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?

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.

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.

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??

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


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.


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.


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


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.


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


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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Hell if you have the money spare, why not splash out and future proof your machine?

Get as much as you can rammed in!

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


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?


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)


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.

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.

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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

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


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.


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.


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

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

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

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

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).

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

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

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.

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.


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.

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.

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.

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


A basic Q6600 is plenty.

8GB of RAM is fine.


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.


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)

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.