PC build $450~$500 multi-tasking (Virtual Machines) & gaming

[Nightmare]

Hi everyone ,

I want to build a new PC for multi-tasking (like Virtual Machines) with some gaming and I need your advice please. My budget is $450 ~ $500.

It will be focused mostly on multi-tasking so that it can handle, for example, a lot of Virtual Machines, plus some decent gaming experience, but I don’t mind if I have to sacrifice the GPU first and acquire it later when I get more money, I'm not a hardcore gamer anyway.

One thing that is important is that the PC must allow me to make some upgrades in the future, since I will continue investing on it. Right now I have an old desktop with Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz (low specs) and a Laptop with AMD Turion II Dual-Core 2.3 Ghz, and I'm getting holding back with these two systems.

And another thing, I don't know if it's relevant or not, but the computer must be able to stay turned ON for longer period of times with no issues, doing some background activities, nothing stressful though.

My startup idea will be:

• CPU: AMD FX 8 cores, Intel i5 or Intel i7 (with no dedicated GPU)
• Motherboard: (CrossFire/SLI Support)
• RAM: 8 GB (possible future upgrade = 16 GB or 32 GB)
• PSU:
• GPU: something around the $120~140 price
• Storage device: 1 TB (possible future upgrade = SSD)
• Case: (preferable a black design)

I'm not an expert, so feel free to correct me

Thanks and regards

[mpack]

I wouldn't buy an AMD CPU right now, primarily because the claim that they have 8 cores is just marketing BS, in fact they're being sued over it.

In any case, are you aware that multiple CPUs don't automatically confer a speed advantage? Particularly since you don't seem to be considering I/O, which will become the bottleneck: most apps stopped being CPU limited a decade or so ago, hence adding more CPU does nothing. Nowadays they are limited by the speed of RAM and I/O (disks). It is only very special applications that can benefit from multiple CPUs - and most of those are graphical and hence won't use the CPU anyway (they'll run on the GPU).

I'd say quad core, latest low power designs, 16GB RAM, and for VM use you want a humungous drive (1 or 2 TB). I also check how noisy it's all going to be.

I wouldn't care about crossfire etc. Just get a decent graphics card and let the marketing people worry about whether AMD or NVidia have the best underlying tech - especially if you aren't a gamer.

I remain unconvinced by SSD. Yes, it makes your PC boot up faster (so the machine is idle faster while I'm off getting my morning coffee - big deal!), but once everything is booted up I'm not sure there's a huge difference. An effective cache will be just as fast as an SSD and works for all drives. If I had an SSD I'd use it, but getting one just isn't a big priority for me. Maybe they make more sense in a tablet or laptop that gets switched on and off more often.

[scottgus1]

I'm going to jump in and say, along with Mpack, that multiple modern-OS guests running off one regular spinning-platter drive are definitely going to choke on the throughput of the platter drive. Especially when they're all booted at once. If you want to go with platter drives & intend to run more than two modern guests, allow two OSs per drive. SSDs do allow much faster data throughput and can hold more guests all running at once, just more expensive.

[mpack]

I'm actually not sure that's true. A typically platter drive has n heads, and each head can be doing independant I/O.

[scottgus1]

Very likely true, if the data that each head is reading is directly above or below the data another head is reading. If the heads have to go to another part of the disk to get other data for a different guest at the same time that the heads need to be over here to read/write for the first guest, then one will have to wait, I'd think, or there will be a lot of thrashing. Likelihood of relatively perfect mirroring of two guests' data locations on different platters in a drive is pretty small I'd guess. I might be wrong...

I have also seen 3.5" 1TB drives that are half as thin as the usual 1" thick hunks of metal we usually install. So they're dropping platters now that they can get that much data on less space.

I definitely ran into slower disk access on guests running several Windows 7's on one 1TB drive. I even had our SBS2003 server drop out & crash twice due to supposedly disconnected disks within the guest OS while I was booting a couple Windows 7 guests off the same drive. The pull from the Windows 7 guests caused the SBS2003 guest to starve and it went kaput (probably not knowing how to handle "why hasn't my data come in yet" - not programmed for it back on '03)