More cores or better cores for a high virtualization usage machine?

Purchasing a new PC this week, wondering if I should get an 8 core processor or go for a higher quality 4 core processor for a machine I will be gaming/ virtual boxing/ scripting/ and running terminal sessions into Cisco devices all at once??

What are your recommendations here?

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Welly_59

More cores/threads for virtualization.

Be honest thiugh, are you really going to be doing all of the above at the same time?

boxerboy1168

More than likely not but I would like something could handle it.

I will be at some point building and pen testing my own home networks though. Probably using the Black Hat Python/ Kali book.

EANx

Hyperthreading is the important aspect here. Why not overclock the 8-core processor?

Every application usage has different requirements. Using gaming as the example, some games require better graphics cards than others and while the actual rendering of frames is GPU intensive, kicking out the frames is more CPU intensive. So if you plan on playing games while doing something in a virtualized environment, playing the game at higher frame rates is more likely to adversely impact your virtualization tasks than doing so as lower frame rates.

So figure out just how likely you really are to do all of that at once then analyze each application for its specific needs. Or, if you don't know how to do that, overclock a hyperthreaded 6-8 core and have the best of both worlds.

EnderWiggin

Why not just get a higher quality eight-core processor?

yoba222

My dual core hyperthreaded laptop has a very close score to my 6-core (non-hyperthreaded) desktop on cpubenchmark. The 6-core is 5ish year old AMD and the laptop is almost the latest 7th gen Intel. However, the 6 core seems to be able to run more VMs.

On the laptop with 4 simultaneous VMs running it starts to bog down when a couple VMs start doing anything intense. 3 or less VMs and it is fine. This is allocating 1 core per VM in Virtualbox.

I really haven't done any research on this but I'd be drawn to 8 or more cores personally.

deadjoe

Whatever you decide on the CPU, don't overlook the slowest component, the IO. Budget for plenty SSD storage and RAM.

dave330i

If you're going to run multiple VMs, then # of cores is more important than CPU speed. More cores make it easier for CPU scheduler to allocate CPU to VMs.