How much ram do I need for a new pc?

[eyeball]

My Amiga 1200 had 2MB of RAM...... God it was awesome..........

Edited July 22, 2008 by eyeball

[S.SubZero]

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.

You won't be running VM's and playing games at the same time, unless that game is Spider Solitaire.

[eyeball]

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.

You won't be running VM's and playing games at the same time, unless that game is Spider Solitaire.

I understand what your saying but thats not entirely true. I very often leave VMs running and play a game of insurgency without a hiccup. Having said that though, the VMs were idle at the time. If they were doing stuff then it may be very different

[midiman25]

Ok so help me decide here.

Do I got for a Quad Core CPU or a high rated Core 2 Duo?

8GB or 16GB

256Mb or 512Mb Graphics card for gaming.

SAS 15K drives for speed or SATA 3.0Gbps

Thanks

[Mr Snrub]

Do I got for a Quad Core CPU or a high rated Core 2 Duo?

Quad core for multiple concurrent VMs to alleviate the logical CPU bottleneck, or faster FSB dual-core for gaming (as these tend to benefit more from FSB than >2 cores).

8GB or 16GB

Probably irrelevant, your bottleneck is likely the CPU or disk well before running out of RAM.

256Mb or 512Mb Graphics card for gaming.

The type of chipset on the graphics adapter, and the type of RAM is more important than the amount I would guess.

SAS 15K drives for speed or SATA 3.0Gbps

If you are running multiple VMs you want them using separate disks to alleviate the disk I/O bottleneck, the type of drive is probably not going to make much difference - for gaming either.

[CoffeeFiend]

If they were doing stuff then it may be very different

I think that was his point. If you're going to run sever OS'es (doing moderately intensive server duties) and other VMs running too, you're just not going to be able to play any fancy game at the same time, even if it's a crazy expensive Xeon monster box. And if there isn't much of a load, then both CPUs are severely overkill.

256Mb or 512Mb Graphics card for gaming.

The type of chipset on the graphics adapter, and the type of RAM is more important than the amount I would guess.

Yeah, the Quadro FX1700 isn't even a gaming card, it's a workstation card for CAD usage and such. It's a $500 card that's not meant for gaming at all (drivers aren't optimized for that at all either). AFAIK it's based on a GeForce 8600. A $200 Radeon HD4850 would totally slaughter it for gaming.

Basically, he's asking us to chose between things that won't really make much of a difference. Either box won't run server VMs with a good load + heavy games decently regardless. He'd be far better off with a simple and inexpensive VM server (Q6600, 8GB RAM, SATA disks) + a gaming computer (E8400 + Radeon HD4850 or such), it would perform better at both tasks, and that would cost less too.

Edited July 22, 2008 by crahak

[cluberti]

From what you've stated your goals are, the quad core is good for running VMs simultaneously, and 8GB RAM should be plenty if you're running 2008+Hyper-V. As to disk I/O not good for VMs, Hyper-V supports pass-through disks that will show up as virtual disks in the VM, but the I/O goes directly to the disk and not through the hyper-V partition or the synthetic I/O filters. Thus, I/O is identical to the actual hardware (and this is the recommended config for VMs running things like SQL, Exchange, BizTalk, etc).

If these are just testing VMs, it'd be better to spend money on slower, bigger disks and use a good RAID controller to make a RAID0 (or RAID 10 for RAID0 speed but RAID1 redundancy, if you don't mind the 50% disk space hit). I/O is going to be the limiting factor, but I have a 16GB box that routinely use 14GB or so for VMs concurrently, and I had to upgrade the disk subsystem to handle the passthrough disks I needed way before I hit 10GB RAM used by VMs - 8GB with a good slower, larger RAID array and a quad-core is a much better VM solution.

Can't speak to games, as I don't.

[midiman25]

Hmm. So I would be better off with a 256 graphics card, quad core, and 8GB ram possible SAS 15K drives?

Maybe another machine to be used as a gaming machine then.

[CoffeeFiend]

So I would be better off with a 256 graphics card

For gaming, both cards aren't good. For VMs, both are über-overkill.

quad core

A basic Q6600 is plenty.

8GB of RAM is fine.

possible SAS 15K drives?

Again, no. Plain old SATA disks in pass-through mode will give you better VM performance overall, in RAID0 if you need more than that. That will also give you WAY more space for the money, which is very much needed with VMs in general (especially things like Exchange that store a LOT of data). The extra space is always useful -- you can keep a library of basic disk images (compressed), ready to deploy (decompress the disk image in a new folder, add the machine, start it), etc. 15k rpm disks are VERY expensive and very small. You can have more space and more IOPS out of more (larger & inexpensive) spindles. And when SATA RAID0 doesn't suffice, then you're pretty much starting to look into SANs and such anyways.

