virtualbox.org

Hi all,

I am building a high-end desktop with the following specs:

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-890FXA-UD5 AM3 AMD 890FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
CPU: 1 AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz 6 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Six-Core Desktop Processor HDT90ZFBGRBOX
GPU: 1 XFX HD-577A-ZNFC Radeon HD 5770 (Juniper XT) 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card
RAM: 2 G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL8D-4GBRM
HDDs: 2 Western Digital Caviar Black WD6402AAEX 640GB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive (A separate drive for each dual-booted OS)

The main purpose of the machine will be for cross platform software development and testing.

I plan on using Ubuntu 10.10 LTS, 64 Bit as my primary OS, and dual-booting to Windows 7, 64 bit when I want to play some games. I'm a casual gamer, but when I play games, I expect everything to work well, hence the dual boot. However, I would like to limit the amount of time that I spend in the full-windows environment, so I would also like to use a separate Windows VM for the more common windows applications that I use (keeping a vanilla snapshot for testing):

- Microsoft Office
- Microsoft Visio
- Microsoft Project
- Microsoft Visual Studio
- Dragon Naturally Speaking, version 11

Dragon Naturally Speaking in particular is an important resource hog. I use it to write all of my papers for college. However, it requires at least a dual-core CPU and 4 GB of RAM under Windows 7 in order to be fast enough to be useful. Is is reasonable to expect it (and these other applications) to preform to preform well under a VirtualBox VM with 4GB of RAM and 2vCPUs? Or, would I be better off using these apps on a dual-booted OS, and using the VM strictly for testing?

Thanks,

Sean

Only DNS and VS can be a problem in the VM. I've read posts here from users who were having problems with VS inside VB, but it might have been a case of trying to compile stuff from a shared folder (that still isn't perfect). As for DNS, there is a user here who used it in VB without issues, but I don't remember which version he was using, I think it was a previous one. Only thing I can tell is to test DNS and if it works, then you're gold. Do note that even if you install the VM with 2 CPUs from the start, it might perform less than with one CPU. That should be fixed now, but it was a problem with earlier versions.

Use Dual Boot.

I agree with Stefan. Office is OK, but VS, Dragon and games all run better on physical hardware. The better performance should outweigh the inconvenience of rebooting.

Virtualization is great, but these are not really good candidates.

And if you need Ubuntu every Time: Why not installing Ubuntu in a VM running on Windows?

I just prefer Ubuntu to Windows for day-to-day use. Though, That's not a bad idea...