at the same time, or 15 copies of Vista on 512MB each. Do you think you're really going to need more than that? If that's the case, then you should be looking into VMware ESX (or ESXi) instead, possibly running on 2 or more servers.

What you seem to want, is a computer that's still going to be a monster rig in 5 years, and basically you just can't buy that. A $50 CPU in 5 years is going to be faster than a $5000 one is now (e.g. a Xeon 1M 3.60GHz 800FSB only 4 years ago was $851, and a $40 Celeron now is faster). You can go the very expensive way with high end Xeons on expensive server motherboards and all that, but it's still not going to last forever. Just look at what's coming out in a year: nehalem. Completely new CPUs, new sockets, no more FSB bus, memory controllers on he CPU (triple channel DDR3), etc, plus various other changes, like PCI Express 2.0, DDR3 RAM, etc -- all of which is gonna require new boards and everything. And again, we're only talking about a year from now.

I say go for the quad and more max memory, this way you will be able to run more VMs at once and you get 4 cores.

A quad core like a Q6600 would be a good investment for things like VMware, but 8GB should be plenty.

You do realize any ram you don't use just goes to waste.

And now with SuperFetch, it doesn't go to waste anymore. Everything you would likely load (binaries for your usual apps) get cached in memory in advance, greatly reducing app load times (it's instantaneous). But past 8GB is sure overkill for anything but the most extreme cases.

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I will be running VM server O/S's eg 2003/2008 so I will need about 1GB ram per VM. Plus other VM,s like XP/Vista.

So that could be 2 vms servers ad one vm workstation running one on box some times. Say 3GB plus 2GB for host.

5GB in total, then allow for future advances leaves me 3GB spare. 16GB would leave me with 11GB spare.

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If you are looking at running that many machine concurrently then why are you looking at a workstation OS anyway (especially Ultimate)?

I work a lot with virtual machines on Hyper-V at work, and I find that even when I am setting up complex labs (e.g. DC, TS server, TS gateway and TS client in a virtual network) I can work comfortably with 8GB physical memory - and once the test is over I can save the state of the VMs to free up the RAM again.

I also have 1 server VM running all the time in addition to my parent partition.

The limitation will tend to be processing power or disk I/O rather than memory when you get to run many active VMs at the same time.

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I think you've lost touch with reality.

I think you fail to realize that there are those that DO utilize 8+GB of RAM. My motherboard supports 16GB and I have 8GB. There are frequent times that all memory is used and the pagefile is thrashed around.

@OP:

If you can afford it and justify it, then get as much as you can.

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Wouldn't say you've quite lost touch with reality!

Personally I'd start off with 8gb now and see how you fare with that, in two years or so have a look at sticking a few more GB's in.

Alternatively just stick the lot in now and have an almighty machine... NASA might ask to borrow it mind....

Its your choice i guess, i'd personally stick half of it in and see how it goes!

-Jon

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Wouldn't say you've quite lost touch with reality!

Personally I'd start off with 8gb now and see how you fare with that, in two years or so have a look at sticking a few more GB's in.

Alternatively just stick the lot in now and have an almighty machine... NASA might ask to borrow it mind....

Its your choice i guess, i'd personally stick half of it in and see how it goes!

-Jon

This is the machine I am looking to buy but 8GB is the MAX amount of RAM it can handle.

PROCESSOR Intel® Core™2 Quad Q9550 (2.83GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 12MB L2 Cache, Quad Core) 525W

OPERATING SYSTEM (English) genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate x64 SP1 WITH Media

TOWER/BASE ORIENTATION Vertical Chassis Orientation (Minitower, W: 170,2 x H: 447.3 x D: 468.4 mm)

MEMORY 8GB (4 x 2.0GB DIMM) 800MHZ ECC Dual Channel Memory (requires 64-bit O/S)

GRAPHICS CARD 512MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 1700 (MRGA14L), Dual Monitor DVI or VGA Graphics Card

HARD DRIVE 146G,(15,000rpm) SAS Hard Drive

2ND HARD DRIVE Additional - 146G,(15,000rpm) SAS 2 Hard Drive

OPTICAL DRIVE 16X DVD+/-RW

Here is the second configuration I am looking at.

PROCESSOR Intel Xeon E5440 (2.83GHz,1333FSB,2x6MB,Quad Core)

OPERATING SYSTEM (English) genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate x64 SP1 WITH Media

MEMORY 16GB DDR2 667 Quad Channel FBD Memory (8x2GB)

GRAPHICS CARD 512MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 1700 (MRGA14L), Dual Monitor DVI or VGA Graphics Card

HARD DRIVE 146G,(15,000rpm) SAS Hard Drive

OPTICAL DRIVE 16X DVD+/-RW + 16X DVD-ROM

FLOPPY/MEDIA DRIVES No Floppy Drive

Edited by midiman25
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ah!

Well again this is entirely up to you. I'd probably be happy with the 8gb but then again I dont use any programs/games as memory intensive as you! It all depends when you want to throw more money at the computer? I mean, if you dont mind parting with a bit more money now, you can upgrade the motherboard but not necessarily buy its maximum ram, update that at a later date should you need it? On the other hand, you could stick with that motherboard and go with the 8gb ram but when the time comes to upgrade you'd have to buy motherboard and ram at the same time.

-jon

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5GB in total, then allow for future advances leaves me 3GB spare. 16GB would leave me with 11GB spare.