Maybe another machine to be used as a gaming machine then.

That's what I've been saying all along:

-A inexpensive VM server e.g. Q6600, 8GB RAM, basic onboard video is plenty good, a few good/fast/quality SATA disks on a decent controller. That's likely WAY beyond what you need for those 3 VMs (depending on load)

-A gaming box, e.g. E8400, ATI HD4850 vid card and all that, which will play any modern game at good settings, without slowing down your VMs down to a crawl, or game having problems because of VM load

Combined, it will cost lots way less than the Xeon monster, and perform much better at both tasks (you could even use the gaming box sometimes to fire up a few more VMs if you wanted to)

[arjuna07]

midiman25,

just 2 months ago i was in a pretty simliar situation since i up into buying a new computer that would last some time.

My criterias were:

* Working (Servers: VM/VPC07, developing)

* Gaming (new games with at least 40 fps)

However, if you just want to play games (which you dont) a Dualcore is the better choice due to higher CPU rates, and AFAIK there is no game yet that is designed for Quad Cores.

Working with a Quad is absolutly awesome! However as far i track the perfromance monitors most of the time my cpu's are 'at balance' to each other, one just peek while starting a new application or have running a background process like defrag, antivirus or simliar.

Conclusion:

If you want to be prepared for the next 5 years..

* get a high-end motherboard

* get the highest quadcore available,

* put in something like 8gb ram,

* get either 1 grafic card > 600mb or 2x512++ sli/crossfire)

* be aware of BIOS tuning, you can either improve overall system perfromance or crash it. (even destroy hw)

I'm having 2 nVidia 9800 512mb sli x2 with wich i do have ~50 fps in each VM/VPC07 emulation.

Hope this helps.

[limb0]

Vista Workshop: More RAM, More Speed : Windows Vista With 8 GB

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vista-workshop,1775.html

This article explains how if you install 8gb of cheap memory you can disable the swapfile forcing everything into memory.

for those too skeptical to read the concept is that vista x64 uses up to 5gb of memory just for itself.

obviously it makes a fat swapfile and resorts to that to give the amount of memory it needs to run smoothly.

if you have 8gb or more, you can safely disable the swapfile altogether forcing everything into ram which means the drive only spins up to loads new apps into ram and not to swap things in and out of memory.

According to Toms Hardware, if you have 8gb then there is at least 3gb spare at all times which is enough even if you intend to run Photoshop CS4 and edit multi gigabyte images.

Incidentally because Apples run x86 there will be no x64 Photoshop in the near future which presumably means people wanting to work on VAST images will all be running Vista X64.

Conclusion:

"Our testing brought us to a clear conclusion: if you often use several memory hungry applications simultaneously, then there's really no way around upgrading your system to 8 GB. Working with applications, and especially switching between them, is much more efficient than with a typical 2 GB configuration. Also, it would even be feasible to run a modern 3D game that already takes up more than 1 GB of memory by itself while having another application with a large memory footprint running in the background. Thus, load times in Windows are a thing of the past, as is the constant swapping of Windows components to the hard drive."

The second i read this I raced out and bought 8gb and never looked back.

I now run 8gb with swapfile disabled on both my machines and i've never experienced any problems.

Cheers to my Nuhi enabled brothers!

PS: Nuhi on behalf of myself and everyone I know whos enjoying the benefits of of your work, thank you!

Edited October 11, 2008 by limb0

[weEvil]

More ram is always better. 8GB is great, and anything over is a dream.

For a GPU go for 1GB if you can. There is no point in 256mb or 512mb. 256mb is a joke. I would recommend that for running Vista`s AERO.

Games are using more texture data now. Something like a HD4850 1GB is recommended. Followed by the GTX260, GTX260-216, HD4870 1GB, GTX280, and the king: HD4870X2. This is in order of performance, and usually price. The GTX 260 I`ve seen has some discounts recently and it is a better deal than the HD4870 but it is slightly slower, more so with AntiAliasing 4x and above.

Quad cores are great. If you can get the Q9550 E0 or the Q9650 E0 they clock really well. Quads are great for multitasking. Like multiple VMs. And some games, new ones do take advantage of quads. Not fully, but you do see a difference. Some need a few tweaks to enable.

I wouldn`t buy a prepackaged PC from Dell or similar. Customize it yourself. It costs the same if not cheaper, and you can get higher quality parts. Far more reliable... depends on how hard you push the hardware.

Edited October 14, 2008 by brucevangeorge