Then you have enough to run at least double the VMs you need. So 8GB sounds perfectly adequate for the foreseeable future.

If you are looking at running that many machine concurrently then why are you looking at a workstation OS anyway (especially Ultimate)?

What he said. If you're going to be using it for VMs like that all the time, why go for Vista in the first place, instead of say, Windows 2008 with Hyper-V or even better, VMware ESXi?

The limitation will tend to be processing power or disk I/O rather than memory when you get to run many active VMs at the same time.

Depends on the workload really, but 8GB surely won't be a limit for like 3 VMs, especially if he's using VMware ESXi (you can overcommit memory, and it only has a 32MB footprint in the first place)

PROCESSOR Intel® Core™2 Quad Q9550 (2.83GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 12MB L2 Cache, Quad Core) 525W edit

GRAPHICS CARD 512MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 1700 (MRGA14L), Dual Monitor DVI or VGA Graphics Card edit

HARD DRIVE 146G,(15,000rpm) SAS Hard Drive edit

2ND HARD DRIVE Additional - 146G,(15,000rpm) SAS 2 Hard Drive edit

And that costs what? 3.5G's? For running 3 VMs? You could build something about 90% that fast for under half the price (and it's not like the fancy $500 vid card is gonna make VMs any faster) This is no cheaper than having 3 computers do the task really.

Then again, you say nothing about the workload. Two mostly idle Win 2003/2008 instances plus a client won't put any load on this (hell, I've run more than that on a P4 laptop with a single 5400rpm disk before). Not knowing what these servers will do, how many clients or anything, we just can't guess where your actual bottlenecks will be. If you don't have a whole lot of concurrent users, a single SATA drive might be adequate. Same for the CPU, with only 3 VMs, unless you have a solid load on the server VMs, your CPU is going to sit ~99% idle.

Check the server processes you're going to run in those VMs: the disk I/O they create, their memory usage, the CPU usage, etc. Then from that you can figure out what you actually need. For all we know, it could be a network bandwidth bottleneck you're going to have. It's just impossible to tell without knowing the workload (file server? web server? database server? who knows...) and what kind of stress you're going to put on it (5 users? 50? 500? 5000?)

Then again, it's not like I'd put a serious workload on a couple server OS'es running inside of VMs, which are on top of a client OS.

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I,m just worried, I work in a large IT dept looking after Servers. Our Dell 2850s get hammered with disk I/O. Although I will not be using my VMs at intensive.

One of them has 4GB and is a dedicated mail server. I want to be able to run around 4 MS Virtual PCs on my PC with no problem. And still be able to use the O/S and play games.

I can order Dell PCs at Education prices so that is one reason why I am looking to get the best for my money.

My current pc with P4 3.2ghz 1GB ram cant handle 2VMs and the Vista host O/S.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the machine I am looking to buy but 8GB is the MAX amount of RAM it can handle on the motherboard.

PROCESSOR Intel® Core™2 Quad Q9550 (2.83GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 12MB L2 Cache, Quad Core) 525W

OPERATING SYSTEM (English) genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate x64 SP1 WITH Media

TOWER/BASE ORIENTATION Vertical Chassis Orientation (Minitower, W: 170,2 x H: 447.3 x D: 468.4 mm)

MEMORY 8GB (4 x 2.0GB DIMM) 800MHZ ECC Dual Channel Memory (requires 64-bit O/S)

GRAPHICS CARD 512MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 1700 (MRGA14L), Dual Monitor DVI or VGA Graphics Card

HARD DRIVE 146G,(15,000rpm) SAS Hard Drive

2ND HARD DRIVE Additional - 146G,(15,000rpm) SAS 2 Hard Drive

OPTICAL DRIVE 16X DVD+/-RW

Here is the second configuration I am looking at that should hopefully last longer.

PROCESSOR Intel Xeon E5440 (2.83GHz,1333FSB,2x6MB,Quad Core)

OPERATING SYSTEM (English) genuine Windows Vista® Ultimate x64 SP1 WITH Media

MEMORY 16GB DDR2 667 Quad Channel FBD Memory (8x2GB)

GRAPHICS CARD 512MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 1700 (MRGA14L), Dual Monitor DVI or VGA Graphics Card

HARD DRIVE 146G,(15,000rpm) SAS Hard Drive

OPTICAL DRIVE 16X DVD+/-RW + 16X DVD-ROM

FLOPPY/MEDIA DRIVES No Floppy Drive

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Our Dell 2850s get hammered with disk I/O.

High disk I/O processes doesn't tend to work so great under VMs

One of them has 4GB and is a dedicated mail server.

Exchange is another of those that's better not running inside a VM. Exchange will use ALL the RAM you throw at it to make mail delivery faster. It's just too much of a memory hog, plus, it tends to use a LOT of disk space too, and disk I/O can be pretty high (again, check relevant perf counters). Exchange can easily max out a dedicated server's resources (again, depends on the # of clients and all). Personally, I'd leave that alone as well, unless you know for sure the server load is suitable.

I want to be able to run around 4 MS Virtual PCs on my PC with no problem. And still be able to use the O/S and play games.

Play games at the same time you have 4 VMs running with decent workloads? Ouch.

Sounds to me like what you need is a VMware Server box, and a gaming computer. That should handle both tasks better, and for less $ overall.

My current pc with P4 3.2ghz 1GB ram cant handle 2VMs and the Vista host O/S.

That can't even handle Vista decently, so of course 2 VMs on top of that...

Edited by crahak
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